From High Streets to Heartbeats: Why the Future of Placemaking is Emotional
At this year’s UKREiiF 2026, I chaired a panel called ‘From Goods to Good Vibes: The Future of the Experience Economy’. Beneath the playful title sat a serious question: what happens when people stop choosing places based purely on convenience, and start choosing them based on how those places make them feel?
Across hospitality, retail, culture, tourism and real estate, we are seeing a major shift. High streets, town centres and mixed-use developments are no longer competing solely on price, function or accessibility. Increasingly, they are competing on atmosphere, identity, belonging and memory.
In other words: experience is no longer an amenity. It is the asset.
On day three of UKREiiF 2026, inside the Rethinking Places Pavilion, I sat down with four people who collectively represent the heartbeat of the UK's experience economy: Kate Nicholls (Chair, UKHospitality), Sacha Lord (Chair, Night Time Industries Association), Matt Snell (CEO, Boxpark), and Zulfi Karim (Founder, World Curry Festival).
Together, the conversation revealed just how urgently the built environment sector needs to rethink the role of culture, hospitality and experience in shaping successful places.
The rise of the experience economy
The term “experience economy” was first coined by economists B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore back in 1998. Their argument was simple: consumers were shifting from buying goods and services to seeking memorable experiences.
Nearly three decades later, the data backs it up.
According to Barclays consumer research, experience-led businesses contribute more than £230 billion to the UK economy, while 63% of people would rather talk about something they did than something they bought.
If people increasingly value experiences over possessions, then places themselves become platforms for experience. Not just as destinations or developments, but what I would call emotional infrastructure.
And emotional infrastructure is not soft power. It directly influences:
Footfall
tourism
dwell time
repeat visitation
talent attraction
investor confidence
long-term place identity
Yet too many regeneration schemes still treat hospitality, nightlife and culture as decorative extras added at the end of the process, once the “serious” development work is complete.
Culture is not a feel-good add-on. It is the foundation of place value.
Good vibes need good margins
One of the strongest themes to emerge from the discussion was the disconnect between the value hospitality creates and the way the sector is supported.
Hospitality operators are expected to animate places, drive footfall, create community and give developments cultural relevance, all while operating on increasingly fragile margins.
As Kate Nicholls pointed out during the session, many hospitality businesses that once operated on margins of 7–10% are now working with margins closer to 3–6%.
And yet hospitality has quietly become the anchor tenant of the modern high street.
“Hospitality is now the anchor tenant. It is a tool of regeneration; it creates places that people want to live, work, and invest. And it can only do that if it makes a profit.”
— Kate Nicholls OBE, Chair, UKHospitality
Matt Snell spoke candidly about the outdated leasing structures that still dominate the industry. Operators often absorb enormous upfront costs and carry the majority of the risk, while landlords benefit from the uplift in asset value.
That model is becoming unsustainable.
The future lies in partnership: shared-risk models, joint ventures, flexible leasing structures and closer collaboration between landlords, operators and local authorities.
The model Matt is actively pursuing with Boxpark is the one he described from Wembley - a genuine joint venture with Quintain, where both parties borrowed together, sat on the same board, and shared upside as well as downside. That is apparently the standard in the US.
Until this becomes the norm, we will keep losing the operators with the vision and the appetite to build the kinds of places that actually transform how people experience a city. As you cannot expect operators to create vibrant, experience-led destinations without giving them the economic conditions to survive.
You also cannot retrofit soul into a scheme after practical completion.
Place as a curated ecosystem
The places repeatedly referenced throughout the panel - King’s Cross, Battersea Power Station, Wembley and Greater Manchester - all have one thing in common. They are carefully curated ecosystems.
Not in the superficial sense of adding food halls or public art, but in the deeper sense of creating layered experiences that work across different times of day, generations and communities.
The future high street is unlikely to revolve around transactional retail alone. It will increasingly be shaped by:
hospitality
food culture
nightlife
festivals
wellness
social interaction
competitive socialising
intergenerational gathering
flexible cultural programming
People want places where they feel part of something.
That requires a completely different mindset from simply maximising commercial yield.
You can’t spreadsheet your way into curating soul. You have to design it from day one.
“We build cultural hubs. We don’t just build a restaurant or a street food café. We create an ecosystem.”
— Matt Snell, CEO, Boxpark
Joined-up governance will unlock experience that scales
One of the audience members made an important point during the discussion: hospitality operators represented only a tiny fraction of the conversation at UKREiiF, despite being central to how places actually function socially and economically.
That reflects a broader issue across regeneration.
Too often, operators, cultural organisations and local communities are brought into projects far too late - after the planning assumptions, lease structures and masterplans have already been decided.
By that stage, most of the important decisions have already been made.
The result? Places that may function efficiently on paper, but feel emotionally flat in reality.
The places already getting this right are doing so not by accident, and not only through great programming. They're doing it through a series of deliberate governance, design, and investment decisions that together create the conditions for transformation.
“The places that are getting it right have a joined-up approach — from local government, to landlords, to placemakers, to operators.”
— Matt Snell, CEO, Boxpark
Sacha shared the story of Greater Manchester's night buses as a small example of a large principle when he was the night-time advisor to Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. Manchester decided to take its 24-hour economy seriously. That meant asking who actually uses the night - not clubbers, but care workers, hospitality staff, shift workers - and making sure they could get home safely and affordably.
"The success of Greater Manchester is down to the leadership. They listen. That's what's completely different."
— Sacha Lord,Chair, Nighttime Industries Association
The panel also highlighted how many US cities combine culture, hospitality, tourism and economic development within a single strategic framework. In the UK, these conversations are still too often siloed across departments and policies. Sacha made a plea for a Minister for Hospitality - someone in government with enough operational understanding to make it happen.
Belonging is becoming an economic strategy
A few weeks before UKREiiF, I attended London Experience Week, where experience economy pioneer Joe Pine spoke about the next evolution of this shift: the Transformation Economy.
The idea is powerful. The next frontier is not simply creating memorable experiences. It is creating experiences that transform people.
That raises an important question for placemakers:
Does someone leave your place differently from how they arrived?
Do they feel more connected?
More inspired?
More included?
More part of a community?
Because increasingly, the places that outperform economically are also the places people form emotional attachments to. In a time shaped by loneliness, digital fatigue and social fragmentation, people are not simply looking for entertainment. They are looking for participation, identity and belonging.
And that means belonging itself is becoming a form of economic infrastructure.
Zulfi's argument about places getting it right was not about events or footfall. It was about people and identity. Zulfi shared the story of why he set up The World Curry Festival in Bradford. The World Curry Festival was not designed to showcase good restaurants. It was designed to tell the story of migration - to give Bradford's communities a stage for an identity that had always existed but rarely been celebrated publicly. The story became an identity, the identity became a destination, and the destination attracted investment.
Following its landmark year as the UK City of Culture 2025, Bradford has cemented culture as its primary regeneration objective. The monumental success of the year-long festival continues to drive long-term physical, social, and economic transformation across the district.
“I truly believe that culture is very much at the heart of regeneration. I think we are led by bricks and mortar too much, and we need to come away from that because for me, the future doesn’t look like that.”
— Zulfi Karim, Founder, World Curry Festival
So what should developers, investors, and local authorities do differently?
1. Stop treating hospitality and culture as an afterthought
Bring operators, cultural organisations and experience specialists into projects earlier.
2. Move from extraction to partnership
Shared-risk models between landlords and operators will define the next generation of development.
3. Design for all-day ecosystems
The future belongs to places that work across morning, afternoon, evening and night.
4. Curate culture continuously
Experience-led places require active stewardship, not passive management.
5. Measure emotional outcomes
We measure yield, occupancy and spend obsessively. But where are the metrics around joy, belonging and repeat social participation?
Put joy on the balance sheet
The experience economy is not just about entertainment or spectacle.
It's part of the emotional infrastructure that creates connection, belonging, memory, and participation in a world that is doing its level best to fragment all of those things.
The operators want the space. The communities want the experiences. The data makes the investment case. What's missing is the structures: the lease models, the planning frameworks, the government departments that actually talk to each other, and the forums that stop treating hospitality and culture as a nice-to-have.
So here's my call to action to anyone in urban development and real estate: challenge, borrowed and adapted from the close of the session:
When you go back to your projects and your portfolios, don’t just ask “What are we building?”
Instead, ask “What will it feel like to live, work, and play here? And who gets to feel that?”
The future of place isn’t more programming. It’s better judgment, deeper collaboration, and courage to design for life - not spreadsheets alone.
Make joy a line item.
Create a system where the success of a place is measured in terms of the joy and happiness it brings to its communities.
Good vibes, it turns out, are not accidental. They are the curated outcomes of policy, risk, design, and care.
That means measuring more than yield and occupancy. It means understanding that joy, belonging and emotional connection are not fluffy add-ons to placemaking. They are increasingly central to economic value itself.
The places that succeed in the next decade will be the places people genuinely feel part of.
The future of our places won’t be defined by what we build - but by what people carry with them when they leave.
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