Community development must draw on and build up the assets that are particular to places. Those assets include the land, boundaries, borders, water, the place's geographic location in relation to the larger region, history, topography, and other elements. Attachment to a shared place gives people and organizations an important common interest around which to organize. Places have identities that can bolster the sense of community.
Places matter for children and their parents because their lives are by necessity lived out close to home. Place matters for politics: local democracy builds on and strengthens the attachments that citizens hold to their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Place matters for economic development: when they are well planned, they attract investments in commercial and industrial enterprises.
"No two places on our planet are entirely alike, and the communities of life that each brings forth are as unique as the patterns of its weather, terrain, geology, and its own surroundings ... In becoming at home in these places and responding to the special kinds of comfort, challenge, and sustenance we find in each, we become a different people." Thomas Bender, "Making Places Sacred," in James A. Swan, The Power of Place, Quest Books, 1991.
"The preamble to Montana's constitution, with its expression of gratitude for Montana's landscape, reflects an understanding however faint that the political culture of a place is not something apart from the place itself ... the strengthening of political culture ... must take place and be studied in the context of very specific places and of the people who struggle to live well in such places." Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place, 1990.
