Someone tell the CPRE that people don't want to live in "run down areas"

A bit of that countryside the CPRE wants to save

People don't want to live in run-down "regeneration" areas but this doesn't stop the CPRE from pressing its NIMBY di tutti NIMBYs button:

'By ensuring that run-down areas, which are crying out for regeneration, are prioritised we can build more of the homes so desperately needed in areas where people want to live, while simultaneously preventing the needless loss of countryside to new housing.’

See kids, in the world of NIMBYs like CPRE, you're going to be living in high rise rabbit hutches next to a railway line on the edge of an industrial estate. This isn't really to "protect the countryside" but to allow people in million pound houses down in places like Surrey to protect the tiny bit of the countryside we actually need to build family homes for the next generation.

The CPRE is right we do desperately need housing in "areas where people want to live" but those areas are not in the derelict inner city, they're down in suburbia on the fringes of the city. The very places CPRE say represent "needless loss" of countryside.

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Should public housing and regeneration funding be linked to increasing housing land allocations?

Scott Beyer toured America looking at the development and growth of some 30 cities. Beyer has a lot to say (I'm not sold on his enthusiasm for density but his market urbanism approach is mostly great) and one suggestion is that housing subsidy should be target:

But those subsidies ought to be directed into the dynamic elastic metros. That is where land is cheaper, approvals faster and labor cheaper, because construction workers haven’t been driven away by high home costs. And unlike stagnant inelastic metros, this area of the country is also where jobs are always available. This means that the housing subsidies not only stretch further, but place people in markets where they can actually be self-sustaining.

This runs counter to government instincts which are to target subsidy to the greatest need. The problem here is that the greatest need is often a creation of the urban containment policies used by those cities Beyer calls 'dynamic inelastic metros'. In the UK this would cover London but also other places in the South such as Brighton, Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge. Indeed, because England has a nationally-directed system of planning, there are very few places (Milton Keynes, Medway, Thurrock) that come anywhere close to the 'dynamic elastic' ideal in Beyers' review.

Imagine, however, that there were billions in housing funding - to provide new affordable homes, respond to homelessness, and support relocation - but that this funding was predicated on the local authorities providing significant increases in land for housing? This would present councils with an interesting choice - take national funding for new homes or continue to side with NIMBYs in preventing development. You could take this still further by linking non-housing subsidy and grants to the same metric - you zone for more homes and we'll give to the economic development funding to go with those new homes.

If we want to break the NIMBY hold on development - where an ugly redundant airfield is precious green belt - then we need to give local authorities a real incentive to do this. Making economic development, housing and infrastructure funding contingent on releasing more housing land might just be the trigger needed.

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The North's biggest assets are not its big cities - they're its problem

Most analyses of England's "North" start and finish with industrial decline and the ever-deepening divide between North and South. I fear that our analyses suffer from a fatal flaw in that they focus on the idea that the future for The North lies in those former beating hearts of industrial England and especially the transpennine cities - Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield.

The result of this analysis is a false imaging of The North as a peculiarly working-class place - once of flat caps, whippets and tea from chipped pint mugs while sitting on a box at the allotment, now of urban wasteland, sportswear, obesity and despair. Here's Phillip Blond concluding his analysis:

The more that the North escapes its working-class monoculture by bringing back the people who left, the more the working classes will benefit, because a diverse social mix is exactly what will create opportunities for the young people currently and cruelly being left behind.

Now I live in The North, in a lovely village an hour from Manchester and 20 minutes from Leeds and Bradford. It's a short drive to Skipton and beyond to the Yorkshire Dales. I simply don't recognise Phillip Blond's caricature of Northern culture or believe that this is the reason why people leave The North. You need to have a spectacularly narrow view of The North to say this:

The North has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach. And culture in its broadest sense is the pull for such people, as it is what makes a place worth living in. But educated families and skilled people won’t remain in, or relocate to, the North unless it has the institutions and culture they expect to enjoy.

And then to suggest that the reluctant move of a bit of Channel 4 to somewhere outside London is how you resolve this void. It all reads like "there's nothing do do in The North", it's a cultural wasteland dominated by Blond's conception of a "working-class monoculture" stretching from Sheffield to Carlisle. And, of course, working-class people don't have the sort of culture that would appeal to Jeremy and Jocasta!

This concentration on the city and failed urban places is, I think, where our analyses of The North go wrong. Airedale, where I live, is doing OK - not brilliantly but pretty well. It has decent enough schools, work ranging from traditional manufacturing through to modern financial services and tech business. And it's a short train ride into Leeds or Bradford. What it isn't is some sort of modish caricature of "working-class monoculture", quite the reverse, it's increasingly full of regular middle-class folk not so very different from those in Cheam or Epping. We'd welcome Channel 4 in Bingley - it might become a little less achingly leftist - but we don't need it because we lack culture.

A decade ago we drew up an Airedale Masterplan and Strategy, an ambitious vision of the valley and its communities. At the heart of this vision was the idea that we'd been ignoring our biggest asset for 100 years - the hills, moors and woods that dominate every vista. It's this realisation that changed how we saw our place and, on a larger scale, it's what The North should do. Forget about that "working class monoculture" for a minute and ask whether The North's biggest asset is is countryside, its market towns, its villages and its hills? When we talk about the Northern Powerhouse it's about how fast we can get from Liverpool to Manchester to Leeds, how these cities should be "economic hubs", and how we should throw money into universities, inclusive growth strategies and strategic rail systems. But this is how every struggling region, every challenged city, talks - from the US mid-west, to the Po Valley and Naples. With the same results - no change followed by another strategy, another place marketing campaign, another complaint about the lack of investment.

Perhaps The North should turn itself round, face away from its inner urban places and look instead at those hills, rivers, coastlines, lakes and forests. When rich tourists talk about Tuscany, they don't talk about Livorno with its high unemployment, declining industry (and probably an Italian version of a working-class monoculture), they talk about Siena, Chianti and San Gimignano. Maybe, when we talk of The North, we should stop trying to pretend it's any more working-class than say Crawley, Harlow or Sittingbourne, and instead point out that with York, Ripon, Whitby, Durham and the Lake District, we have a cornucopia of fantastic heritage and culture as good as anywhere in Europe.

I realise that this doesn't get rid of the issues that many places face - lack of good infrastructure, poor schools and something of an image problem - but it would shift the narrative from "please Mr London but something in our begging bowl" to "Hey you southerners get a slice of what we've got - and check out these house prices". Our biggest assets are not the big cities, they're our problem.

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Paint, tiles, flower pots and park benches - lessons from Estepona's regeneration

I've always been a little doubtful about the "let's be like Barcelona" school of urban regeneration. This leads to enthusiastic proclamations about how Bradford will be the "Shoreditch of the North", as if this is somehow either achievable (Bradford's not two stops on the tube from the City of London, for a start) or desirable (why would we want a child free and expensive city filled with achingly trendy beards). I do think, however, that we can look at what other places have done successfully - even Shoreditch - and ask if some of what they've done can help make our place a better place.

We've been visiting Estepona on Spain's Costa del Sol off and on for over a decade. And during that time, we watched the building explosion of the 2000s, fevered speculation about high speed railways and more recent twitchiness about Brexit, at least among ex-pat residents. Oh, and most of the local council went to jail:

The socialist mayor of Estepona, Antonio Barrientes, and ten other council officials have been arrested on corruption charges related to property development fraud.

It has dragged on a little too:

Since 2006 a judge has been diligently carrying out an investigation before bringing the case to trial. Some 113 witnesses have been interviewed, 26 police reports written, 800 volumes of documents have been collated and the final report ahead of the trial is 226 pages long. Of those questioned, 94 are still formally under investigation. The inquiry has taken so long that three people being investigated have died.

In and amongst all of this Estepona has slowly transformed as a place, mostly through old-fashioned place-making - public and private - and a realisation that today's Costa visitor is less interested in the flash night life of Puerto Banus (now a decidedly Russian affair albeit with the same number of Ferraris, Aston Martins and Lambos as ever) and wants a quieter, more-measured place to enjoy. We are, after all, ten years older, a little greyer and just a tad slower than we were when we first visited.

The result is a really lovely town where residents, businesses and the council (helped by a few dollops of EU cash) work together to keep it looking good:



The streets of the old town - like the one above feature coloured pots filled with geraniums. Every night in summer council workers water these pots - a pretty big commitment but it makes for a fantastic display:



What this investment - over about ten years - has done is encourage residents to add their own pots and plants to the show:



Each street has it's own colour schemes - red in one, yellow the next, one street has yellow with pink polka dots - and it melds into some brilliant public squares:



This square not only features a lovely stone elephant (alongside a lovely restaurant Casa Dona Jeronima) but some brilliant features and details:






The most recent public space - once a tatty square where the buses used to stop - not only has an underground car park (what a good use of the space) but more great planing as some lovely murals:





Most of the town is pedestrianised (or with access limited to residents) and has been gradually improved with the same palette of colours and materials mixing with creative tiling and mosaics to make a pleasant place for an evening stroll. The whole town centre has the feeling of a park albeit one where people live, where businesses are run and where visitors enjoy beer or tapas (often both). And on the back of this better public space, you get the refurbishment of great old buildings:







The result of this (and I've no doubt that thousands of Northern European visitors - semi-resident in many cases - is a factor in the town's success) is that the old chiringuitos are sharpening up their act to serve this affluent audience and not lose them all to traditional street cafes and restaurants in the town:



There's also investment in the beachfront (Estepona has an artificial beach but beyond the town itself the beaches are smaller and rockier) like this boardwalk:



To return to where I started, this isn't an argument for other places to do the same - that doesn't work. Rather it's for us to think how these relatively simple investments in the street scene, in features and details, and in soft elements such as plants or flowers make a place so much more effective. When I argue for us to treat city and town centres like parks rather than as CBDs or "economic drivers", it's this sort of work I'm talking about. Andalucia isn't a rich place (per capita income is lower than for Bradford) but this town has, having escaped from the mania and corruption of Spain's housing boom, focused its efforts on making what it has work well.

Of course, Bradford isn't the Costa del Sol any more than it's Shoreditch but I do think the lesson here is to step back from those voices telling us it's all about some sort of competitive race between different cities for investment, business attention and development. Perhaps we should think more about paint, flower pots and park benches than about whether one or other bunch of sharp-suited developers are going to arrive in town to build.

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Farewell and thanks, Will Alsop. Bradford should belatedly implement your masterplan.

Will Alsop was a prophet. I don't say this lightly as much of the remembrance of him will focus on the architecture, his penchant for livening up urban design with giant teddy bears and his failed plans for northern cities.

I live in one of those northern cities, Bradford. And every time I look at our struggling - and let's be honest Bradfordians, it is struggling - city centre I think of what Alsop told us to do. I know everyone thinks about lakes and canals, sensory gardens and singing pillars but this wasn't what Will told us to do. Really, it wasn't.

What the Bradford Masterplan was about wasn't development either. Quite the opposite - Will's masterplan was an anti-development masterplan. "Knock down the crap", said Will, "and don't build anything in its place, make it a park." Now we can argue about whether the 'crap' is or isn't 'crap' (High Point anyone?) but Will Alsop's proposals were prophecy. What a different city we'd be had we done what he said - not built Broadway, not tried to attract whizzy developers to build speculative wonder buildings, not pretended that there was any land value in the city to be leveraged into development profit, and recognised that doing the same as everywhere else doesn't win you the game.

Instead we took a radical - almost revolutionary - proposal for the city and spent two years turning it back into a boring, planner-friendly, same-old-same-old plan for a regeneration. A plan for a regeneration that never happened. A plan based on a misguided belief that Bradford could be a 'central business district' when Leeds is just nine miles away (and Manchester a mere thirty miles). A plan that ignored the biggest change in retail since the invention of the supermarket - for a mail order city to miss the arrival of mail order's triumph is spectacular.

Will Alsop's prophecy was that cities and town centres would be about play not work, trees not bricks, walking not parking. Turning most of Bradford city centre into a park was a brilliant idea and, you know, we can still do it. It just takes a little bravery from the council. Instead of spending £80 million on buying up property in the vain hope it will cover up our budget weaknesses maybe we should build Will Alsop's park - pedestrianise Market street and Princes Way, turn all that Council-owned land in the top of town into great public space, buy up and flatten Darley Street. Don't just admit defeat in the city centre rat race but celebrate this defeat. And if there's  little spare cash at the end, let's build a giant teddy bear to remember Will Alsop who dared us to be brave.

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Is building new retail capacity in suburban Bradford such a good idea?

"We'll get that away," says the council officer about a proposed out-of-town retail centre on the site of a closing leisure centre in South Bradford. So the Odsal District Centre is the future of that part of town? For how long? And is this really the future?

I wonder if this is a false hope brought on by the prospect of a capital receipt (and a pig-headed refusal to consider the site for housing) rather than a genuine engagement with economic reality. And Bradford isn't alone in all this - up and down the country local councils are buying up retail centres, either in the name of regeneration or, more commonly, investment income.

Here's some reality from the US courtesy of the always excellent John Sanphillippo:

This new retail plaza on the side of a Northern California freeway isn’t adding needed capacity. It’s cannibalizing existing retail sales from older shopping centers. There’s a limit to how many shoe stores and kitchenware shops the area population can support. Online sales are cutting in to already slim margins. It won’t be long before this place is hollowed out and half vacant, not least because the chain stores will be offered special incentives to relocate to a new place a few miles away. That’s when city officials and developers will hatch a public private partnership to turn the venue into a “technology park” to lure in some other heavily subsidized scheme that will also prove economically wobbly.

Just down the road in the same town is a premium outlet mall that, not too long ago, was the guarantied-to-succeed cash cow favored by municipal planners. But these things just don’t perform well beyond the first tenant lifecycle, particularly when there’s a parade of similar establishments for a hundred miles in every direction. Meanwhile, this failing mall is in a location with a critical housing shortage. The median home price here is $700,000 and very few homes are on the market. Median rent is $2,900 if you can find a vacancy. Most people can’t.

Right now, investment in new retail capacity, other than for discount supermarkets, is a monumentally stupid idea - even if you've an end user lined up. Just look at what's happening in UK retail - not because of slow economic growth but because the market is changing fast. So far in 2018, 14 listed retailers have failed, 1,236 stores have closed their doors, and 13,176 employees have lost their jobs - in four months. And there's more to come if House of Fraser, New Look and Debenhams performance is anything to go by.

Out in the real world the change appears to be accelerating - "go to Amazon," my wife's friend tells her on a chance encounter at the garden centre searching for outdoor furniture, "they're much cheaper and they've got more choice." The triumph of mail order is almost complete, every day a stream of delivery vans comes through our little estate of thirty-odd houses and flats - clothes, food, furniture, everything a home could want delivered conveniently to the door. And all this is without counting the folk who, for their convenience, collect from Cullingworth's chemist or post office.

It's not that shopping is dead - we're shopping more than ever - but that we can shop with a glass of wine in hand from our sofa while muting the adverts on the telly or pausing the Netflix series we're watching. Why - given all this - would people want to drag themselves to a load of cheap sheds thrown up in suburban Bradford? The retail the will work is that which offers something we can't get from our sitting room - events, socialising, entertainment, reward - and that which is additional to a destination - the shop at the museum, the little boutique of handmade clothes by public square, the cheese stall or deli in some space near the popular restaurant.

What matters, given convenience is now an app on our phone, is leisure and pleasure, place and space. And, in no known universe are out-of-town retail sheds any kind of pleasure-led place, a destination for a trip out. People aren't going to say, "let's go to Odsal Distrct Centre it's so much fun there", yet because of an obsession with short-term value that is what we get. And sadly, in a decade or so, Bradford (and lots of other places) will be asking what to do with a half empty and increasingly redundant retail centre - just as we are with the crumbling district centres build in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

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A note on why land values matter...

This is a really splendid building in Bradford city centre:



As you can see it occupies a large footprint, has three stories and an imposing presence (it's also listed and in a conservation area but those details aren't relevant to my point here). It was recently sold at auction where it was listed at £670,000. I've a feeling it might have gone for less than this despite having good sitting tenants. For less than a flat in Southwark you could have all this magnificence!

The thing is that this price reminds me that land values in central Bradford are essentially zero. Imagine that's a cleared site for a second - could you build a three storey office block (even one that's not natural stone and to a high design quality) there for less than £670,000? Of course not.

The building is, however, there and this means it has value. But the sad - and it is sad - truth is that land in Bradford is pretty much valueless even if the buildings currently sitting on that land can be used and can generate some sort of yield. Forgive me for feeling that it's pretty difficult to have a commercially-driven regeneration strategy if the land values are zero or negative.

Maybe we need a different approach? Like the one here

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Regeneration without new land for suburbs created the problem of Haringey

If you restrict the availability of land for housing, poorer parts of town get gentrified - "regenerated" as we like to say in England. And, because we've restricted land for housing the poor people who live in those gentrifying areas lose out:

And that displays the flaw behind the creative class theory up to now. The idea itself is excellent–creative class professionals enhance urban cultures and economies, and should be welcomed. But cities that have embraced them so far, such as San Francisco and Austin, have not anticipated for this by allowing the necessary new housing. And the results are predictable: wealthier professionals are fighting with poorer service-class workers over the same set neighborhoods and housing stocks–and the latter group is losing.

Right now - as Claire Kober has discovered - the political consequences of this trend are problematic. Not because the people opposing gentrification have got any better proposals than the gentrifiers and regenerators but because a bunch of left wing agitators are riding to power on the back of promising a better world without really explaining how. And doing it violently. It's not just Momentum agitators in Haringey but a trend seen in Barcelona, Seattle, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney. In every case existing residents are promised new homes, protected rents and the benefits of a delightfully shiny regeneration and, in every case, those residents see wealthy incomers changing their world.

As it happens, I think that local leaders like Claire Kober deserve credit for their efforts - it's not their fault that we've had four decades of urban containment in London - but they should also be saying to people like London's mayor and whoever is in the revolving door as housing minister this week that the city needs space to grow. Central London has pretty close to the world's highest rents (Manhattan and Hong Kong are worse but they're islands so have an excuse) yet nobody is prepared to say that it is wrong-headed planning policies that are to blame not foreigners, property developers, landlords or local council leaders.

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Stupid regulation and dumb government - why Detroit isn't regenerating

This piece from Scott Beyer sums up the problem with local government's default approach to business regulation - banning stuff:

The city has begun reinforcing regulations that, because of bureaucratic disorganization, have long been ignored. Central to this is the Operation Compliance Initiative, which was passed in 2012 by then-Mayor Dave Bing to regulate Detroit’s 1,500 illegal unlicensed businesses. Most operate on extremely low profits and, like the Browns’ project, are often run out of homes. Part of a complex underground economy, they are usually in poor areas. They offer everything from auto parts and electrical equipment, to basic retail and in-house dining—but they all have failed to meet the permitting and licensing requirements mandated by the city and the state of Michigan.

My city of Bradford isn't a broken as Detroit but we're just as dumb - banning A-Boards, charging upwards from £500 to put some chairs on the pavement, stopping taxi firms collaborating to compete with ride-share apps, imposing onerous planning restrictions on security, enforcing use classes to prevent innovation, banning takeaway food anywhere near schools. I guess we're probably no more unfriendly to business innovators than most other cities but, frankly, many of those can get away with it. Bradford, like Detroit, is damaged by these overzealous regulators and dumb rules.

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Should Council's be doing this?

I understand the financial imperative for local authorities to seek investments that will provide (possibly) assured future income. But there is a point at which you have to ask whether using the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) to invest in commercial property is either fair or the proper use of such borrowing:

Through this innovative partnership, local authorities borrow money from central Government via the Public Works Loan board at a fixed low interest rate and regenerate surplus land that they own by building a Travelodge hotel as either a stand-alone project or as part of a mixed-use development. Not only does this create jobs and boost the local economy but it also provides a substantial return of profit for the council.

It looks great, doesn't it? After all the commercial interest (Travelodge in this case but it could be other businesses) gets access to cheaper finance than would be the case had they borrowed from normal commercial sources. And the Council gets that much vaunted 'regeneration' and an income from owning the freehold. It all seems like a brilliant idea but it does raise questions especially where the deal is less of a partnership that the one described here.

The first question is how local authorities with preferential borrowing rates and a benign tax environment are affecting the property market, especially for the sorts of investment - shopping malls, car parks, supermarket sites and so forth - that are favoured because of their (hopefully) reliable income. It may well be the case that the value of these assets is inflated by the capacity of local councils to invest larger sums given low interest rates on their borrowing.

The second question is whether the PWLB exists for the purpose of commercial property investment - especially the sort of investment Bradford Council has undertaken by simply buying an existing car park for several million quid. Surely the operation of the PWLB shouldn't be merely 'prudential' (does the ground rent exceed the cost of borrowing) but should contain some recognisable social value.

Finally, do local councils have the expertise to engage in this sort of property investment - what looks like low risk may turn out to be more problematic. Imagine buying up a freehold only to find that the income from ground rent dries up or becomes difficult to collect? Local councils are looking for long term income here without necessarily appreciating how market and social change will affect that long run - what happens to car parks in a world of self-drive cars? Do AirBnB type models undermine the budget hotel? And how will the medium term play out in the world of retail letting?

Councils will, of course, turn round and say, 'but we've no choice as we've no money'. This merely returns to the original driver of such investments - falling council revenue budgets - while the risks associated with such strategies are unclear and the impact on property markets elsewhere store up further problems. And this is all before we consider how many billions councils will add to public borrowing.

Should councils be doing this?

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Everything wrong with planning in one paragraph...

This is California but don't let's pretend it's any better here in England:

Mandatory parking requirements, sidewalks, curb cuts, fire lanes, on site stormwater management, handicapped accessibility, draught tolerant native plantings… It’s a very long list that totaled $340,000 worth of work. They only paid $245,000 for the entire property. And that’s before they even started bringing the building itself up to code for their intended use. Guess what? They decided not to open the bakery or brewery. Big surprise.

Sanphillippo goes on to cite example after examle of how planning and regulatory codes stop things from happening - leaving unused buildings slowly rotting in valueless environments because fancy urban experts wandered round pretending that there's some magical value in those buildings that aren't being used, won't get used and will stay empty unless you get creative and flexible.

I'm in Bradford. This is half our problem.

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Writing elsewhere - on Bradford city centre

Guest blogging at Bradford Civic Society - here's a flavour:

The big question on my mind then, as it is now, is what’s Bradford’s problem? We can look at old photographs from the 1960s and 1970s showing a bustling, busy town filled with shops and shoppers. Talk to people who remember those times and they’ll reel off the shops that once were and are no more – Busby’s, Carter’s, Brown & Muff – and explain how all this was destroyed by a rapacious, greedy council run by useless councillors. I’ve a feeling that all this is, at least in part, meant to exonerate us residents for giving up on the city centre – deserting those shops for other places out-of-town, on-line and even, horror of horrors, Leeds.

Some people will tell you that Stanley Wardley’s dastardly plans for the city are to blame. “All the good stuff was knocked down,” folk will exclaim, “the Swan Arcade, Mechanics Institute, Kirkgate Market Hall – and look at the Odeon.” But is this really so? Did Bad Stan really kill the city or is this just another way of dodging the truth about us, the City’s residents? Go back to those photographs from the 1970s – the busy Arndale centre filled with shops, the old Broadway likewise. Was is really bad architecture and half a ring road that did for Bradford city centre or was it something else?

Do go and read.


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My speech on Bradford City centre to Politics in the Pub

For those of you who missed last night's Bradford Politics in the Pub event, here is my short speech about the regeneration of our City centre and the Council's current proposals. We were asked "how do we solve a problem like Darley Street?"

"Forgive me for not answering your question. I really do think it’s the wrong question for all that we’re rightly concerned about the future of that street.

It’s more important, I feel, that we think about the longer term, about the future of the high street and the role of City Centres like Bradford.

When big and successful centres like Leeds and Manchester are starting to question the size of their retail footprint – about shrinking the centre, as it were – it seems silly of Bradford to think in a different direction.

The idea that retail alone – or even in large part – can deliver a future city centre is, I fear, delusional. Those things in your pockets and handbags ensure you can buy stuff at the flip of a finger and have it delivered to your door – city centres will never compete with this shopping offer.

We need a different answer. One that works for Bradford.

14 years ago, Bradford asked Will Alsop to provide a city centre master plan. I posted the result – or at least the video that accompanied the plan – on the Politics in the Pub facebook page – if you’ve not seen it, it is easily googled.

Once you got past the teddy bears and blobby architecture, Alsop’s plan was genuinely radical.

So genuinely radical that we ignored it.

Alsop proposed an anti-development masterplan. A completely different take on a city centre. One that played to the uniqueness of Bradford as a place and to the city’s challenges with land values and investment.

Alsop said ‘knock down the ugly stuff, the results of Wardley’s 1960s redesign of the City Centre, and replace it with a park.’

That was pretty much it. For sure there were bits of detail. Some debate about whether there should be no planned new development or just very little.

It’s time for us to look again.

What are centres for?

Here’s a list from American ethnographers Susie Pryor and Sanford Grossbart:

“…dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends.”

You might care to add to this list but I do know that, when Bradford City are promoted to the Premiership it won’t be celebrated by buying stuff on Amazon – the flags, parades, banners and beer will be here in the city.

Imagine that in a place that’s like a park? For a fleeting moment Bradford has a glimpse of that dream.

But we put it away. Searched instead for “high value demographics”, “enhanced land values”, and “new investment profiles”. Development bollocks.

Bradford doesn’t have the values right now to deliver shiny retail, grade ‘A’ office space or high quality market housing. So simply moving bits of the city about – fixing Darley Street by shutting down the main generator of footfall in the ‘top of town’ seems to be simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So let’s do to the top of town what Alsop told us to do – turn it into a park. A destination. That might just work. It seems right now a better bet than waiting for millions of private investment in housing that probably isn’t going to arrive in Bradford city centre any time soon."

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The Inner City - urbanism's dirty secret

From Chicago through Dublin, Glasgow and Manchester to Lyons, Barcelona and Vienna, the Inner City is urbanists' dirty secret. We've spent decades bashing away at solutions and nowhere are we any closer to what the right policies might be.

Just a reminder what it looks like - this is Baltimore:

Take, for example, McElderry Park, a 103-acre area just east of Johns Hopkins University's centrally-located medical center. The neighborhood, which was once middle-class, is now a severe version of the city's downward spiral. About one-third of families there live in poverty, and workforce participation levels are 54%. Nearly three-quarters of residents don't have any college education, meaning they are generally supported either by the government, or low-wage service jobs—which make up an increasingly high percentage of jobs in the city. The neighborhood's physical emptiness symbolizes another discouraging trend, population loss, which is at the heart of Baltimore’s problems.

As Scott Meyer who painted this picture observes, this isn't an anomaly in Baltimore or indeed any large city in the USA. And we know - we see the riots, despair and dislocation in our own cities - that it's not an anomaly in Europe. In the USA, Donald Trump made much of the inner cities in his campaign - in that blunt and divisive style of his, he said stuff like:

“Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever...You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.”

Set the rhetoric aside for a second, hold back your distaste for Trump - doesn't he have a point? If that sad, declining picture of Baltimore is any guide then these seemingly intractable problems of the inner city are genuine. And Trump is right - if you're a decent parent how are you going to raise your children, keep them out of trouble, keep them alive and off drugs when the only thriving industries are crime and welfare?

And is isn't new. Here's P J O'Rourke from 1991 in New York:

Mott Haven was once a district of substantial apartment houses, comfortable if not luxurious, the tract homes of their day. These sheltered the Jewish middle classes on their way from the Lower East Side to White Plains. Now the buildings are in various stages of decomposition, ranging from neglected paint to flattened rubble. Abandoned buildings are office space for the local criminals, who deal almost entirely in drugs. (There's not much felonious creativity in a modern slum.) Scattered among the remaining turn-of-the-century structures and the empty lots piled with trash are various housing projects with large, ill-lighted areas of "public" space, dead to all traffic and commercial activity. Squalor and overcrowding are often spoken of as almost a single phenomenon, but in New York's poor neighborhoods the lower the population density, the greater the filth and crime.

Or, to make clear this isn't a problem merely of US inner cities, here's The Economist in Paris:

For all the schemes and money, the banlieues are a world apart. From 2008 to 2011 the gap widened between unemployment rates in “sensitive urban zones” and in surrounding areas. Schools have a high turnover of often-inexperienced teachers, gaining merit by doing time in the banlieues. Job centres are understaffed. The unemployed say their postcode stigmatises them. Drug dealers compete with careers advisers to recruit teenagers. “Here, drug trafficking has always helped circulate money,” says Stéphane Gatignon, Sevran’s Green mayor. “It’s how people scrape by, despite the crisis.”

Every city has its dark side, the place where the crime, drugs, squalor, poverty and despair lives. We've spent millions - we're still spending millions - on these places. We do up the houses, Smarten up the schools. Put in neat pocket parks. We even try to do up the people - schemes of training, child care, job support. And yet if we take a map of England's poorest places from 1968 and a map from today, there's a frightening correlation. For sure some bits of inner London and a few streets of Salford and Manchester are now swish and gentrified. And in the seaside towns and mining villages the collapse of their industry created new places of poverty - Blackpool, half the size of Bradford, has twice as many children in care. But not much else has changed.

We sort of know what needs to be done. That old line about escaping the ghetto - finish school, get a job and keep it, get married and stay married - is still true. But the problem is that not only does this not happen enough, there are young people on the edges of these places - people who start out OK - whose lives collapse them into the slums. Immigration helps, especially immigration from even poorer places, but only when you've an economy that generates the jobs those people need. That's France's crisis - in a country where one-in-ten of working age is out of work, the banlieues have double that rate and even higher rates of youth unemployment. It's no damn use having employment protection, mandated working hours, minimum wages and child care if the result is there aren't any jobs - especially if you're black or an Arab.

Britain's most dysfunctional places are different - mostly filled with native white communities (often mixed with long resident afro-caribbean communities) rather than immigrants. In an economy, even in the North's big cities, that creates jobs, not great jobs but a step on that ladder, too many decide to step aside from that world. A community settling for a half-life on benefits topped up with bits of crime and casual, cash-in-hand work. What's gone is the thing - whatever it was, church, club, union, workplace - that showed those growing up how it worked. There's no-one saying "learn something at school, get a skill if you can, get a job - any job - and keep it, try to make your relationships work".

Instead we get the well-meaning and the bothersome. The former do a lot of good by stopping the whole place falling into utter chaos and letting some few young folk escape the life of the slum. These social workers, policemen, housing officers and folk delivering job programmes are, however, mostly a sticking plaster, more about giving a broken community a hug than fixing the break.

The bothersome on the other hand are different - these are the folk who know better - they want people to change their lifestyle, to conform and are more worried about delivering stop smoking clinics and fat clubs than seeing behind the eyes of their 'clients'. There they'll see someone who wants to know why they should bother being 'healthy' when booze, fags, easy sex and crap telly are the only things that take the edge of pain away from a shit life.

It's no surprise that, in this world, the people most likely to escape are those who've found god. Church, mosque and temple provide a place of calm and the faith a direction - all those beliefs will point to the very things that allow people a road to a better life. Educate yourself. Work hard. Respect others. Do the right thing. In times past we also had secular institutions embedded in these working class places that did the same - trade unions, clubs and pubs (often with sports attached), friendly societies, allotment clubs. A host of activity done by the community not to the community.

These places weren't perfect but, in dealing with the imperfections - sexism, cliqueiness, casual racism - we've lost sight of the good things like community, shared experience and decent role-models. What we have left, with the death of these institutions, are the institutions that are least wanted and most exploiting - crime, landlordism and the external state.

I've often suspected that, in part, we don't want the responsibility of trying to fix these broken places. We've been happy to manage their problems rather than invest in the intensity needed to provide a new hope. For sure, it's easy to say to people "your life, your responsibility" and then make sure they don't starve (while locking up their sons and taking the children off their daughters). But is that really what we should be doing? Or should we be looking for the skeletons of past institutions are trying to breathe new life into them?

It's easy to point at the city as the problem with its lack of personal scale, its busy-ness and its tolerance of wealth and poverty in the same place. But rebuilding the bones of an old community, helping shape strong people - that to me seems worth doing. To do this we need to set aside fifty years of sociological presumption, to lift the stone and see glorious life not nasty bugs. Instead of make people's habits the problem, we should be asking how we build back the social infrastructure that once held places together and pointed people to a better life - even when sometimes those things involve booze, fags, burgers and cake.

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Gentrification should be welcomed by cities not treated as a curse

One of the single most important challenges facing Bristol and cities like it as they grow their economies is how to do development without doing gentrification. I set out from the start that I believe gentrification to be a social ill.

To appreciate just how stupid this statement is, you have first to note that the man who said it was very nearly elected executive mayor of Bristol. Marvin Rees was the Labour candidate in 2012 and fancies another go at getting elected next year. And Marvin believes that 'maginalised communities' must be protected from

...the focus on a high tech economy in which the highly educated are uniquely placed to exploit the opportunities and rising property prices and rents so that historically poor areas become increasingly unaffordable to their long established lower income traditional communities and their children.

This suggests that Marvin feels ordinary working-class Bristol folk won't be able to get good jobs in that exciting new Bristol that economic growth creates - they're excluded, as Marvin puts it, from "...the city of street art, the Shaun the Sheep tour, festivals, balloons, bridges, Brunel, the hipster and the Tesco riot." What a depressing vision for a city - you can't invest in buying a house, opening a coffee shop or brewing craft beer because that might exclude 'traditional communities'.

We see a lot of this anti-growth rhetoric wrapped up in a package dubbed 'opposing gentrification'. And resisting the blandishments of people like Marvin Rees is essential if cities are to reduce deprivation, create opportunity and develop into places where people want to live rather than places people want to escape. Marvin needs to ask himself a question about those traditional communities he cites - St Pauls, Easton and Southville. Do people growing up there who succeed stay there or do they leave for a place, often not far away, that they think is better?

I recall an old colleague who was born and brought up in Chapeltown, a part of Leeds as noted for its riots as for its culture. This colleague, Robert was his name, insisted that he would stay in Chapeltown: "these kids need a role model who isn't a gangster or a drug dealer". Some while later I ran into Robert again and he had succeeded - thriving business, got married, child on the way and living in Harrogate. So much for staying in Chapeltown.

Without gentrification this is what happens - the best from those 'traditional communities' move away as success makes that possible and the gap they leave is filled by a new generation of poor people. As my colleague Robert noted, the roles models for youngsters - other than pop stars, boxers and footballers - consist of criminals, gangsters and wheeler-dealers. In a gentrified neighbourhood there's a whole load of people - many from pretty ordinary backgrounds - who provide examples of success without negatives.

It is madness to want to preserve poor communities out of some misplaced sense of social solidarity yet this is precisely what people like Marvin Rees want, this captures the lack of aspiration and rejection of opportunity that results in places remained stagnant, dying slowly from neglect. It is a recipe for ossifying the social deprivation gleefully described by Marvin in his article. Places like Bristol - in truth most every place - needs those bohemian sorts, hipsters and the like if they are to succeed:

It gets down to what I call "the eye" - certain people have it. "The eye" in this regard is really about intuition and it allows you to spot things and live well without very much money. When my wife and I were building our first brand, Red or Dead, in the early 1980s, we opened a shop on Neal Street – now a buzzing part of fashionable London, but then it had no fashion shops and was a rather dowdy area stocked full of white good repair shops. We took a risk and acted outside of the mainstream. Our approach allowed us to spot a place where city investment and mainstream money wouldn't go. And it worked. We grew our business by spotting Neal Street equivalents in half a dozen UK cities and another dozen locations around the world.

Politicians and activists - most green sorts and the 'progressive left' - want to exclude people like Wayne Hemingway from their cities or else to corral them into specific regeneration areas thereby killing the initiative and innovation they bring. Let's not get this wrong, gentrification isn't the be all and end all - if we want kids from St Pauls to succeed we need great schools, good training and a wide variety of what they used to call 'jobs with opportunities'. But attacking success in the strange belief that its investment, excitement and choice excludes people can only result in less growth, less development and a poorer place.

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If we want to protect the environment, we need to fall in love with the car again

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New Start magazine is home to the most predictable and dated of approaches to regeneration. A bunch of folk wrapped in the New Economic Foundation, Green Party, Agenda 21 line of anti-development, anti-car, anti-freedom beliefs that simply don't reflect the reality of either regeneration or the thrust of transport technology. Here's a classic of the genre from the misnamed Campaign for Better Transport:

We know our reliance on cars is bad for us – bad for our health, bad for the environment and bad for the economy. Yet the way we plan and build continues as if it were still the 1950s and the car a watchword for freedom.

And so on in this vein. Each illustration of the car's evil is ticked - 'clone towns', 'subtopia', 'car-dependent ghettoes', 'foorball pitch sized car parks', 'retail parks'. And the glorious alternatives to economic growth are celebrated - 'improved public health', 'revitalised town centres' and 'tackling carbon emissions'. Plus of course the desire that planning rules should be changed "so economic growth is no longer allowed to trump essential considerations like environment and health". As if planning rules do anything at all but limit economic growth - it's what they're designed to do.

My problem with this - and all the stuff about "strong public transport links with discounted ticket prices, the establishment of cycling routes and initiatives such as free bike workshops all contributing" - is that it completely fails to recognise the direction of transport technology. All the most innovative and green developments in transport are about roads and transport on roads - from smart road surfaces and electric vehicles through to flexible urban pods and lorry peletons the future of transport lies with clean green vehicles using a new generation of roads not with 19th century technologies like trains, trams, bicycles and trolley buses.

Technology is making roads dramatically safer and allowing greater capacity while the development of hybrid engines and more efficient transmission systems is making vehicle significantly less polluting. New materials reduce the carbon emissions in manufacture and make recycling or waste reduction easier. In time vehicles become smaller as technology eliminates collisions allowing for more flexible parking systems.

The problem is that we have a planning system that sees roads as a problem and cars as a curse rather than seeing these systems as a more flexible, safer. reliable and sustainable solution that railway tracks or other systems dedicated to single uses. Most public transport solutions (with the honourable exception of electric buses) rely on this exclusivity - from bus lanes and tram lines to swathes of countryside ripped up to accommodate high speed rail. It really is time we set aside this obsession with old technology and began to support investment in the exciting technologies of tomorrow - technologies based on the shared space that is the highway.

If we want a sustainable transport future then the answer lies in working with technologies that make roads more flexible, safer and faster. We need to embrace the idea of increased road capacity and smoother traffic flow that smart road technologies will bring. Above all we need to remember that the car still is a watchword for freedom, is still the preferred means of transport for the majority, and that driverless technologies open up that freedom to people who right now can't access the car. We need to fall in love with the car again.



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Offering folk stuff to buy isn't enough for a place to work - you have to entertain them too!

Retailing as entertainment

The long-term transformative effects of ICT cannot yet be fully appraised in part because technology uptake is rapid and unpredictable. Nevertheless, in one aspect – urban design – a synergy has emerged between bricks-and-mortar merchants and planners, in reaction to virtualization. Their complementary efforts, when successful, imbue commercial space with interaction-based vitality. The human instinct for sociability further supports these efforts, evidence that there is no substitute for many of the benefits cities offer. Lives are arguably better in proximity, a point supported by decades of agglomeration and anthropological research. The challenge for planners, therefore, is to create space for meaningful experiences inimitable in the virtual realm.

OK it's a little bit wordy (as we'd expect from an American academic) but the point being made is central to the business of regeneration and the future direction of 'place-making'. The critical issue is that the 'field of dreams' approach that tended to dominate town centre development no longer applies - just because I build a shopping centre doesn't guarantee that people will flock to its hallowed halls. If all I offer is stuff to buy, the consumer has the choice of sitting on her step with a smartphone flipping through a vaster and more exciting range of stuff to buy.

Pay a visit to a recently developed shopping mall - say the Trinity in Leeds, for example - and check out the shopping. Isn't the most striking thing just how little of this there actually is in the new mall? There are dozens of places to eat and drink, there's a cinema, and there are shops - run by brands like Apple, Bose and Superdry - that are as much as branding and market positioning as they are about actually selling you stuff. We were in the Bose shop getting a demonstration of their TV (unsurprisingly the sound quality was beyond awesome although this didn't make up for its lack of smartness) and, in chatting to the sales assistant, we discovered that she wasn't incentivised to sell us stuff. No commission, no sales bonus - because the shop was there to promote and position the Bose brand.

If we want places to succeed then there has to be a reason for people to visit them - if what they offer can be perfectly replicated on-line (or, in some cases, imperfectly) then the chances are that people will access the offer through the web rather than by visiting some place. What places need to do is threefold.

1. Offer those things - chiefly around 'human sociability' - that can't be done on-line (even if they can). 'Live' music is only really live music if you're there - yes someone could stream it live to the smart TV in your lounge but is that the same? I would argue it isn't - we want the live because of the whole experience, the beer, the slight crush of the crowded venue, the sense of sharing a great experience with others. The ability to say 'I was there'. Just having a bar or foodstop isn't good enough - it needs a purpose beyond that mundane fact, a presence that can't be replicated with a bottle of wine from the supermarket and some home cooking.

2. Connect with the on-line world. We went to the Prado in Madrid and, unplanned, bought an offer to guide us round from a smartly dressed gentleman. He showed us 10 - just ten - pictures from the thousands in the gallery. And these pictures taking us from the middle ages to the 21st century told us a story of art down those ages. We could have hired one of those clunky electronic gadgets as a guide but wouldn't it be more interesting if a little smartphone app could replicate the sort of offer that gentleman made for us?

3. Focus on the occasion, the event and the demonstration rather than just the sale. It's true that the value of the place comes in part from the value that consumers invest in that place - and much of this is, inevitably, a cash value. But, as Apple, Bose and many other brands have shown, the value of a public presence needn't be about selling you some stuff. Rather it's about showing you what that stuff can do, reminding you that the stuff in question is popular (why else would there be a big shop fill with other people looking at that stuff), and reinforcing your decision to buy it.

I'm quite excited about the future for town centres, malls and other shared places. Partly this is because the domination of public space by retail is nearing its end but mostly it's because the evidence right now is that successful places are places where the special stuff - the things that make them work - are made by the people visiting rather than for the people visiting. A new generation of entrepreneurs are creating new approaches to public fun and games - from political debates in a pub to cheese tasting and street parties.

And where there are lots of people having a good time there's the opportunity to enhance that good time by selling them the stuff they want (even if they didn't know they wanted it until just a minute of so ago). For public authorities there's a difficulty because of an instinctive discomfort with things that disrupt existing markets and existing expectations. Excuses will be used to prevent or slow the initiative of these new ideas - the street vendor or market stall undercuts the shopkeeper, selling alcohol in the street encourages anti-social behaviour and your funky flea market needs a "markets licence" for some bizarre reason.

What we know is that many of the best examples of this new place-making reflect this development. I prefer to call this consumer-led but, if you're uncomfortable with the idea of being a consumer, citizen-led works just as well:

Authentic urban transformation relies more on citizen initiative than the influence of global capital, and may be facilitated by ICT but not defined by it; this can be seen in the quiet regeneration of urban neighborhoods. Global capital may underwrite loans for acquiring properties and developing land, decisions in such neighborhoods are often made locally and in the type of fragmented manner that generates a bricolage of uses and styles. Examples in the United States include East Nashville, Kansas City’s Crossroads district, and Oakland’s foodie Temescal and KoNo districts. None displays the architectural shock-and-awe of emerging global mega-cities, but each embodies a citizen-level developmental determinism that shapes their design and atmosphere. They are literal incarnations of the unique priorities of citizens at that time and place, independent of global trends that often result in regression to an aesthetic mean.

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Rags, swag and pet food - Gentrification, markets and the grocery store...

Scott Beyer writes about gentrification:

If you’re an urban pioneer who settled in downtown Cleveland sometime in the past decade, you’re probably happy with the neighborhood’s progress. Even as the city as a whole has continued to lose population, the central area has revived thanks to an influx of young and educated newcomers. Downtown Cleveland right now has its highest-ever population, with more than 13,000 residents and lots of new housing developments on the way. There are more than 4,000 hotel rooms, with another thousand expected by 2016. And residents today enjoy a more walkable neighborhood, as new restaurants and bars open around old cultural institutions like the theater district. If you are looking for a large grocery store, however, you’re still out of luck.

Partly this reflects the high income of those gentrifying folk plus their preference for eating out - not so much at fancy sit down restaurants but at those street food places, coffee shops and bars that sell slices of cured pig. But it also raises a question about the economics of food retailing and the truth that retailers (especially convenience retailers) are entirely driven by 'counting chimneys' - or whatever the urban high rise equivalent of 'counting chimneys' might be. If there aren't enough people living in the area, there won't be a grocery store.

The response has been subsidy or financial incentive (or even worse - and UK planners are very guilty here - use class constraint). The problem with this approach is that it doesn't change the economic reality - if there aren't enough customers spending enough money then the store will close once the incentive dries up.

The answer - rather than chasing national retail chains or hoping for some hipsterish spin on the corner shop - may lie with something that can be great but is too often neglected by local authorities: the market. The problem is how to strike the balance between the municipal market's traditional customer base and the wealthier, trendier folk following in the wake of gentrification.

The commodification of the shopping experience, with its attendant fetishization of taste and provenance, is still in its early phase in Kirkgate Market, as indeed it is in other British markets. In this sense, Kirkgate and other similar markets are on the gentrification frontier.

Part of the irony here is that the 'hipster' is searching for authenticity, for the sense of discovery and difference, yet doesn't realise what is the authentic and genuine in an English municipal market (swag, rag and pet food as one trader described it to me a few years ago).  I have criticised Leeds Council's approach to Kirkgate - preferring long leases and high rents in the Grade I listed part of the market buildings thereby creating something of a false environment. This is not because I'm against long leases or higher rents per se but because it is very clear that this strategy doesn't work.

Given that markets are in publicly-owned spaces (whether open air or covered) and not operated for profit, there is the opportunity to both support the traditional low income customer base (who want swag, rag and pet food) and also to encourage new customers - whether from new immigrant groups or from those trendy gentrifying sorts. In and around Bradford's Oastler Centre (I still think I was wrong to agree to changing its name from John Street Market) we can see this mix in play as the old mix of stalls (meat, fish, greengrocery, clothing and cafes) is supplemented by stalls serving the new immigrant communities - the spice stall, the stalls catering for African, Philipino and middle-eastern communities. What has yet to happen is for new places to open that complement the customers served by the bars and cafes opening in adjacent streets.

But I'm not here to talk about Bradford's regeneration but to look more generally at how gentrification delivers both benefits and problems. The benefits come from the investment and from the spending power of a wealthier customer base -- no-one can deny that this can, and does, transform places. But the downside is that the improvements are all kecky-pooky. We get nice bars, cafes and specialist food or clothing retailers but the everyday stuff of the high street - grocery, hardware and so forth - doesn't arrive or at least doesn't arrive so quickly.

As Scott Beyer concludes (after two decades of gentrification) in Cleveland where the first general grocery, Heinen's, has opened:

Retail options are now focused around a few scattered nodes, namely the East Fourth Street pedestrian mall, the 5th Street Arcades and the Warehouse District. For the neighborhood to be truly livable, say Starinsky and others, the city will need to fill in the gaps with additional retail options. Attracting the right mix of stores will require continued focus by public officials and private groups alike. But downtown residents will no doubt look at the opening of Heinen’s as a crucial step in the right direction.

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From Margate to Estepona (and, I hope, Bradford) - people-led regeneration...

Sunbridge Wells - engine for a new Bradford?

Wayne Hemingway has always been an interesting regeneration pundit. Partly this is because his background is in fashion and design rather than property, architecture or trendy urbanism. I remember him talking to a small invited audience (in Nice) about how we needed to change our thinking about housing estate design but that this meant thinking about the houses not the streets or parks. It was his sense of detail, of design being about the user rather than the designer that fascinated.

Now Hemingway has written in defence of the hipster, that much maligned creature:

The word hipster is much maligned. The media has helped turn a sector of young folk who are interested in new things and being a bit different – someone who in the past might have been described as cool and hip – into a caricature. Its derogatory connotation is impossible to avoid. But the fact is there is nothing derogatory about hipsters when it comes to regeneration. "Hipster-led regeneration" is creating value around the world, often in places where government investment just doesn't cut it.

Having set out his stall, Hemingway explains how edgy design-led and creative individuals are prepared to step outside the expected and go where the usual investors and institutions won't go. We are told about Hackney's renaissance, about the Mitte District in Berlin and Williamsburg in New York. Plus - and I loved this - Margate. And this is the point - I was talking yesterday about how Margate was now where Brighton was a decade or so ago, filling up with people who want trendy seaside but can't afford to live in Hove.

Margate is not being given a leg up by city folk like in Whitstable. These are young people, often creatives, without vast sums of money who are spotting an opportunity that is relatively affordable evocative property, a sandy beach, within reach of London and some likeminded pioneers. My god it’s exciting there. I look at it as a place full of exciting opportunities. You know that in ten years’ time it won’t be a failed Mary Portas High Street – it’ll be a cool town.

I'm excited by how this happens. The other day my wife and I were meandering around the old town part of Estepona on the Costa del Sol. And we were struck, especially given what we read about the Spanish economy, by how much smarter, cooler and buzzier it was than ten years ago when we first visited. However, this isn't the hipsters but a different sort of much-maligned group - Northern European ex-patriot retirees (and the long tail of semi-retirees, second home owners and families or friends of ex-pat retirees).

Even in a place that has been drowned in the wash of a burst housing bubble (bad news for those who bought ten years ago) there's not the impression that those ex-pats and other tourists have stopped consuming, stopped needing the things that brought them to the Costa del Sol - sun, beach, bars, balmy evenings and decent places to eat. And they want these places to be like the same sort of places back home in Hamburg, Stockholm and Bristol.

What we see - in Estepona just as much as in Margate or Hackney - is that change, rejuvenation and growth come from people not from institutions, banks, grand businesses or governments. This isn't to say such beasts have no role - I'm sure Hackney and Thanet Council's have helped the regeneration in their clumsy kind of way and I know Estepona has had a generous bucket or two of European Regional Development Funds. But it is to say that the institutions need to follow the people not the other way round.

Too much regeneration is about grand buildings, planner-led development and theoretical urban design. It's about tidiness, order and an almost subliminal desire to change the demographic by fiat. We need instead to think more about what we like, to hug close those things that make us go wow and to preserve those places that might be untidy but cut across the different sorts of people in a community. When I think about my city, Bradford, its not the Westfield development (welcome though it is) or the new grand plans for the city that give me hope. Rather it's Sunbridge Wells, little bars and cafes on North Parade, John Street Market, curry houses, and pubs with real beer and bad decor.  These are things being done by people - some may even be hipsters and plenty are immigrants - because they think it would be a fun way to make a living. This isn't institutional direction but a hopeful sign of a city that's decided it won't be the butt of other places jokes or the curse of the grumpy old bloke.

This is - I hope and pray - people-led regeneration. And the official response should be to let those people have a good long rein and the chance to live, love, succeed and even fail.

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