Local politicians and planners are increasingly focusing on quality of place and quality of life in local development as a tool for attracting citizens, tourists and businesses. On the other hand, businesses are increasingly focusing on non-material features of their products such as narratives and images, which relate to customers’ perceptions. The aim of the workshop was to explore, compare and critically analyze how the experience turn in planning and development is constructed and how it materialises into strategies, projects and innovations. The workshop hosted 29 participants from Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Denmark. Among the participants were not only researchers, many of them young researchers, but also a number of representatives and consultants from different sectors and from Danish regions and municipalities. The researchers represented different scholarly backgrounds and approaches, and this variety in itself stimulated discussions. The opening session dealt with ‘Experience and culture economy and place’. Trine Bille and Carlos Freire-Gibbs talked about the emergence of experience economy as a policy in Scandinavia and Denmark. Bille showed how in Denmark the experience economy is a construction which is rather directly connected to the goal of creating market economic growth. Policies take for granted that experiences, creativity and culture create economic value, but without being very specific about why or how this economic value should take place. At a national policy level experience economy seems to be related to culture and creative branches, but evidently other branches do provide ‘commodified’experiences eg pets and pornography. The field seems to be fuzzy, and this is a challenge for policy makers. Freire-Gibb supplemented this by showing how experience economy has become a key notion in Danish research, and how the notion has travelled to become important in local economic development policy. Under the heading of “Places in competition,” May Hald, Tone Haraldsen and Anne Lorentzen explored the role of experience economy in “creating a place” in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and in Danish municipalities, respectively. The experience economy discourse seems to be more rooted in Danish than in Norwegian spatial development policy. Hald & Haraldsen showed that, in Norway, Oslo is the only place in which the location coefficient of the cultural industries is higher than one. However, the fact that Oslo is a creative city is not exploited in the place marketing of the city, which is rather traditional with its focus on the natural environment as well as on high tech. The situation is quite the opposite in Denmark, where regional and local development strategies integrate concepts of leisure, culture and experiences related to businesses as well as to local amenities. Local strategies are ambitious and it can be argued that some of them are in need of a reality check, with the actual resources taken into consideration. Perceptions of identity were in play in both cases, and these were developed further in the section on

‘residential location and leisure’where Vincent Pandolfi and Christian Schubarth looked at two different locations, namely Maastricht and Gros-de-Vaud in Lausanne North. The future of Maastricht is being negotiated among different actors and coalitions and a creative city agenda is emerging, although with some difficulty. This agenda is still to be developed in Gros-de-Vaud which is characterised by urban sprawl. The locals could learn to benefit more from the local natural environment and enhance their local identity, through development of tourism, according to …