About Generation Place

For decades, the question tourism has asked has been: "How can this place serve tourism?"
Generation Place flips it around: What does this place need to thrive — and how can tourism support that?

We call this approach Place First. It means we look through the lens of place in everything we do.

There are many people already trying to put Place First, an entire generation feeling uncomfortable with tourism and place development that exhausts the place instead of strengthening it.

It is time for them to connect and to share the questions, the answers, and the solutions that they have tried out and that are scattered around the world.

Why Torino

Torino is our symbolic host city, and deliberately so. Few cities embody urban transformation as vividly — a place that reinvented its own identity from industrial capital to a city of culture, innovation, and quality of life. That makes it the ideal backdrop for a symposium about the transformation of tourism itself.

What's different?

Alongside plenary sessions and case studies from places around the world, Generation Place is built around a participatory format: every participant is welcome to bring a real Place First problem from their own city, region, or organisation. When you register you'll be invited to share with us your place specific problem. We can discuss this in groups at the conference, or in the months following the conference. You bring something that's relevant and you might put it into practice yourself.

No barriers between speakers and audience. It means that you are open to listen but also to speak and contribute to what it means to put place first

It's really international. It's in English with Italian translation, so we do expect to see professionals and students from both Italy and other places across the globe.

What's the program?

The symposium runs over two days, 9 AM to 5 PM.

Day one is built as an arc. It opens with why Place First matters, moves through what it means to see a place differently and then to act differently, and turns to places already working this way — closing with those that want to, but are still running into the obstacles.

Day two picks up the conversation and widens it to placemaking. The final three hours are given over to Torino itself: a city where tourism is in transformation and you get to be part of that process.

Who's it for

We're building a room that also includes tourism, city marketing, placemaking, urban planning, and regenerative professionals: anyone who shapes what a place is, and who it's for. The name reflects that ambition — Place, not just tourism, and Generation, a signal that this is a forward-looking, next-generation community.

Where will it take place?

The symposium is hosted in partnership with Turismo Torino e Provincia at the Castello del Valentino, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the banks of the Po that has been reinvented again and again — from riverside residence to ducal pleasure palace, veterinary school, barracks, and today the home of Torino's school of architecture. Few venues make the case for Place First so plainly: the castle survived because each generation found it a new purpose.

Photo Credit: Peter Broster