Place, and its manipulation, creation and promotion, is at the heart of cultural planning and the theoretical assumptions that inform and underpin it. Cultural planning is concerned with shaping how people live in places and communities (as citizens), and most strategies seek to use the arts and other forms of creative endeavour to enhance, consolidate and express place attachments. For instance, public art, as a key aspect of many cultural planning approaches, is intended both to mark place and foster a sense of place identity and identification. Cultural mapping, widely accepted as being the first step in any cultural planning project (Grogan and Mercer 1995; Mercer 2002), is similarly about place and tracing the intersection of place and meaning. Cultural planning is also concerned with creating or ‘making’ places and, more recently, the notion of ‘place management’ has joined ‘placemaking’ as an important element of many cultural plans. Relevant in this context are the ways in which local government will often plan and manage specific places and use placemaking strategies for a range of ends, including those that are social. For instance, many of the cultural planning strategies developed in recent years to control public disorder and drunkenness in the night-time economy are about place management and often placemaking (Stevenson 2013). The aim of this chapter is to trace aspects of the conceptualizations of place that are relevant to cultural planning, including in particular identifying how it differs from, and intersects with, the related concept of space. In doing this, the chapter suggests that the potency of place lies in its association with the symbolic, and the cultural and emotional realms of meaning, memory and experience. It is these sentiments and resonances that cultural planning seeks to identify, represent and capitalize on. This agenda is played out most notably through cultural mapping and placemaking initiatives but, as the chapter suggests, the influences are pervasive and the language of place permeates cultural planning. A central concern of the chapter, therefore, is to provide a context for understanding the idea of place and the importance of place attachment to life in the contemporary city.