Place marketing and town centre management: A new tool for urban revitalization

Managers in the UK have begun to adopt the concept of town centre management to attempt to revitalize the in-town environment. This is a refinement of the North American concept of centralized retail management implemented in the 1980s in cities such as Chicago, Seattle and Wisconsin. One strand of town centre management in the UK is place marketing, which aims to raise the profile and public awareness of the locality among residents and visitors. This paper reviews the experience of town centre management in the light of a recent survey of existing management schemes in the UK, emphasizing the role of place marketing and its contribution to urban revitalization. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.