How to capture the idea of a place?

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Place identity underlying the unique value proposition of a place is determined not only by its geography, history, cultural heritage, but also by the everyday life of its residents. They “write” a unique story about their place every day with their own words and actions . And the question is, how can we recognize the main idea of this story? How do we condense this complex mass of data into a specific, comparable and manageable generalized formula of place product? The existing methods of place product analysis and development are either intuitive and, thus, difficult to reproduce, or reproducible, but sacrificing the specificity and uniqueness of the marketed place. We introduce interconnected morphological classification tables as a tool for describing the more general (and thus comparable) features of a place, on the one hand, with minimal loss of the specificity that shapes the place identity, on the other. The place product concepts of five Moscow districts obtained using these tables are not unique, because they have combined typical elements of the morphological tables. However, they do not repeat one another and embody the distinctive features of the districts being studied. The closest metaphor is provided by LEGO blocks, whose standard elements can form unrepeatable combinations.

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