Place First Voices: Anna Pollock

In the lead-up to the official launch of our new community, GENERATION PLACE, in Turin, Italy, we want to highlight people whose work puts the flourishing of a place first. This series opens up to anyone who embodies the PLACE FIRST principle already - musicians, painters, visual artists, writers, philosophers, placemakers, journalists, consultants, mayors, community workers, people in healthcare, and those reflecting on placemaking, placemarketing, and tourism. If someone comes to mind whom we may not yet have considered, feel free to send us a personal message. The more inspiration we gather, the stronger the community becomes.

JOIN US AT GENERATION PLACE, FEBRUARY 24–25, 2027, IN TORINO, ITALY, AND MEET SOME OF THE PLACE FIRST VOICES OF OUR GENERATION. LEARN MORE HERE.

Place First Voices Featuring Anna Pollock: Thinking Like A Gardener

Let's turn to someone who was breathing this generation's air long before it had a name: Anna Pollock, founder of Conscious.Travel

Anna has spent more than five decades inside tourism, and almost as long asking what does this place need in order to thrive. In the 1990s she was among the first to read the strategic implications of the internet for the sector, writing the first internet-based tourism strategy for Scotland; in 2007 she produced one of the earliest reports on what climate change would mean for Canadian tourism. Each time, she was early. Each time, the point was the same: the industry was measuring the wrong thing, and the place was paying for it. When New Zealand assembled its Tourism Futures Task Force, she was invited as the only non-New Zealander to contribute to the report We Are Aotearoa.

What makes her work Place First is not the vocabulary but the worldview underneath it. Her argument is that we are part of nature and not apart from it, and that every regenerative act begins with a single question: is what I am doing conducive to life's flourishing? From there follows the shift she has spent years describing — learning to think more like gardeners and less like miners. Or, as she put it more plainly: 

Community is to regenerative tourism what soil is to regenerative agriculture. Without living soil, nothing you plant will hold.

And she has kept moving rather than settling. Recently that meant four months living in Bougainville, alongside work on indigenous-led regeneration through food, farming and hospitality in Vanuatu — the opposite of a career spent circling its own achievements. It is the harder and more honest version of the story: not looking in the mirror and applauding, but growing up, maturing, and asking what you can still usefully contribute.

A generation is not defined by the people who agree with an idea once it has become fashionable. It is defined by those who were living it first, quietly or loudly, before anyone thought to name it. Anna Pollock is one of those people.

MORE PLACE FIRST FEATURES TO COME...