By Matt Healey – CECAN Fellow | First Person Consulting
Place-based approaches are everywhere. From urban regeneration to health equity, from community development to environmental management, governments and funders worldwide are targeting interventions at specific geographic areas. The OECD documents renewed global interest in place-based policies. Yet there’s a challenge at the heart of this interest: disconnected, inconsistent or unclear conceptualisations of what “place” means for the intent of the change sought. This creates challenges for how we then evaluate. How can we evaluate something “place-based” if what that thing is “based” on is unclear?
The Problem Isn’t Just Methods
My CECAN Fellowship began with a straightforward observation: guidance on systems methodologies for place-based evaluation hadn’t kept pace with the growth of place-based work. Practitioners were defaulting to familiar approaches, and it felt like systems methodologies were a missed opportunity.
But as I worked through the literature, a deeper problem emerged.
Complexity frameworks – the very tools we’d reach for in systems-informed evaluation – tend to treat place as a backdrop. A setting. Context. Meanwhile, the place-based literature largely underplays the complexity challenges that genuinely engaging with “place” creates.
The result: a gap that no amount of methodological guidance alone can fill.
Space vs. Place: It Matters More Than You Think
The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan drew a foundational distinction in his 1977 work Space and Place: space is abstract and geometric; place is space made meaningful through human experience. As he put it, “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”
Doreen Massey took this further, arguing that places are never finished or closed — they are constituted through relationships, “always under construction.” Her concept of throwntogetherness captures how places bring together diverse human and non-human trajectories that must be negotiated, not simply managed.
This matters enormously for evaluation. Many initiatives described as “place-based” are actually what Madgin and Howcroft (2024) call “space-based” – they target geographic locations without engaging with the knowledges and meanings that make spaces into places. We need to go beyond the view that place is a ‘stable’ state. It goes through processes of creation and recreation, and ever-changing views of what that means.
Let’s ground this in a visual. ‘Space’ is like a sealed jar – a closed, fixed container or ‘system’. This means it is self-contained, and immune to the effects of the outside. Administrative boundaries applied to local government is a way of thinking like this – we take the view that the ‘edge’ is firm or ‘hard’. However, we know that someone could live in one local government area, and work in another. They transition between the two – but importantly, what these two mean to that person varies.
These two local government areas could be conceived as two spaces, but the meaning of ‘work’ and ‘home’ for that person is murkier. The edges of the systems of place are open. The boundaries are permeable. Experiences and meaning cross-over and are shaped by what flows in and out.
In summary, the same space can be multiple places. For a planner, the one space could be the site of problems to be solved. But for a long-term resident, it is a place of family heritage and belonging. Or for a recent migrant, it is an opportunity for safety and refuge. They are the same ‘space’, but different ‘places’. And so, evaluation frameworks that treat “the place” as singular not only misunderstand how places work — they risk reinforcing the very dynamics they claim to address.
Four Challenges That Can’t Be Ignored
This complexity creates four distinctive challenges for evaluators working in place-based settings:
- Attribution – Outcomes emerge from interactions among people, context, and programme in ways that can’t be isolated. Conventional approaches that seek to establish independent programme effects often misrepresent how change actually occurs.
- Boundaries – Administrative lines rarely match how communities experience place. The boundaries drawn around an initiative are always somewhat arbitrary, typically reflecting an ‘ease’ for those in power. They can allocate funding to a government area in a much easier way than to a ‘place’ that spans government areas.
- Temporality – Place-based work operates across radically different time scales simultaneously: the short cycles of funding and politics; the slower rhythms of trust-building and systems change; and the deep time of intergenerational connection. My CECAN colleague Dr Luke Roberts explores this temporal complexity beautifully in his blog on navigating the temporal ecosystem of policy change.
- Contested outcomes – Different stakeholders hold different, sometimes incompatible, definitions of success. This isn’t a disagreement that more data can resolve; it’s embedded in relations of power, institutional position, and ways of knowing what the intent or way of understanding of ‘place’ means.
Introducing the Some of Place Framework
The Some of Place framework is a heuristic for complexity-informed, place-based evaluation. It doesn’t prescribe methods, it structures the opportunities and needs that policy makers seek to address and the questions that evaluators ask, so that evaluations are more honest about what they can know, more attentive to whose perspectives are privileged, and more useful for the adaptive work of place-based practice.
The framework is defined by four components:
- Nine dimensions of place (the Ps) — a structured vocabulary for attending to the multiple dimensions through which places function and change. In other words, the dimensions reflect specific aspects of activity and short-term outcomes.
- The space between — where interaction between dimensions of place occur, and emergent outcomes are produced. This is about the relationships between dimensions, not any single one.
- Bounded by time — explicit recognition that places operate within multiple temporalities simultaneously, and that choosing which time horizon to evaluate within is itself a consequential decision. For example, people who live in a community see change in a different frame of time to policy makers investing in a 3-year program.
- Some-ness — the throughline of the framework is a principled form of epistemic humility. In other words, any evaluation or inquiry understands only some of what matters in a place. We can never understand all aspects for everyone. By adopting some-ness, we do not apologise for the limitation but lean into it. It’s a complexity-theoretic recognition, grounded in Paul Cilliers’ work (2001), that “limited knowledge is unavoidable” in non-linear systems. The evaluator’s responsibility is to be transparent about which some they have chosen – and why.
The Nine Dimensions of Place
The nine dimensions emerged inductively from a cross-disciplinary synthesis spanning place theory, complexity science, and evaluation methodology. They are grouped in three clusters, though there is a fuzziness at the borders between them.
| Human dimensions | Institutional & epistemological dimensions | Material & meaning-making dimensions |
| People — Who is present and how their intersecting identities shape experience of place | Policy — The governance arrangements and institutional structures within which place-based work operates | Planet — The ecological systems and biophysical processes within which places are embedded |
| Power — How authority, influence, and decision-making are distributed, including colonial legacies and whose knowledge counts | Practice — The activities undertaken in pursuit of change, both formal and emergent | Prosperity — The economic conditions and material circumstances that shape life chances |
| Participation — How communities are engaged in shaping their places and the evaluations of them | Paradigms — The worldviews and ways of knowing that frame how problems and solutions are understood | Purpose — The meanings, attachments, and sense of identity that make places matter to those who inhabit them |
The key is to recognise that no dimension operates in isolation. These dimensions form part of Some of Place. The space between, time, and some-ness all apply in practice. I have more to do in terms of operationalising this – but we cannot rely on one single lens.
What This Means in Practice
Let’s look at this in practice. Consider an evaluator commissioned to assess an urban regeneration program. The commissioning brief describes the area as “disadvantaged” – defined by deprivation indicators, targeted because of poor health and high unemployment. This is a very common view – and many times we start by asking “what is the problem to be solved?”
An evaluation of a response seeks to surface answers to a myriad of questions. Any intervention or policy response will have a particular lens or frame that can be aligned to the nine Ps. But time bounding forces us to consider what is measured within commissioners’ timeframes, versus a community’s. The result? Two different indicators that satisfy both. Some-ness requires the evaluation to be explicit about the focus on health outcomes, but also what is missed – changes in community experience, residents’ sense of possibility, or hope for the future.
An Honest Evaluation Is a Better Evaluation
Place-based approaches are likely to become more prevalent as societies confront climate change, widening inequality, and the limits of spatially-blind policy. The evaluation challenges they present will intensify accordingly.
The Some of Place framework doesn’t resolve these challenges. What it offers is something that has been missing: a way of thinking consistently about how to define place that is adequate to its complexity. It positions evaluation as a contribution to ongoing place-based learning, and that what my place looks like is different to yours, even when it’s in the same space.
In a field where the pressure to demonstrate impact often rewards false precision over honest uncertainty, that shift matters.
Matt Healey is a CECAN Fellow, and Co-Founder of First Person Consulting in Australia, working across evaluation, systems thinking, and place-based practice.
References:
Cilliers, P. (2001) Boundaries, hierarchies and networks in complex systems. International Journal of Innovation Management 5(2).
Madgin, R. & Howcroft, M. (2024) Advancing People-Centred, Place-Based Approaches. University of Glasgow.
Massey, D. (2005) For Space. Sage.
Tuan, Y-F. (1977) Space and Place. University of Minnesota Press.