Bradford's uniqueness comes from its Asian community - perhaps that's where economic development should begin?

“I have always been struck by how while every company tries to convince you of how different it is than every other brand, every city tries to convince you that it is exactly the same as every other city that is conventionally cool,”

You'll be familiar with this - "Shoreditch of the North" or similar is a common cry from city leaders as they scrat about for a positioning statement (Bradford and Halifax have both laid claim to this particular tag making it all the less individual). Places need to be more like Barcelona or Amsterdam or Montpelier. The result, as Aaron Renn whose quotation opens this piece, observed is that city marketing videos all seem the same:

“...pictures of the hip creative class, some startups, something about the local fashion and food scene, some people on bicycles going through the center of the city"

I recall, for work on my masters degree, reading the 'innovation strategy' of every English Regional Development Agency (RDA). They were, references to specific places or businesses aside, pretty much identical - except that is for the London and South East RDAs: they didn't have innovation strategies, just lots of innovation. Economic development has become - perhaps it was always so - something of a search for a safe sameness. Today every local or regional economic strategy stresses something called "inclusive growth" and proclaims that this is somehow new or different (without, it seems to me, ever really defining what "inclusive growth" means). Nowhere - least of all the places that struggle - is taking Aaron Renn's advice and seeking out individuality, difference, a unique selling point as us old fashioned marketers put it back in the days of big hair and nice suits.

Is any struggling city taking Michael Porters advice about branding?

“Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value."

The answer - at least from looking at the North of England, is a clear 'no'. Bradford wants to talk about 'technology', about 'levering land values', about tourism and about retaining graduates. Don't get me wrong, these are all excellent things but Doncaster and Wakefield and Hull and Salford and Gateshead and Barnsley and Sheffield say exactly the same. And, after decades of investing time and money in this ideas, what have we got to show for it all?

Much of what we do, quite understandably, is to point at what we have got that's working (in Bradford's case City Park, The Media Museum, Saltaire and high tech manufacturing in Airedale) and say things like "we're on the up". Again there's nothing wrong with this, it's just not enough. At the same time we are making strategic decisions based on the assumption that the economic fundamentals (things like land values, for example) are the same in Bradford as they are in Shoreditch.

Currently Bradford city centre has a few short of 2000 planning permissions for residential units yet to be built. We know (because the Council keeps bragging about it) that there are more applications in the pipeline. The problem is that in 2016/17 just 95 of these units were built out. And there's a reason - it probably costs something around £50,000 to built an apartment unit (more if we're talking about high rise buildings or heritage conversions) but you can buy a 2-bed flat in a (relatively) new build complex for £48,000. This tells me that land values in the city centre are pretty close to zero.

The classic regeneration approach is to use actions ('levers' is a favourite word) to raise those land values so it becomes viable to build speculative apartments or even offices. Those levers involve things like anchor institutions - one reason why so many places have chased Channel 4 so hard is because those 300 jobs will act to make wherever they end up "sexier" thereby raising values. If there aren't the anchor institutions, local authorities nationalise risk by using public borrowing to secure investment, either as a package of public and private funding (as with the former Bradford Odeon) or as, in effect, a straightforward commercial loan (Bradford did this successfully to secure the HQ of Provident Financial and less successfully with rugby league club, Bradford Bulls).

The thing is that this mix of funding does not seem to have made much of a difference - a listed former bank building in the best part of the city centre sold recently for a value indicating again that the land on which it stands is worth nothing. The Council has set aside (or more precisely indicated its willingness to borrow) something of the order of £87m in the transformation of the city and as part of a wider asset strategy. It should worry us that the Council is planning on buying up essentially valueless property in the hope that its involvement and investment will transform land values. I hope I am wrong in saying I really don't expect the city to get any real return from this spending nor to I anticipate that it will trigger some sort of investment boom in the city centre.

I've said, in remembering architect Will Alsop, that we should look again at his masterplan for Bradford. I described Alsop as a prophet for recognising that the city centre is too large and too dispersed. Moreover, Alsop set out an alternative - anti-development I dubbed it - approach of knocking down all the rubbish and replacing it with open space. We, almost reluctantly, did a little bit of this with City Park (where there wasn't so much to knock down) but everywhere else the plan is still to 'lever' those non-existent land values. With the emptying out of the 1960s/1970s part of the city centre we have the opportunity to do that clearance, to create new open space but instead the intention is to knock down the top of town, relocate the (admittedly struggling) John Street Market and create a site for, you've guessed it, more housing that nobody wants to build because there's no value.

The proposals are only made possible, just as is the crazed idea of building a new office block on part of that successful City Park, by the readiness of the Council and Combined Authority to bung loads of (borrowed) public money at these developments. In a city ringed with empty office blocks, surrounded by cheap rents and filled with empty flats it seems entirely the wrong strategy to build more. Yet that is what orthodox economic development tells us, all in the essentially vain hope that the result will be like Shoreditch rather than just more empty offices and poor quality flats. The problem is (and I hate to break it to Bradford's leaders) that our city centre isn't fifteen minutes walk from the City of London.

Having a city centre with zero land value is an advantage but only if we use it. Putting in parks and open space is a start but we also have the opportunity to look at creative approaches like homesteading or similar based on giving people free rent or free land in exchange for living and working there. We can learn from successful retail models in Bradford like the bazaars run by Asian entrepreneurs at Great Horton and Thornbury. The irony is that, while the traditional municipal markets are declining, these market-style bazaars (including one in what was a temporary building created during the botched relocation of Bradford's last specialist fresh food markets) are thriving. Alongside the Bradford Curry, these developments play to the city's uniqueness - the UK's biggest Kashmiri community at over 100,000 may not be without its problems but it does set the city apart from those other Northern cities. The first time I heard the term 'Bradistan' was from a Pakistani colleague in Manchester - her and her friends were frequent visitors to Bradford partly for reasons of family but also because of the offer to smart Pakistani women. Just not the city centre.

Looking at what we might call the 'old' city (Bradford pre-1974), the only thriving culture is, in the main, that Pakistani culture of bazaars, takeaways, sweet and pudding shops, grills, restaurants, cloth shops, and wedding halls. Us white residents get only occasional glimpses of this world but it's there and it's thriving. Perhaps, instead of pretty much saying "shh don't mention the Asian stuff", we should listen to what Aaron Renn said about Brooklyn's imported mid-west culture and Nashville's celebration of once-naff country music and become British Asian's capital?

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