Activating civic wealth creation in devitalized communities: The role of sense of place

Communities in developed economies increasingly face devitalization due to uneven development and economic fragility. How do some local communities create civic wealth — social, economic, and communal wealth that enhances the local community — amid the downward spiral of collapsing industries, relocating businesses, and brain drain? In this paper, we develop a conceptual model that theorizes how community entrepreneurs leverage community members' sense of place, i.e., the attachment and identification that individuals have with a place, to activate an upward spiral of civic wealth creation (CWC) in the context of devitalization. We connect research from human geography, environmental psychology, and related fields with community and entrepreneurship research to unpack how leveraging sense of place activates three core processes of CWC in devitalized communities: engaging community members, mobilizing place-based resources, and collaborating for local innovation. Our model depicts how sense of place is key to building communal wealth — capital created to enhance the community's capacity, cohesion and cultural assets — which in turn is essential to ensuring the other types of civic wealth (i.e., social and economic) benefit the community, thus creating upward momentum. With our model, we contribute to research at the nexus of community and entrepreneurship, including growing literature on CWC.