Building community in a destination: from curation to critical mass
Why the role of hosts, connectors and programming needs to evolve as a destination matures.
A collection of good real estate assets does not necessarily make for a memorable destination.
You can build beautiful residences, a world-class marina, hotels, restaurants, retail, wellness facilities and carefully designed public spaces. Each component may perform perfectly well in its own right. Yet none of those things, individually or collectively, guarantees that the place will develop a genuine sense of community. In the end, it is people that create that.
More importantly, particularly during the early years of a new development, somebody has to create the conditions that allow those people to meet, participate and gradually develop a relationship with the place and with each other.
I was fortunate to spend almost nine years involved with Porto Montenegro, including five years as (Fractional) Brand Director, and saw the destination evolve through several distinct stages of its development.
One of the lessons from that experience was that community-building is not a one-off exercise. What a destination needs during its launch phase can be quite different from what it needs once it has achieved critical mass. If destinations have lifecycles, their communities do too.
In the beginning, the community may exist largely on paper
During the early stages of a mixed-use destination, much of the proposition is necessarily hypothetical.
There may be a masterplan, completed residences, early buyers, a marina, perhaps the first restaurants and hospitality components. But the social ecosystem that is eventually expected to animate those spaces has yet to develop. This phase is critical to the future success of the project.
Selling an apartment does not automatically create an active resident. Leasing a commercial unit does not create a gathering place. Berthing a yacht does not necessarily connect its owner or crew with the wider destination. At this stage, it is extremely risky to assume that ‘community’ will somehow happen of it sown accord.
The first residents and customers may come from different countries, visit at different times and have little reason to interact. Many are encountering both the destination and each other for the first time. This is when high-touch community curation can be particularly valuable.
Every emerging destination needs connectors
In the early years of Porto Montenegro, we needed people who understood the different communities developing around the destination and could actively bring them together. These were not simply event managers.
They were hosts, connectors and recognisable faces of the destination: people who knew who had arrived, understood what different groups were interested in, made introductions and created reasons for people to participate.
That human role is easily underestimated in a development plan because it cannot be represented particularly well on a masterplan or capex schedule.
Yet in an emerging destination, it can be as important as the physical spaces themselves. A dinner involving ten carefully selected residents who subsequently become friends may ultimately contribute more to community than an event attended by hundreds of people who never interact again.
The objective during this phase is not necessarily to produce the largest possible events calendar. It is to begin turning a collection of individual customers into a community.
There is no single destination community
As a development grows, another reality becomes increasingly apparent: the destination does not contain one homogeneous audience.
A marina development, for example, might simultaneously contain property owners, seasonal residents, yacht owners, captains and crew, hotel guests, families, local residents, employees, restaurant customers and visitors from the surrounding region. They share the same destination, but their needs can be completely different.
Consider the contrast between the owner of a high-value waterfront residence and a young crew member spending several weeks in port on a superyacht. The resident might respond to private dinners, cultural events, owner gatherings, concierge-led experiences or introductions to other residents with shared interests. The crew member may be much more interested in sport, crew socials, excursions, training, nightlife and opportunities to meet people from other yachts.
Neither programme is inherently better than the other. They simply serve different communities. A generic monthly “community calendar” risks serving neither particularly well.
The strategic task is therefore to understand which communities make up the destination, what matters to each of them and where opportunities exist for those communities to interact.
Programming becomes part of the social infrastructure
As the destination becomes more established, the emphasis begins to shift. Hosts and connectors remain valuable, but there are now enough people for more structured programming to play a greater role.
Some activities should remain deliberately targeted. A yacht-crew social programme has a clear audience. So does an owners’ dinner or a children’s activity programme.
Other activities can deliberately create crossover. A running or cycling club might bring together residents, yacht crew, hotel guests and local people. A food festival can attract the wider region. Wellness and sports facilities can create recurring interaction between people who might otherwise have little reason to meet. Cultural events can bring visitors into a residential or marina environment and change perceptions of who the destination is for.
Seen this way, programming is not simply entertainment. It becomes part of the social infrastructure of the destination. It creates reasons to return, opportunities to participate and recurring points of connection between people and place.
Eventually, the community starts doing some of the work itself
There is another transition that occurs as a destination reaches maturity. At Porto Montenegro, as the resident and visitor base grew and the destination became more established, the community gradually began to take on more of a life of its own.
People had been returning for years. Residents knew one another. Businesses developed regular customers. Sports and social groups formed. Owners introduced other owners. Informal networks developed independently of anything organised by the destination itself.
The need for deliberate intervention did not disappear, but its nature changed. There was less need to engineer every introduction because many of the relationships already existed. The destination had accumulated something that cannot easily be manufactured at launch: social capital.
At that point, the role of the destination operator can begin to move from creating community towards enabling it. Rather than attempting to control every interaction, the task becomes providing the spaces, platforms, programming and support that allow an increasingly self-sustaining community to express itself.
Community strategy should evolve with the destination
These phases are not rigid. There is no precise moment when a destination moves from one to another, and different communities within the same development may mature at different speeds. But the broad progression is useful.
During launch and early establishment, the emphasis is likely to be on high-touch hosting, introductions, small gatherings and deliberately creating connections.
During growth, the destination needs a better understanding of its constituent communities, more structured programming and a balance between targeted activities and opportunities for crossover.
At maturity, a significant proportion of social activity may become community-led. The destination can support that existing ecosystem while introducing larger-scale cultural, sporting, wellness or commercial programming capable of engaging both the internal community and the wider region.
In simple terms, the balance gradually shifts: Direct intervention decreases as community autonomy increases. That does not mean programming becomes less important. In many cases, the opposite is true. A mature destination has the audience and credibility to support more ambitious programming than would have been possible during its early years.
Critical mass creates new opportunities
Once a destination has developed a substantial resident, visitor and local following, programming can start to perform another role. It can become a means of connecting the destination with the wider city, region or tourism economy.
Markets, sporting events, cultural programmes, food festivals, wellness initiatives, talks, exhibitions and commercial partnerships can all attract audiences beyond the immediate resident population. This can be particularly important for developments that might otherwise risk becoming inward-looking enclaves.
The objective is not necessarily to make every part of a destination accessible to everyone. Exclusivity can remain an important part of the proposition, particularly in luxury residential, hospitality or marina environments.
The opportunity lies in understanding where exclusivity creates value and where permeability creates life. A successful destination can accommodate both.
From transaction to participation
There is also a wider commercial point. Developers invest considerable resources in finding buyers, hotel guests, marina clients and commercial tenants. Yet the relationship can sometimes become surprisingly transactional.
Sell the apartment. Hand over the keys. Complete the transaction. A destination creates an opportunity to build a much longer relationship. If owners participate in the life of the place, establish friendships, develop routines and begin to feel that they belong there, they are no longer simply customers of an individual real estate product. They become part of the destination.
That can influence repeat visitation, referrals, advocacy, participation in events and the use of restaurants, amenities and other businesses within the development. More broadly, an active community contributes to something fundamental to the perception of real estate: the sense that this is a place where people genuinely want to be. That is difficult to manufacture through marketing alone.
Designing the spaces is only part of the job
Placemaking discussions understandably tend to focus on physical interventions: landscape, public realm, movement, seating, shade, amenities, retail and F&B. All of those things matter of course but a beautifully designed public square does not create community simply because people have somewhere to sit.
Someone still has to provide the initial reasons to use it. People need opportunities to meet. Different groups need to be understood. Programming needs to respond to the rhythms of the destination. And, particularly in the early years, somebody needs to take responsibility for making connections happen.
Over time, if that work is successful, the balance changes. The hosts become less central. The networks become stronger. The community begins organising itself. Programming becomes more ambitious. New generations of residents and visitors inherit a social ecosystem created partly by the people who came before them.
That is when a development begins to feel less like a collection of real estate assets and more like a destination. The physical masterplan may provide the stage, but ultimately people create the life that takes place on it.