•	Bad Buildings: The New Architectural Legacy in Liverpool	go
•	Why is Our Skyline So Famous?	go
•	Concourse Tower, Lime Street: An alternative vision	go
•	One hundred years 1904-2004, what have we learnt?	go
•	Contemporary apartments vs Conservative apartments	go
•	Height limits, 'Appropriateness' and losing the plot	go
•	Why so negative?	go
•	Pro-city, positive thresholds and a new language for the development professions?	go
•	Town Planning...or CITY-BUILDING?	go

Town Planning...or CITY-BUILDING?

One of the fundamental areas we are exploring through Design+ is the stimuli that cause cities to grow. What new planning approaches are needed specifically to tap the potential inherent in our big cities that has to be different, not just in magnitude to towns, but essential to identify if we are to tap the unique dynamic of the bigger cities.

One of the dichotomies of 'town planning' in the UK is that the same policies have been applied to village, town and metropolis...but cities are not just big towns, they work in fundamentally different ways! It has long been our belief that viewing towns and cities through the same planning prism is just utterly wrong.

So, are we damaging our cities by treating them as though they are just big towns. Have we diluted their ability to generate wealth and well-being, as alluded to in a recent ODPM report on the failure of Northern cities to counter the pull of London, and particularly how can new thinking on urban dynamics, as opposed to town planning be applied in Liverpool? The politics of concentration of power in London is damaging enough, are we compounding this by mis-planning downtown and the rest of our metropolis?

We aim to leave no stone unturned in our quest to highlight how we can revive Liverpool's fortunes through its physical development.

© 2004 Downtown Liverpool