Why so negative?

The prospect of Liverpool once again becoming economically active has led some to recoil at the prospect of change and adaptation of the built environment this would bring. It is almost as if the city’s demise over the last 30 years has been secretly welcomed, as inactivity forced wider ideological planning and heritage issues into the background where discourse and dispute could be avoided.

Market stagnation removed the need to actively debate, make decisions and suffer the consequences should decisions fail. But this is not healthy in the long term, and we have a more ingrained problem that is afflicting policy here in Liverpool, problems that could have severe repercussions for the city and its future potential to develop internationally significant patterns of activity.

In the period of Liverpool’s torpor we have missed out on many of the most excessive development patterns that, while they may have accommodated growth in economic activity, never the less, eroded the inherent qualities of the urban fabric of many of our competitor cities. But! We are in danger of missing out entirely on the new thinking that is being implemented across the globe - pro city planning that is leading to some truly remarkable recoveries in cities that as little as ten years ago where given up as irreparable.

Attitudes in Liverpool as a result of this disengagement from current practice means that there is still a taint, an undercurrent of disliking cities that has so poisoned British planning thought from the start.

Liverpool HAS been developing policy of sorts, and its HERITAGE, thought through in an intellectual vacuum where fancies, and fantasies, have been played out and developed into firm foundations for restoring the city to it’s 19th Century pre-eminence, though of course it is only the look of the buildings of that period that is of interest to policy drivers!

'Design', especially in the downtown area of Liverpool, currently takes a one dimensional approach to a complex urban environment. This can lead to long term problems for future development of the city. Issues about population density, critical mass and any contribution to generating a mix etc are not part of the equation.

Everything is geared toward not offending principles based on form, townscape, height-lines and palette. This approach does not recognise or accommodate the needs of a dynamic city to change and evolve over time, neither that different uses have differing spatial and massing needs than previous primary uses gave in a neighbourhood. The greatest negative impact though, has to be on the city's ability to grow.

Culturally, economically and physically a growing city impacts on previous landscapes, new buildings become the new focal point of areas in place of older ones - The Liver Building in place of St Nicholas' Church, for example. Old planners and the newly powerful generation of heritage specialists do not like this at all. Old planners want to do away with the basic urban form, zone everything and curtail chaos, whilst the heritage movement want to set everything in century old aspic!

The saddest irony for Liverpool that even if we restrict our outlook simply to aspects of architectural or aesthetic concerns, we are missing out here too. We are currently in a golden age of architectural design and innovation, but so tight is the grip of heritage principles of manners, deferment and ‘in keeping’ that we are not only losing to our competitors the physical carrying capacity that commercial cities need, but even stylistically, we are consigning our visual progressiveness to the bin.

Setting out a rigid template for building height, massing and 'appropriate' style cannot be the sole criteria as to whether a building is allowed or not? It also assumes that change and growth are intrinsically undesirable, so must be avoided! The type of approach Liverpool is following at the moment is still 'non-thinking', it has retreated to the ‘surety of the past’, strangely enough, stepping right back into the principles that have caused so much damage, ones we thought we had missed during the last decades of the 20th Century!

This misapplication of ideas to do with style and the thorough misunderstanding of how healthy cities function undermines the very basis of what Design+ is about, namely that a whole series of factors from different fields have to be thought through when considering building and what buildings are expected to contribute to the improvement of the city's well-being.

Current thought is exclusively concerned with visual aspects...and the bad taste that permeates the heritage community at that! We must understand what position our advisors have on wider ranging issues as it is these that also effect their attitudes to design, and therefore the advice they give.

Design perameters are not some universal universal standard from which cities deviate from and compromise on in order for short term gains. The heritage lobby, their experts and advisors have particular desires which inform their 'tastes'. We do not HAVE to agree with them to fully maximise our heritage environment...sadly, as we see all around us, it is actually quite clearly the reverse.

© 2004 Downtown Liverpool