Out of Place: Fixing the Disconnection Problem

From one point of view, we’ve never been more connected. From my home in Manchester, I can work with clients across the UK, keep in touch with family in Australia, game with friends in Hong Kong, and order actually good instant coffee from Berlin (I really need to stop doing the last one).

And yet the same technologies that allow us to connect with people in distant places make it easier to live out of place. Why brave the weather when you can just stream a music festival? Why join a local knitting circle when online communities offer tips and validation?

The perverse result is that we’re more disconnected than ever. In the UK, many places struggle with fragmented communities, declining participation, social isolation and loneliness. 

There is an antidote. Going to a gig, meeting friends for dinner, visiting a gallery, touring a city or learning to abseil. Experiences that are rooted in place bring us into contact with other people.

In most places, the problem isn’t really a lack of things to do. But so often we find ourselves living a few streets away from things we’d have loved to do, if only we’d known about them. Meanwhile, nearby places, cultural venues and businesses compete for attention through disconnected websites, mailing lists and social feeds, rather than working collectively.

Tourism gives us another perspective on the same problem. A place can attract millions of visitors without connecting with them in any meaningful way. Visitors move between generic accommodation, attractions and recommendations supplied by global platforms, while local communities experience the pressure on housing, services and public space. Barcelona shows what can happen when the visitor economy and everyday life butt heads.

Connecting People to Places

Successful destinations depend on balanced relationships between residents and visitors, businesses and cultural organisations, community groups and public bodies. They depend on people knowing what there is to do, having reasons to participate in those experiences and being able to access them. Technology has an important role to play in making these connections – but technology alone isn’t the solution. In fact, making digital connections is often the easy part.

Let’s take a town, city or region with hundreds of things to do: museums, gigs, walking tours, restaurants, workshops, festivals, independent shops, historic buildings, community events, and hotels. The first challenge is simply to bring those offers together. We need to make it easy for organisations to contribute information, whether through upload forms or automatically from their own websites. It means structuring that information consistently, to turn an attraction, concert ticket, or restaurant listing into something computers can understand, organise and exchange.

And it means allowing that information to flow freely. Instead of every website maintaining its own isolated database or product catalogue, structured data and bookable products can be made available through APIs, feeds, plugins and widgets (such as our Discovery Panels). A destination website might use this information one way; a community channel another. A neighbourhood publisher might select community-focused activities within walking distance, while a tourism organisation might promote experiences that are relevant to an international visitor.

As CultureHosts, we aim to provide the unglamorous plumbing for connecting places: structured data, content standards, good documentation and systems that play nicely with others. We built our technology not as a closed shop, but around the principles of shared infrastructure and distributed visibility.

Technology isn’t strategy

Every few years, a new technology promises to transform how place marketers engage their audiences. Today much of the attention is on artificial intelligence. AI will change many things. But smart itineraries aren’t much use if the underlying information is incomplete, the experiences aren’t relevant, suppliers aren’t on board, booking is a mess or nobody has decided which audiences they actually want to reach.

Places don’t just need the right software or a new website. They need to offer local people and visitors compelling reasons to participate. They need marketing capable of reaching the audiences for whom that offer is relevant. They need efficient processes, because asking hundreds of time-poor businesses and community organisations to maintain information manually is unlikely to work indefinitely. And they need to combine measurement with optimisation, so they can understand what people discover, engage with and book – and act to improve performance over time. In order to become ‘connected’, places need to solve all these problems.

Connections between systems matter, but connections between people and partners matter more: between tourism and culture teams; councils and businesses; major institutions and grassroots organisations; destination organisations and communities. A genuinely connected destination needs partnerships as well as platforms, and shared ambitions around accessibility, sustainability and who should ultimately benefit from the visitor and cultural economy.

“Service with a software”

For more than a decade, we’ve combined digital technology with practical support to help places make these connections work. We describe our model as “service with a software”, rather than “software as a service”. The distinction is central to how we address connectivity gaps. Our technology provides the shared infrastructure to bring together listings, connect systems and distribute experiences. But it’s our services that help places develop their offers, engage partners, improve processes, reach audiences and turn infrastructure into impact.

The balance between these differences is different wherever we work. In Trafford, our work grew out of the borough’s cultural strategy and the need for greater visibility and collaboration across its cultural and community offer. CultureHosts now provides the listings infrastructure behind Trafford Is, helping organisations contribute and share information and residents discover more of what is happening around them.

Across the West Midlands and West Yorkshire the same principle operates at a regional scale. Shared CultureHosts infrastructure connects content from across multiple local destinations and enables it to be published and sold through different channels, helping places collaborate without giving up their own identities or relationships with their audiences.

So what does a connected destination look like?

Digital connectivity only matters when it serves a wider ambition for a place. Technology can make information flow, join up systems and extend distribution, but it can’t decide what a place wants to become, who should benefit or give people a reason to participate. Those connections have to be built through strategy, partnership and a shared sense of purpose.

The measure of connectivity, then, isn’t how many systems are plugged together, but whether a resident can discover something around the corner that they never knew existed. Whether a small cultural organisation can reach audiences it couldn’t reach alone. Or whether a visitor can experience what is special about a place, rather than just tick off the top five on TripAdvisor.

Technology has made it easier to live out of place. Used differently, it can help visitors and residents reconnect with the places and experiences that surround them.