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.Be sure to check out the full video on MuniSquare or our YouTube Channel and subscribe to get more content like this!Chapters01:39 — Opening: Who Creates Value in a Community?02:23 — Competing Definitions of Public Value03:38 — Rethinking Value: The Aging Society Example06:22 — Tourism, Resistance, and Local Control (Scotland Case)08:51 — Visible vs. Invisible Value11:11 — Micro-Experiments vs. Traditional Innovation14:53 — Professional Expertise vs. Local Knowledge19:43 — A Place Has Agency21:00 — Learning to Observe and Map a Place23:27 — From Problem-Solving to System-Based Thinking24:42 — Case Study: Faxe Municipality (Denmark)27:00 — Redesigning the Festival Through Community Input28:30 — Outcomes: Relationships, Access, and New Pathways32:49 — Why Process Matters More Than Outputs34:00 — Access and Infrastructure: The Transport Example37:45 — The COMPASS Model Overview42:30 — Managing Tension and Conflict in Co-Creation44:00 — Expanding the Definition of Prosperity46:30 — The Role of the Facilitator in Place-Based Work53:34 — Closing Reflections: Practice Over Theory