The Consequences of Inaction: Building an Anti-Urban Future?
Renaissance scenarios
Imagine the scene; Liverpool limits development to the ‘harmonious template’,
that has in fact never existed, of our Georgian and Victorian forbears - Manchester,
Glasgow, Birmingham, etc do not.
As a result of one simple 'improving' policy, this means that by 2050 downtown
Liverpool's carrying capacity will be tens of thousands less downtown residents,
millions of square feet less commercial floor-space and activity, the city will
have missed out on the urban renaissance taking place in other cities, as they
are using the potential of their new approaches to city growth, whilst we elected
not to.
To ensure that policy is fully implemented we will have brought in further,
complementary policies that would be dependent on dampening the free market
economy so as to maintain qualification for 'heritage landscape' grants, as
anticipated in the WHS management document. The city lost one of its most important
cultural traditions, namely that of encouraging cutting edge architecture, in
a golden age of architecture and design, for the mediocre, non invasive/intrusive
and bad mannered.
But there is worse. Of course, the aesthetic priority wrought havoc on our main
and most important tradition, namely that of 'doing business'.
Attitudes towards such divergent factors as ‘developer greed’, ‘development
control’ ‘appropriate aesthetic concerns’ inspire policies that combine to stultify
growth, investment and progress… compounding the city’s now irreversible decline
from 19thC world metropolis into provincial obscurity.
A reluctance to see new approaches to urbanism as actually beneficial to the
wider quality of life of those who live in urban centres meant that policies
that directly contributed to further decline and dereliction of neighbourhoods
continued whilst every other competitor city concentrated on providing the building
blocks of rejuvenation,.
Failed housing configurations continued to form a central plank of ‘regeneration’,
even though the schemes that have followed the principles where proven to be
untenable, unsustainable, un urban and where dropped many decades earlier in
other cities. Attendent socioeconomic problems remained more entrenched in liverpool
than its competitor cities as a result.
Enterprise and self help is seen as anathema to policy, swinging over reliance on speculative and ephemeral ‘inward investment’ continue, along with duplicitous policies designed to maintain pre-eminence of the pubclic sector and it's grant sourcing base, leaving the city utterly dependent on external factors to an unprecedented degree amongst Western Cities.
The city is too poor and 'kitsch' to attract sufficient numbers of visitors, which is a double blow as spending policies had for years been dictated by estimated future growth of income predicted in consultant reports that grossly over estimated the heritage tourism dividend. The miscalculations lead to year on year cuts in frontline services in an era that has seen central government removing subsidy to 'the Regions'
Continuing population falls exacerbate and feed problems in all areas as the young and qualified leave to find work in other areas, putting an even greater strain on revenue. Indications that population decline had been reversed at the start of the new millennium was shown to be short lived as the city could not generate or attract the commercial growth needed to sustain net in-migraton and a return of the diaspora.
All text and Images © August 2004, Downtown Liverpool. All rights reserved.