A Place Needs a Keeper

London and New York each have around seventy five business improvement districts: owners and businesses who pool funds and appoint a manager to look after the streets they share. Singapore began its own pilot in 2017, across Singapore River One, Discover Tanjong Pagar and Raffles Place Alliance.

Our research, published in the International Journal on Smart and Sustainable Cities, followed those three precincts. The model works because it joins partnership to steady funding. It struggles where everyone enjoys a better place and few feel they should pay for it, and where an imported tool is asked to behave as it did at home.

The deeper finding is that place management is still imagined too narrowly, as cleaning, security and footfall. A place is also an experience. We call the alternative the Experience Improvement District, or XID.

XID is now our method. We study a place, agree what better would look like, look after it every month, and report honestly on what changed. Not a report that sits on a shelf. A keeper who stays.