Who Decides What a Place is Worth? Guests Christa Breum Amhøj, and John Diamond

Who gets to decide the value of a place? In other words, who gets to decide the metric?

I brought that question to Christa Breum Amhøj, a Danish practitioner, researcher, and what I can only describe as a social architect because she reads a place the way a building architect reads a site. And to John Diamond, who sits in Manchester and has been watching the same tensions play out in the UK across decades of academic research, consultation, and engagement with emerging local government challenges. What follows is my attempt to trace the arc of what the three of us discovered together.

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Chapters

• 01:39 — Opening: Who Creates Value in a Community?
• 02:23 — Competing Definitions of Public Value
• 03:38 — Rethinking Value: The Aging Society Example
• 06:22 — Tourism, Resistance, and Local Control (Scotland Case)
• 08:51 — Visible vs. Invisible Value
• 11:11 — Micro-Experiments vs. Traditional Innovation
• 14:53 — Professional Expertise vs. Local Knowledge
• 19:43 — A Place Has Agency
• 21:00 — Learning to Observe and Map a Place
• 23:27 — From Problem-Solving to System-Based Thinking
• 24:42 — Case Study: Faxe Municipality (Denmark)
• 27:00 — Redesigning the Festival Through Community Input
• 28:30 — Outcomes: Relationships, Access, and New Pathways
• 32:49 — Why Process Matters More Than Outputs
• 34:00 — Access and Infrastructure: The Transport Example
• 37:45 — The COMPASS Model Overview
• 42:30 — Managing Tension and Conflict in Co-Creation
• 44:00 — Expanding the Definition of Prosperity
• 46:30 — The Role of the Facilitator in Place-Based Work
• 53:34 — Closing Reflections: Practice Over Theory