Institute of Place Management and RSA Webinar Series

Session information to follow to shortly

Date and Time

Monday 9th February

1pm GMT / 2pm CET

Place managers across the UK are increasingly dealing with Privately Owned Public Spaces (or POPS as they are becoming know as) from city squares and retail plazas to repurposed industrial sites. A new open access article by Dr Jenny Kanellopoulou, Dr Nikos Ntounis  and Prof Steve Millington, explores how these spaces are managed on the ground and what that means for their ‘publicness’.

Managing and Navigating Manchester’s Privately Owned Public Spaces: Understanding Publicness is available to read here.

This research offers a plural property perspective, recognising that managing public space is rarely black and white. By applying the tools of legal geography, the study highlights how day-to-day decisions – about signage, access, behaviour, and maintenance shape how inclusive, accessible, and truly ‘public’ these spaces feel in practice.

For place managers, this means rethinking how to work with private owners, developers, and communities to ensure POPS contribute to local quality of life and not just commercial performance.

Join us to discuss practical challenges and solutions around POPS, ownership, and urban governance. This session will explore:

• What POPS are and why they matter to place managers
• How legal geography helps us understand public/private boundaries
• Case study: Managing POPS in Manchester
• Practical insights for working with private owners and stakeholders

Speakers:
Jenny Kanellopoulou, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University
Nikos Ntounis, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University
Steve Millington, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dahae Lee, TU Dortmund, Germany

Chair:
Ian Harvey, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University

This webinar extends the discussions from the recent in-person IPM workshop at the RSA Regional Futures Conference, which examined how regional policies can more effectively negotiate and support place-based change – particularly the often-overlooked potential of hyper-local interventions. These discussions have become even more significant given the ongoing progression of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, which proposes new powers, duties, and governance mechanisms with far-reaching implications for places across the UK.

While regional and sub-regional thinking is well-established, it frequently fails to recognise the fine-grained governance structures needed to balance long-term strategic planning with immediate, locally anchored action. This disconnect exposes weaknesses in existing frameworks (such as the now-defunct Local Enterprise Partnerships), reinforces an illusion of localism (Gherges et al., 2020), and highlights the lack of embedded local knowledge in decision-making – issues that sit at the heart of current debates around the Bill.

The session will address several themes including:

The scarcity of hyper-local data, which limits the ability of places to meaningfully shape or evidence their own priorities

The role of tactical place management in animating place-specific actions that go beyond conventional regeneration or planning frameworks

The need for reforms in local governance structures – from community budgeting and commons-led approaches to more participatory models- that extend beyond the constraints of traditional place management mechanisms such as Business Improvement Districts Lessons from elsewhere

By bringing together colleagues from across the IPM Member Network and international colleagues, we aim to deepen the sector’s collective thinking and lay the foundations for a stronger, more coherent approach to place governance in the UK’s evolving devolution landscape.

Speakers:

• Dr Nikos Ntounis, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Prof Cathy Parker, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Chris Wade, The People and Places Partnership Ltd
• Dr Ioannis Papageorgiou, Rhodes Centre for History and Social Research, Greece

Chair: Ian Harvey, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University