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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 7 2002 23.53 BST
- The Observer, Sunday July 7 2002
The British have never really accepted that cities are at the heart of their economy, society and civilisation. Rather, they are something we put up with. The real Britain is the leafy suburb, the rose-covered cottage or the Palladian stately home in rolling parkland. Cities present problems that have to be solved through 'urban regeneration'; our real lives belong elsewhere.
The very phrase reflects the ambiguity of our attitude. Regeneration is something that will happen to our distressed urban areas directed by some outside agency - Whitehall or a quango. It is well intentioned, of course, and will try to produce balanced growth, balanced neighbourhoods and more jobs - with dutiful obeisance to those other qualities we know matter to vibrant 'urban areas': good public transport and the institutions of culture. Those who discuss this 'regeneration' hold conferences and seminars, earnestly debating which form of tax credit or planning reform might make brownfield sites more easily developable - and deplore the lack of sense of mobilisation over what is plainly Britain's most pressing problem.
Yet what is required is a paradigm shift. Instead of thinking in terms of 'urban regeneration' we need to reconceptualise the entire argument. We need to think not of the depressing notion of 'urban' but rather the celebratory idea of the city - and to make re-energising our cities part of the ongoing revitalisation of all dimensions of British civilisation.
As Peter Hall argues in his great book Cities and Civilisation, the character of cities both shapes and is shaped by the prevailing civilisation - and if they work well so does the civilisation of which they are part. Stockholm is a great social democratic city; its architecture and layout are as much tribute to social democratic values as Los Angeles is a tribute to free market values - sprawling across hundreds of square miles with no core, but vibrant for all that.
Historically, the Italian renaissance grew out of its burgeoning cities; the flowering of Victorian industrialisation was centred on our cities and the great civic culture that tried to roll back squalor and celebrate urban life. Today's London, for all its manifest problems, has emerged as a true world city - a tumult of ideas, life and new industries - that is a magnet for not just the rest of Britain but increasingly the rest of Europe. Urban regeneration has not needed to be directed; whether it be Smithfield market, London Docklands or Paddington basin, the development has been driven by the demands of civil society and business alike.
The task is to generalise this vitality to the rest of Britain, and to understand how it might be unleashed. There are signs of life. Three years ago, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Bristol, Liverpool and Sheffield, now joined by Nottingham, clubbed together to form the core cities group. Their proposition is that vibrant cities are the solution, not the cause, of economic and social ills. But before they can even get to first base, they argue, they need the autonomy and political sovereignty that great American and European cities enjoy.
It is local people and local leaders who care passionately about their local city; and it is their energy that has to be harnessed if the city is to flourish - and this is so difficult in Britain given its long tradition of highly centralised government. The core cities are campaigning to re-cast their financial and political relationship with London so as to empower local energies.
The scale of what needs to be done is enormous. Research co-authored by the Universities of Manchester, Leeds and the London School of Economics shows that the economic and social gap between the core cities and their regions with London and the South East has steadily widened since 1993 - in sharp contrast to what has been happening elsewhere in the European Union.
The 'urban regeneration' agenda - recast as a renewing cities agenda - thus becomes more obviously at the heart of any worthwhile national strategy to attack poverty, dependency and disadvantage.
London's growth is instructive. It is a city, of course, that has benefited massively from globalisation and it has assets that cannot be copied. On the other hand, some of the components of its growth are also evident in other dynamic cities, and do lend themselves to transfer.
For example, London's airports have become important sources of competitive advantage, so that west London, near Heathrow, is a booming cluster of knowledge and information technology-based companies feeding off Heathrow's linkages. London's universities have closed the gap on Oxford and Cambridge (also part of the South East's economy) and are themselves sources of intellectual capital and drivers of both the knowledge economy and a smart manufacturing sector. And London boasts a burgeoning micro-service sector - ranging from hairdressing and restaurants to professional gardeners and party-organisers - that is growing to meet the demands of affluent households and small businesses. It has become a self-feeding economy, as London property prices testify.
But the core of London's growth is based on knowledge industries, around which these other industries feed. It is the quintessential knowledge-based 'ideopolis' - a twenty-first century metropolitan version of what we first saw in those Italian renaissance city states. The key elements are the airport, the university and the capacity to create new businesses to exploit new ideas - either within or outside existing companies - that buoyant demand, intellectual capital and business self-confidence then help to sustain.
The core cities outside London are the poor relations - witnessing all this but unable to do much about it. Much of their growth has been lop-sided, skewed towards retailing rather than the integrated growth from which London has benefited. The British now have 10 square feet of retail space per person - five times the European average. Thirty-one per cent of Europe's retail space is in Britain. All our regional cities boast gigantic shopping malls that have brought jobs and growth - but this alone is an insufficient basis for urban regeneration, and if based outside the city centre often actively hurt it.
This is not to decry shopping. British retailers are sophisticated and highly efficient, and the next wave of shopping development needs to be shaped so that it boosts urban life. Shop architecture and the planning of shopping districts and malls need to become fundamental to the way cities think of promoting their liveability and attractiveness.
But this alone is not enough. Our core regional cities all have the capacity to become ideopolises in their own right, building on their own distinct areas of comparative advantage in a globalising economy; they have to capitalise on the new institutions that underpin contemporary growth.
First, airports and the districts around them are now growth poles in their own right, and key linkages to the outside world.
Manchester airport, for example, is already beginning to play this role, but without better transport links to the city centre - the same disability facing all our regional airports - the city's capacity to build on these key links to the outside world is compromised.
Then there is the university, neglected as a source of intellectual capital generation, growth and cultural strength alike.
World-class universities are the other new growth poles, especially if there is an accompanying infrastructure that diffuses their ideas and vitality into both the local business community and civic society. Britain has an immense opportunity here; with the EU university system so weak, it could make itself the intellectual and knowledge capital of Europe.
Around these twin spearheads our regional cities could develop their own professional and micro-service sectors - and then the transport and training infrastructure that could integrate the socially excluded parts of their urban space into the new economic and social dynamism.
Even to begin to do this - customised as this process must be to local strengths and needs - requires much more local political direction, autonomy, planning and financial power than our cities currently possess. They are Europe's political and financial weaklings, and it shows.
The Government is moving tremulously to ease matters: there are local mayors, a proposed new autonomy to tax, borrow and spend (a bit more) outside Treasury limits, more authority to plan locally and to experiment with regional development agencies. But we are still far away from permitting proper city government and understanding the drivers of growth in the new economy.
The tools that have been developed for urban regeneration around the existing model are increasingly innovative. If we can locate them within this new framework, Britain could yet achieve the breakthrough it ardently wants - and have twenty-first century cities of which it can be proud.
