Town Centre Management (TCM) studies have mainly focused their attention on the organisational and managerial solutions aimed at addressing cities and towns development so far. The marketing perspective has been too often neglected and constraint to an operational view. To fill this gap, this paper reviews TCM studies, examining their operational implementation into the Italian context, with the ultimate goal to claim for their evolution in a strategic marketing perspective. To this aim, we report the concrete experience of the Bologna city, as a case study able to represent an example of good practices that can inform scholars thinking as well as entrepreneurs and local government authorities’ decision-making processes. The paper describes the pro-active approach that the Bologna’s City Council has adopted to identify and understand the needs and wants of the various city’s stakeholders in order to acquire a thorough market knowledge and on these basis planning and implementing a successful city development for the future.