Thursday 15th October 2026, 12:00 – 13:00 BST
Presenter: Matt Healey, Principal Consultant | Co-Founder, First Person Consulting
Webinar Overview:
The problem with basing things on ‘place’
Place-based approaches (PBAs) are everywhere – urban regeneration, health equity, community development, environmental management – and their adoption continues to grow. Commensurate with this, is the commissioning of place-based evaluations. Despite this growth, the field lacks a coherent conceptualisation of what ‘place’ actually is.
Many initiatives described as place-based are better characterised as space-based: they target geographic locations without engaging with the meanings, relationships, and histories that make a space a place. Meanwhile, complexity-informed evaluation – the toolkit we would reach for – has tended to treat place as backdrop rather than as constitutive of the dynamics being evaluated.
This creates four intersecting challenges, or perhaps considerations, for basing ‘something’ on or in place: attribution, boundaries, temporality, and contested outcomes.
Introducing the Some of Place framework
In this session, Matt Healey shares the outcomes of his CECAN Fellowship, which set out to connect place theory, complexity science, and evaluation methodology. The result is the Some of Place framework, comprising nine dimensions of place (the ‘Nine Ps’), the ‘space between’ where emergent outcomes are generated, ‘time bounding’ across multiple temporalities, and ‘some-ness’ – a principled form of epistemic humility recognising that any evaluation captures only some of what matters in a place.
Matt will unpack the thinking behind the framework, walk through its components, and explore how policymakers, commissioners, practitioners, and evaluators can use it to move beyond surface-level acknowledgements that ‘place is complex’ toward genuine engagement with what makes a place, a place, and how to practically base approaches or evaluations on it.
Join us to consider what it would mean for evaluation to be honest about which ‘some of place’ it has chosen – and why that honesty makes for better evaluation.
Presenter Biography:
Matt Healey is a CECAN Fellow and Co-Founder of First Person Consulting (FPC), an evaluation and research consultancy based in Melbourne, Australia. He has worked in evaluation for 12 years, with a focus on the intersection between systems thinking and evaluation across health, social policy, and environmental domains. He serves on the Board of the Australasian Evaluation Society (AES).
Matt’s interest in place spans his practice, including recent work on participatory systems mapping for place-based service integration, and development of interactive systems thinking learning tools including The Pig Model and The Boundary Game – both of which connect directly to the perspective-taking and boundary critique at the heart of the webinar.
How to Join:
This talk will take place via a Zoom Webinar – please click here to register for a place.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.