Love, folks. It's love. Love conquers all. At least that has been my almost unbearably hackneyed conclusion so far.

Last week, I was asked to join a panel discussion posed with the question, What role does placemaking have in building sustainable communities? This gave me a great excuse to break down and map out my personal theory of change. Here it is: love and working together. Have no doubt, the triteness is not lost on me - I grimace even writing this, but I really believe there's something to it.

Vacuum-driven development

I arrived in the world of regeneration and "sustainable development" with an honest-to-goodness optimism about policy-driven change. Call it institutionalism or what have you, but I believed like so many of us do that the right policies and incentives could build the world we want. My MPhil (in something called Planning, Growth, and Regeneration) was an entire degree focused on the policies and economic tactics employed in regenerating places. I still believe policy is important and essential, such as putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions and installing feedback systems like road pricing. There are housing policies and anti-policies that I believe in as well, and let's not forget about parking maximums. Where my confidence falters is in the zone of economic development policy, the stuff of business parks, tax perks, and a long aisle of pig-lipstick.

The revelation occurred while attending a conference about struggling rural villages, desperate to create jobs and retain young people. I had just been contemplating these same challenges for large cities like Liverpool, UK and it hit me that everyone feels like a struggling rural village in the globalized economy, except the top dogs like New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London and Shanghai, etc.

Common practice favours what I call vacuum-driven economic development, where your goal is to suck up more talent, resources, and"job-creators" than your neighbours. We've seen all the tricks to do this, mostly resembling some form of bribery, freebies, or pleading with the government. It's naively self-interested and doesn't scale well. These policies don't work for most of us because no matter how much money we throw at it, we can't compete with the awesome vacuum power of the cities at the top of the food chain.

"Love will save this place."

So I began pondering how we could create new value that is independent of the vacuums. Is there a form of value and meaning that creates an unbeatable stickiness, bound up in place? Of course there is: love. Love makes us do irrational things, like stay in a place where we need to fight tooth and nail to create opportunity for ourselves. The number of times family and memories came up when I asked my friends Why do you live where you live? is testament to that.

I came across a beautiful quote the other day and I don't know who to credit it to.