Downtown Liverpool: Design Coding

Design Coding

But not in this way, please?
Downtown planners have announced their outline policies for ensuring that development across whole swathes of downtown are kept within what they see as 'suitable' parameters.

We have to say again that this is a retrograde step, does nothing for conservation or aesthetic improvement, indeed, on both levels the plans are destructive and must be dropped.

On the aesthetic level we have already seen the results of squashing buildings into an an envelope of mean height, massing and palette preference, it has led to hideous buildings and the uglificataion of neighbourhoods. The proposals are nothing less than formalising what has been already proven counterproductive:

Prescot Street

On the more important issue of sustainability; areas that are not allowed to change, grow, re adapt or re-intensify are in danger of staying financially unviable. Simple as that. The conservation lobby are not going to provide the grants that are made necessary by their interfering?

We think that the title of the overarching initiative indicates the fundamental problem precisely. We are a city, not a town, so why are we allowing a 'townscape initiative' to dictate domestic scale in what evolved into a metropolitan scale CITY well over a century ago? When will we get the basic city-building principles we actually need?

Have these people never been to San Francisco, commonly regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in the world? Or Singapore, Perth or any number of stunningly beautiful cities around the world that are historic, maintain and revere thier heritage, as manifest in their old buildings, but who still view themselves as having a bright and vital future?

The point is that so has Liverpool - in vibrant cities diversity, mixed scale, mixed palette, multi-ethnic, WORKS!