Downtown

Urban Design Week
Downtown Architects and Urbanists, Taylor Young came up trumps last week with the ONLY dedicated event in the city for Urban Design Week 2005, the national initiative now in its seventh year and organised by the Urban Design Alliance www.udal.org.uk, with a seminar on 'Achieving best practice design in regeneration'.

Heritage Open Days
Last weekend saw another group of great commercial downtown buildings open to the public for free as part of the national Heritage Open Days. This year saw an even bigger and better colour guide from the city council to accompany the event - we welcome this but can we look forward to a glossy leaflet for Urban Design Week or Architecture Week 2006..?

Summer Lovin'
Whilst news of the planned closure of current Museum of Liverpool Life won't be greeted (even by Liverpudlians) with many tears, Tate Liverpool has been quietly pulling in the crowds with this year's blockbuster exhibition 'Summer of Love' which has resulted in the gallery having its busiest month ever, with over 100 000 visits last month alone. Summer of Love tours to Frankfurt in November so catch it while you can. What happened to the rumours of bringing treasures from the Prado to Liverpool for 2008?

Roving Retail
Downtown retail has taken somewhat of a battering with a combination of consumer debt reaching record levels, a general slowdown in high street retail and the double whammy of lack of car parking provision and the Big Dig roadworks in Liverpool. However a recent (painful) visit to the Trafford Centre made for an interesting experience by virtue of the countless Scouse accents spending big bucks - good news for Grosvenor then when their increasingly exciting 'big dig' is completed in 2008?

New directions
In the next few weeks we plan significant changes to the downtown site, changes that will allow more up to date information and discussion to be provided as well as more ownership by our community of downtowners, more info on this soon.

As part of these changes Tony Siebenthaler will no longer be editor or main contributor. Tony has wished to take a step back for some time. As he stated a number months ago when he decided to no longer respond to press invitations to comment, or to take part in public debates on urban issues, " Sometimes, when the current is so strongly running against you, to save being overwhelmed the only sensible thing to do is to step out of the sea for a while. To do anything other would be not only dangerous but utterly futile".

Tony has decided, with the site having reached its second anniversary, and with over 7 million hits to date to take this a step further and leave, as part of his wider decision to completely disengage from all areas of his calling .... at least (hopefully) for the time being!

City

HMRI has taken it's most negative and controversial step with the decision to demolish the so called 'Welsh Streets', an area of late Victorian, terraced housing to the South of the inner core. Two main issues arise from the debacle ..

1) Now that the housing market is revived, so is no longer 'collapsed' where is the justification in wholesale clearance?
2) Equally important is just what process of suburbanisation (de-urbanisation) will be the proposed solutions to the area?

We have many stark examples of housing strategies compounding problems when fragile urban neighbourhoods are replaced with semi detached/'secure-by-design' ghettos! Hopefully, now that URBED and PTEa are working in the city, some sane thinking may begin to seep into the 80's Brookside utopia that has permeated so many of our 'urban' regeneration priorities?

Kings Dock
Infrastructure work has started on the Kings Dock, together with the appointment of the new Liverpool Arena CEO, the selection of the hotel operator, the construction partner and the residential developer. Go and check out the waterfront now because when work really starts to kick-off, probably next year - you will be surrounded on both sides of the Strand by over a billion pounds of investment. Nearby residents are already up-in-arms over the existing building works in Ropewalks and PSDA: but L1 is changing - who will deal with the thorny issue of planning decisions made a generation earlier?

Public and Prized
Another Liverpool coup in premiering CABE's better public building award exhibition at the Tea Factory until 30th September. CABE has also firmed-up their interest in the city with the the appointment of their new dedicated project manager for Liverpool..

That will turn 'em on
The first visuals for how the new downtown/M62 corridor will look have been released. No-one doubts the urgent need to address the Eastern approach into the city - but for this to be the 'grandest vision' for what will be a major gateway into the downtown area! Now is the chance to develop an inspiring, contemporary street into the heart of the metropolis, or...?

Vasco de Gama -
- famously 'circumcised the world with his forty-foot clipper' but exam-bloomers aside, the Clipper Ventures 05-06 Round the World Yacht Race departed from Liverpool this weekend cheered on by 000's of people and facing a 35 000-mile circumnavigation across five oceans. You can follow the progress of each of the 10 international yachts live at: www.clipper-ventures.co.uk Come on Liverpool!

Metropolis

Merseytram update
Following Govt capping of Merseytram Line One investment earlier this year to £170m, Merseytravel has been energetically meeting with all five metropolitan boroughs to reach a consensus on financial support. With Sefton having refused to commit to Line One over concerns that residents will have to pick up the tab if costs over-run, the Merseytram project is in a precarious position. With success at JLA resulting in big benefits from business and travellors into the city - the importance of investing in metropolitan-scale transport is self-evident.

Why not for the Dee?
A feasibility study is proposed to check the viability of creating a tunnel-link from mainland Scotland to the Orkneys. A similar link would generate massively more value if plans to link North Wales with Liverpool via North Wirral got beyond the discussion stage and
into firm intention. It is possible, check out these links:-
1) World's longest tunnel page [go]
2) NYC bridges and tunnels [go]
3) Honshu-Shikoku Bridges [go]
How much more valuable also would the second Mersey crossing be [www.merseycrossing.co.uk] surely this must go ahead?

Media Matters
Keen observers will have noted the gradual erosion of Birkenhead's connection with the river and its adjacent metropolis. It is subtly exemplified in the Wirral press, now of course owned by a national media group. Check out thisiswirral.co.uk for links to Cheshire and ..Trafford (Manchester!). No wonder when local newspapers are reviewing books and music from cottonopolis that the slow shift in cultural axis results in polls such as this. One Wirral-based website however has its sights firmly set on a different future www.liverpool-wirral.co.uk

International

The 4 corners of the world
Ever eager for the metropolis to build it's international role again we wondered if we will be in a position to see these flying out of the ever-expanding JLA to Japan? Would be nice.

Personal space standards will out
Viable personal space standards are essential benchmarks if the next generation of downtown pioneers are to be hooked. Even in Tokyo, land of the micro everything, micro downtown living has proven to be unsustainable. So 'swish' were the Nagakin Capsule Tower pads when they where first constructed, like most urban 'solutions' the reality proved to be somewhat different to the pamphlet [link].

But the macro urban apartment opportunity is huge in Liverpool. Anecdotal evidence points to generation after generation of young people leaving the city once they have children in order to live in Cheshire, Wirral - even Warrington! Which developer then will have the chutzpah to build big, 'brownstone' apartments for families in downtown Liverpool?

How far are our standards from the third world?
The recent horrific level of devastation brought home how the incompetence and inability of the 'welfare led' system in New Orleans compounded the problem. If we look closely at how our city-region is governed and what organisations perceive as strategic priorities are we sure that we are building solid structures that not only seriously tackle major problems of poverty and social isolation but would be able to face up to a major crisis?

The latest report ['Doing Business 2006'] from the World Bank also gives us an idea of how perceptions in Liverpool, though not as stark as outlined here, still create a policy environment that looks for solutions in the wrong place? [link]

World famous for much more than simply oranges
With LFC in Seville recently defending their European Cup against Real Betis, we thought we would give you a quick look at that great historic [1, 2] city that also has a strong tradition of world class, cutting edge architecture.

Two more historic Spanish mercantile/maritime cities:

We all know about Barcelona, so just take a quick look around these sites
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/barcelona.html
http://www.barcelona-online.com/architecture.html
http://www.ub.es/escult/1.htm
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/09.23/01-forman.html
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/8445/contemp.htm
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_n1175_v197/ai_16565499
http://www.miesbcn.com/en/books_a.html

Of course Valencia is hosting the Americas cup..
..which rumour has it that Liverpool turned down because of the 'inconvenience of facilitation'!! As a result of this Valencia's campaign to corner the international mass niche nautical tourist market has gone through the roof to complement their view of the city as one with a bright future as well as a stupendous past [1, 2]

Did THE most famous seafaring metropolis in the world really pass up such a mind-blowing opportunity? Surely not. But on previous evidence...

You're Being Watched!
Hotel operators will either sleep more soundly or need some new fingernails as the international business and tourist community tell it how it is at tripadvisor.com. The chief heroes and villains in Liverpool's hotel sector will need little introduction! Check out the reviews too for interesting data on visitor-reasons for staying in the city.