Engaging with forgotten places: Applying a multifaceted understanding of place in an analysis of two Danish cases

Based on insights from two local development initiatives in North Denmark, this chapter explores avenues to increase the likelihood of developing and implementing successful smart specialization-inspired policies in remote places. This chapter illustrates how a broadened approach to place-specific development has the potential to facilitate local, bottom-up processes in challenged remote areas, in addition to showing the issues that may occur. The chapter reveals how such a broadened place-specific approach should look beyond the elements usually emphasized in regional and local development processes and additionally address more intangible elements, including subjective meanings, conceptions, and emotional aspects. This focus on intangible elements should be combined with a focus on how the physical setting of a place shapes and interacts with the narratives and social processes that exist among actors. Furthermore, this chapter emphasizes that identifying actors is key to a broadened place-specific development approach, where attention should also be given to elements that can reveal where civil society engagement could serve as a driver of local economic development.