Taking its cue from the National Endowment for the Art’s Our Town initiative, this panel examines efforts to integrate place-oriented thinking into cultural policy frameworks. Our Town is a large-scale attempt to do so at the national level, and this panel will reflect on the attraction, challenges, potentials, and transferability of this sort of endeavor. Particular attention will be paid to questions about what constitutes success for such strategies (e.g. participation, vitality, growth, sense of community) and how to measure it; challenges in building cross-sectoral partnerships; the relationship between place-oriented and person and group oriented policies; grassroots or counter-movements to formal placemaking policies, and more.