Quote of the day - on city marketing

From Aaron Renn (who's always good value):

This is easiest to see in marketing videos put out by various chambers of commerce and convention and visitors bureaus. If you happen to watch one that isn’t of your own city, you will immediately be struck by how generic it is and how it tries to sell you on a list of purported amenities and attributes we’ll label “conventional cool.” A list that includes things such as coffee shops, bike lanes, trendy fashion boutiques, startups, microbreweries, skateboarders, silk-screen-print posters, hip restaurants, tattoos, public art and so on.

Add faux heritage, urban growing and farmers markets to get the set! Aaron's point is that cities need to be distinctive, different to succeed. The city has to offer something that the visitor - or aspiring resident - can't get somewhere else.  This doesn't have to be 'conventional cool' as Aaron puts it - he cites Nashville, home of country music, as somewhere that has got it right. In the UK there are places with that same distinctiveness  - I think of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden in Calderdale, of Brighton and of North Norfolk. But our cities - other than London - are way off the pace.

What we get, again and again, is the same generic solutions - an 'independent' or 'cultural' quarter, a budget for 'edgy' street performance and a slew of street art. Add to this a nice city centre mall, a series of chain restaurants and a more-or-less featureless town square to get the standard issue English city - it could be Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham. This isn't to disparage the efforts of regenerators, merely to observe that the marketing of cities has got itself stuck - we're still thinking about 'Grade A Offices' and high end retail when the nature of work and shopping is changing rapidly, pulling away from the world of the CBD and shopping mall.

The pitch we make to sell the city appears more as 'we're just like all the other really good places' rather than 'this is the home of...' something. If your city is the best place to shop, sell it as the best place to shop and don't pretend that you offer culture when you don't. And if you've been curry capital of Britain for years on end, doesn't that tell you something about your uniqueness? If you've a great pop music heritage, go for it - not just the kitsch remembering but getting the cool kids who want to make music to come there. And if your city's strongest brand is a football team, make that the point of difference.

As Aaron Renn concludes:

Rather than rejecting their actual selves, cities need to embrace -- but update -- who they are. Adopt best practices to be sure, but also be true to the native soil. A great city, like a great wine, has to express its terroir.

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Regeneration, garden cities and why Jane Jacobs didn't like Ebenezer Howard

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Anne Power, Professor of Social Policy at the LSE isn't a fan of our renewed enthusiasm for 'Garden Cities' - indeed she was quite scathing in an interview with 'Inside Housing':

Garden cities are environmentally damaging, expensive and slow to build, said Professor Anne Power...talking about the government’s plans for a new generation of the developments.

So where does this take us? I'm not convinced by Professor Power's argument on either speed, cost or environmental risk but her view is important since it comes from someone who has spent a lot of time worrying about the problems of cities.

But there's another view - for me a better, more liberal and more exciting view - that of Jane Jacobs. I've always loved the way in which planners and regeneration boffins claim Ms Jacobs for one of them - when the very opposite is true. This means that planners go on about people-led and evolving city systems while completely ignoring anything that looks remotely untidy or outside municipal control.

Anyway, here's what Jane Jacobs though of Ebenezer Howard, the guru of 'garden cities' and godfather of town planning:

“His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge."

And we see this reflected in the self-righteousness of 'transition' towns, in the obsession with the local multiplier (have NEF actually conducted any real tests on their model or is mine still the only one) and in a focus on anything other than tilling the soil of enterprise.

So much that is written about community regeneration either mistakes the activities of the relatively wealthy residents of poorer places for regeneration or else implants a set of values that were best left behind when the Woodstock generation left that muddy field and headed into the real world.

I was at an interesting session on the next round of LEADER funding (EU funding directed to the rural economy, farm diversification and rural business productivity). It was striking - and depressing - to see the argument presented that we'd have to focus on economic growth (you know, jobs and businesses) because that was what DEFRA wanted. The implication - and this is clear in so much community regeneration - was that a better economy with more jobs, more income and more wealth was somehow not what regeneration is about. So much better to open up a new cycle path, run awareness-raising on climate action or plant herbs in street verges.

The problem we have is that our "plan-led" system has competing objectives - it wants reduce carbon emissions, it urges us to be healthier, it wishes to plan out crime and it wants to promote biodiversity. And, wonderful though these things may be, they all require a compromise - we cannot meet the idea for all of them. Something has to give.

And the first thing to give is economic growth, jobs and business. The very act of planning - or requiring someone to seek permission to do something with their property is a drag on the economy. But when we want that decision - to build a home, to open a business, to extend a factory - to also contribute to combating climate change, preventing obesity and providing homes for bats, we have problem.

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Perhaps we should stop trying to create communities - mixed or otherwise.

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I live in a mixed community. Socially, in terms of income and, to a degree, ethnically. But the real magic about the place is that it wasn't 'created', there wasn't a great masterplan that would mean Cullingworth had a variety of housing - flats, terraces, semi-detached and detached, old and new, large and small. Nor was there a grand plan to make sure that the village had about 20% of its stock available for social rent. Yet somehow we've managed to have that mixed community that makes Cullingworth such a fine place.

So it does rather concern me that the solution to some communities - whether Belgravia or Easterhouse - not being 'mixed' is to chain up the wrecking ball and knock stuff down. It's as if we're channelling some petulant child troubled by the failed sandcastle - kicking out at our failures. So, as Peter Matthew's describes:

An area of predominantly social housing is demolished, replaced with a mixed-tenure community, with a net reduction in the numbers of social housing units and an increase in rents. These developments intend to, and do, push the poor and marginalised out of our cities.

We have done this time and time again. Even Cullingworth wasn't immune to slum clearance - back in the 1960s the then Bingley Urban District Council bought up the back-to-backs in the village (paying an average of £43 pounds - no I haven't missed off any noughts - for each house) and flattened them. For a few residents there were new council houses in the village but for most the new Woodhouse Estate at Keighley beckoned.

I make this observation to provide a context for the assertion that knocking stuff down and starting again probably isn't the right solution - however despairing we may be at the prospects for residents of Holme Wood or Bracken Bank (these great peripheral estates has such appealing names). Nor are we served by the common assertion that somehow the depressing dreich of the council estate is responsible for the failings of that estate's residents.

Indeed, just as health inequality is caused by the mobility of the healthy and wealthy, places of multiple deprivation come about because they are the only places where the poor and ill can afford to live. And we know that, at the first opportunity, those poor and ill folk will up sticks and head for a nicer place - indeed the most ambitious will leave before they cease being poor and ill in the expectation that another place, however tough, will provide the opportunity for escape.

This is why people from the other side of the earth will crowd into unsanitary, damp and dangerous accommodation in Bethnal Green - the prospects are better than in Sylhet or Timisoara. And why young people from Barnsley and Huyton head to London, prepared to pay through the nose for a shoe box and have a job. The problem is that, once these places start to work, the authorities decide they must act - and acting means enforcement, slum clearance, regeneration.

Nor - however cute the argument might be - is there a case for turning the approach upside down and:

...demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing...

This suffers from the same problem as slum clearance except instead of kicking at our failed sandcastle we run over and trample on some other kid's spectacular sand version of Versaille. Such demolition utterly fails because - like slum clearance - it doesn't really face up to the problem but rather neatly sidelines that problem. We get action for the sake of action, a sort of Gentilean approach to regeneration rather than asking why it is that we residualise social housing and marginalise the residents of social housing. Or for that matter why it costs £650,000 to buy a 3-bed terrace in Hackney.

The truth - or at least the beginning of truth - is to remember where I started: mixed communities should be places of the willing rather than creations of the planner. Indeed, more often than not, our planning disrupts that process of community building. Indeed, as Jane Jacobs remarked about that godfather of the planned community, Ebenezer Howard:

As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

Every day I see examples of planners disrupting people's innovation because it fails to fit their rules - from little examples like not allowing people to keep goats in Detroit or getting a couple to demolish their rather beautiful woodland home, to the grand plans that make land too dear and too precious for the growth of wonderful communities.

So to return to Cullingworth. There's an application from Barratt Homes to build 233 houses on the edge of the village. It's a brownfield site, it's not in the green belt and Cullingworth's a nice place to live. The development will happen - all we really want as a village is for the developer to build us a new village hall. We'll cope with a classic estate development because the remaining 1200 homes are so diverse and we're watching to see what happens to other sites in the village - some homes for rent maybe, a few more apartments and some smaller houses for younger couples.

But in other places - already cursed by planners - we'll see 'urban extensions' into the green belt that consist of vast swathes of suburban sameness, the very opposite of the mixed community we want to create. And this, like so much else about Britain's housing (from poor space standards to the price of housing land) can be laid firmly at the door of our planning system. Even the much maligned housebuilding companies exist in their current form because of the manner in which land markets are skewed by the, often bizarre, decisions of planners.

In the end regeneration isn't about knocking stuff down. Cullingworth wasn't created by demolition and rebuild (the land the back-to-backs occupied prior to their demolition remains largely - the existing and ageing village hall aside - open land) but rather by the interaction of its residents, by the fact that there's a chance for most of staying here and by the initiative of businesses and individuals. Perhaps - and there are many places like Cullingworth - we should restart our search for community by looking at these villages and learning about how they stay mixed.

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Life in Brazil's slums...

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...isn't quite what our mental image would suggest:

Beatriz Soares, 21, a resident of Complexo da Maré, falls into this middle class status, despite the fact that water, sewerage, electricity and gas are not regulated in her home. “I’ve never missed anything here at home,” says Soares, a student of Journalism. Her parents run a bakery in the slum and have a monthly income in excess of R$2,000. This income allowed Soares to study in private schools, today making progress in English and Theatre studies.

Soares demonstrates an increased consumption among families of the slums: she has health insurance, her own car, computer and cell phone. Furthermore, her spending on clothing is constant. “I love buying clothes from stores in the mall,” says Soares. She is not alone in her lifestyle. Instituto Data Favela found that most households in the slums have refrigerators (99 %), washing machines (69 %) or microwaves (55%), with many also owning a plasma, LED or LCD TV (46 %), or freezer (38%).

The central point here, the thing that makes Complexo da Maré a 'slum', is that word 'regulation'. People have sanitation, running water, electricity and gas but it is not as regulated or controlled as is the case with those parts of Sao Paulo that aren't 'slums'.

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Why Spike Lee is wrong. Some thoughts on gentrification.

American film producer, Spike Lee went off on one about the gentrification of Brooklyn:

Then comes the motherfuckin' Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can't discover this! We been here. You just can't come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin' African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can't do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father's a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin'-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin' people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He's not — he doesn't even play electric bass! It's acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin' house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin'-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!

Language aside this is a pretty classic critique of gentrification - wealthy hipster incomers buying up cheap properties and doing them up. Soon followed by trendy bars, whole food stores and the other paraphernalia of hip modern urban life. And the place is unwelcoming to the people who were living there before the trend-setting bearded ones.

The problem is that, despite Spike's passion, he's wrong. That Christopher Columbus Syndrome applied as much to his Dad as it does to these white folk moving in on Brooklyn. Indeed, gentrification is a necessary urban process not something to be prevented. More to the point, as Spike polemically explains, the consequence of gentrification is better schools, more responsive public services, safer streets and, overall, a more pleasant environment.

Gentrification isn't slum clearance - people are buying property on the open market and improving it, they aren't rounding up poor folk and marching them to the next slum up the line. And don't those poor folk also benefit from better schools, safer streets and the litter getting cleared up?

Here's a slightly different take on gentrification - it contains some angst and a warning but it isn't the 'this-is-my-place-you-can't-live-here' attitude that Spike Lee (and many others who attack gentrification as anti-poor). This is Atlanta:

Personally, I credit her (together with many other people) for creating a lot of value over the years. Compassionate value. But that’s where irony steps in. Because value, once created, doesn’t just sit quietly in a vacuum. It attracts people and money and change at an increasingly accelerated pace. After the risk oblivious — my wife and me in our youthful naiveté — come the risk aware (folks who recognize the challenges associated with disadvantaged or depressed areas but are willing to accept them, at least conditionally) and, finally, the risk averse (those who’re only attracted to an area once certain levels of safety, predictability and comfort present themselves).

The process of gentrification does exclude but, in this case, it took 20 years. And in that 20 years the prior residents of the area have benefited from those improved schools, those better services and those safer streets. The very things they'd urged politically for years but that were delivered in a (relative) breath by economic change. Moreover, some of those 'natives' - if that's a word we can really use - will still be there happy and smiling because their lives were made better by gentrification. OK it will be a pleasant, maybe a little dull, middle-class neighbourhood rather than an edgy urban place.

However, we aren't all hipsters and seeking affordable urban edge isn't what we do. We want a safe, reliable, pleasant and stable community - Cheam rather than Peckham. And gentrification - not always but mostly - delivers just that sort of community.

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Empathy in regeneration: hugging the poor and saying 'there, there'

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Julia Unwin, boss of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has written a book about combatting poverty. I have yet to read it but I'm pretty sure it will be the usual curate's egg of calls for government intervention and creative ideas for responding to the inefficient distribution of economic gain.

However, the response of some - in this case Neil McInroy from the Centre for Local Economic Studies - is to return to the idea that economic reality shouldn't be described because it's insufficiently empathetic. And worse to suggest that our policy-making should be guided by empathy not evidence:

Too often policy has little empathy toward the poorest.  We already know that the policy default settings, such as trickle down and a ‘rising economic tide will lift all boats’ are just not strong enough to tackle poverty, even in times of growth.  But increasingly, some policy seems alarmingly detached from the plight of the poorest.

For Neil and his ilk, asking why people are poor rather than merely how we should relieve that poverty is a problem. Rather than seeking to eliminate the causes of poverty - why people rely on state-handouts, how some people fail and require relief, the way in which the economy (and society) places barriers preventing escape from poverty - Neil wants us to carry on with his cuddly consensus, with policies best described as "giving the poor a big hug and saying 'there, there'."

Empathy is fine but saying that it necessarily describes the actions - the distorting interventions of Neil's preference - required is to misuse emotion as a policy tool. Emotion guides us to the need to act not the nature of that action. And we've used Neil's qualitative, judging approaches to policy for 40 years - during which time the poorest places in England have remained just that, the poorest places in England.

I don't care how much empathy Neil has - his policy prescription, currently dubbed "place-based" but in reality a localised protectionism, will act only to make matters worse for the poor with whom he empathises so readily. These 'place-based' policies are fantastic for the better off in poorer places - they love all the growing stuff, the collectives, the community meetings. But the poor aren't included - they're looking on as cheaper food is denied, as business is condemned and as a fake "resilience" makes the world less open and more expensive.

Empathy is a fine emotion. But is isn't any sort of guide to what we should do to make people's lives better.

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Pointless tears for a lost high street

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Professor Sparks laments the emotional void left by the loss of Woolworths. He makes an important point, putting his finger on the way some retailers can create a sense of attachment that’s more sentimental than economic. But of course sentiment doesn’t pay the bills.

Do you feel an emotional void as a result of Woolworths closing? If you do then your levels of emotional sensitivity are far more developed than those of normal people. Now I understand how marketing and advertising - the presence of a brand over the years - can create attachment. Indeed, as a professional marketer I can respond with a smile of quiet satisfaction at the way in which branding sustained Woolworths as a business long beyond the point where it lost its way as a retailer. But emotion at the demise of a shop few of us visited more than a couple of times a year?

Let's weep for the high street, let's mourn the loss of those shops we cherished in our now forgotten youth. We should wipe away a tear knowing that the greengrocer who always called you "John" has gone, that there are so few bakers and that the comfortable retail brands of yesteryear are now just memories.

We should post pictures of our towns in those glory days when we had, we're told, some 'attachment' to the high street. And have long conversations while hunched over these snaps, remembering past ages and regretting the loss of these past institutions.

Show that emotion, call down a curse on the shops that have filled the void left by those old shops. The second hand shops, dens of evil gambling and places where all that's for sale is the false hope of an easy (but expensive loan) - cry out about:

...predators in Food Bank Britain, leeching on a society that struggles to make ends meet and ensuring their users pay over the odds to survive.

But let's not see that remembered past as a guide to some golden future for the high street, let's not pretend that emotion can ever substitute hard reality. Not the reality of poverty - there is less poverty today than there was when those black and white photographs were taken, when people trudged in worn out shoes, back aching to the high street to haggle and hassle for the things a family needed to survive. No it is the reality that our wealth has brought choice, mobility, opportunity and, in doing so, has left those retailers behind. All the tears of happy memory will not change this fact.

Yet people like Julian Dobson persist in painting this myth:

This is why the future of such high streets lies in a very different approach to prosperity. Instead of desperately competing for the spending from enclaves of affluence, high streets need to return economic value to local entrepreneurs and shoppers. This demands access to property at low rent and with business rates set at intelligent levels; it requires active encouragement of local enterprise by councils and chambers of commerce; and it requires community-based networks of trade and exchange that rebuild local loyalty.

Don't get me wrong, I'm with Julian on the tax thing - all taxes do is make business harder. But the pretence that somehow affluence is fading from places like Rochdale, that poverty and the food bank is somehow the norm of living in these northern towns is a distorted, even insulting, picture.

However, the shoppers in Rochdale, in Littleborough and in Middleton, they're on the tram into Manchester or fighting the traffic round the M60 to the Trafford Centre. Or indeed, and this is ever more the case, sat in their onesie on the sofa, smartphone or iPad in hand buying stuff on-line.

There is a future for the high street, not as a dystopic place filled with betting shops and fried chicken takeaways but as a place for leisure and pleasure. This isn't about some form of local protectionism, an impost on prices that further excludes the poorest, but about getting the scale right and the place right. Above all it means fewer shops.

So wipe away the tears, they serve no purpose beyond the memory that invokes them. Instead recognise the reality of 21st century retailing - on-line provides a scale of choice never before available to the consumer. It drives down prices and brings the world's goods to our sofa. Just as there were once 50 shops in Cullingworth (there are now fewer than 15 and four of these are hairdressers), there will be no future need to struggle with heavy bags to that high street of people's memories to face less choice and higher prices than we get either on-line or in the supermarket.

These tears for a lost high street are pointless.

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"Local Protectionism" - the New Weather Institute and the promotion of poverty

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David Boyle from the New Weather Institute (a sort of nef on steroids) asks us to name the 'local economics' his organisation and others are promoting:

The prevailing economics of regeneration is based on the idea of comparative advantage.  Places need to specialise, otherwise – heaven forfend – everywhere will have to build their own radios or cars or anything else.

Or so the old-world economists mutter when you suggest that ‘comparative advantage’ might be taken too far.

Because when it is, what you get is too few winners and far too many losers, places that are simply swept aside in the narrowly efficient new world, where only one place builds radios.  Or grows carrots.

Now, as we know, comparative advantage - while not being the be all and end all of trade economics - is a pretty fundamental concept. And the idea that there will be only one place building radios because of 'comparative' advantage is, to put it mildly, nonsense. And here's a rabid right-wing economist to explain the nonsense - his name is Paul Krugman:

At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world. Both comparative advantage and natural selection are ideas grounded, at base, in mathematical models -- simple models that can be stated without actually writing down any equations, but mathematical models all the same. The hostility that both evolutionary theorists and economists encounter from humanists arises from the fact that both fields lie on the front line of the war between C.P. Snow's two cultures: territory that humanists feel is rightfully theirs, but which has been invaded by aliens armed with equations and computers.

Put simply the losers in David Boyle's 'local economics' are - as with protectionism everywhere - the consumers. This supposed 'resiliance', this much vaunted 'susatainability' and this self-important 'social responsibility' all comes at a cost. And that is higher prices, less choice and more poverty.

Getting people to scrat about in fields doing "sustainable local growing" is not an economic policy - it's a good idea, good for health, good for community but if it's your economic policy then it's a step back towards living in mud huts and relying on subsistence agriculture, the sort of policy Oxfam promotes in Africa rather than giving Africans access to trade, investment and economic growth.

What poor communities don't need is another bunch of middle-class sociology graduates arriving on their doorstep with another big hug. What they need are better schools, good homes and an idea that there's something beyond the horizon, a route out from poverty. What The New Weather Institute are offering is a future of gentile poverty with vegetable growing not a genuine economic future for poor communities.

The name for David Boyle's 'local economics' is an old one and a bad one: protectionism.


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Local multipliers are something of a myth

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Trendy regional economic development folk like to tell you about "the multiplier effect" arguing that buying locally means that more money "stays in the local economy". We are told - mostly without any real evidence - that this multiplier effect is the magic formula for making poor communities less poor, that it explains how paying higher benefits improves local economics and is the reason why inefficient traditional high streets are better than supermarkets.

Here's an example of this mythmaking from New Start magazine:

Working with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, Preston Council is researching how much of the procurement spend of institutions – including Preston College, the University of Central Lancashire and Preston Council itself – actually stays in the local region.

‘The findings so far suggest that each institution spends less locally than you’d expect’, Whyte says. ‘There’s scope for us to improve that by looking at how to maximise local spend and supply chains and if there are any gaps in the local market, think about what we could do to fill it.’

The Evergreen model fills those gaps through a network of co-ops supplying food, energy and laundry services to local institutions. Preston Council is considering emulating this approach and has undertaken a number of initiatives to boost and expand local coops, including setting up a Co-operative Guild network.

Sound great doesn't it? But what it covers up is a fundamental factor about local preference - it distorts the market and, in doing so, it raises prices. If local suppliers in Preston know that they won't be squeezed out by a supplier from distant Burnley or, god forbid, Skipton then there will be no need for them to keep prices under control.

Thus we witness the essential fallacy of the local multiplier - the gain made in keeping money circulating locally is taken up in higher prices. It is, at the local level, essentially protectionism - great for the businesses that benefit but awful for the consumers who don't. The money may be circulating for longer but the buyers are paying more than they would be if the system were a free market. There is no gain.

And this is before we start talking about the opportunity cost of public spending:

It is quite misleading to leave public policymakers with the notion that their spending is not at the expense of the private sector because it may be autonomous or have multiplier effects

There may well be a local multiplier but these strategies to promote it are not only ineffective but probably damaging to the local economy (and certainly an impost on consumers).  Apparently though, this is "new economics" and we should be excited:

Until recently experiments in local economics were small-scale and peripheral. But the failures of orthodox approaches are leading even the most successful local economies to find new ways to boost jobs and revitalise communities. With a paucity of ideas and support from central government local areas are now abandoning laissez faire for more interventionist approaches.

Welcome to the latest in a long line of failed and failing regeneration strategies!

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The myth of landbanking

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Politicians who think they know about housing are wont to shout about a thing called landbanking:

Ed Miliband will warn developers to ‘use it or lose it’ if they continue sitting on land with planning permission under his government.

In a speech to Labour’s national policy forum this Thursday the party leader will announce plans to give local authorities power to serve compulsory purchase orders on developers.

Town halls will also be able to levy fees on land that sits unused for years despite being approved for development, under the proposals.

The inference of all this is that the big housebuilding companies - Barratts, Wimpey, Redrow and so forth - are buying up land, getting permissions and then sitting on the land.

Without wanting to get all technical, this is twaddle. It's true that housebuilders have landbanks but it's also true that tying up all your capital in land is a daft idea if you make your money from building and selling houses.

Here's an indication of the truth from Barratt:

The interim management statement from Barratt Development PLC said in 2013 it secured 8,150 plots as opposed to 3,685 plots in 2012 to bulk up its landbank.

£150 million more has been spent on land in 2013, £377.7 million, compared with 2012, has £226.8m.

The statement said: ‘We continue to target an owned and conditional landbank of around 4.5 years.’

It's interesting to note here that local planning authorities are expected to maintain a five year supply of deliverable housing land. Barratts are merely matching that process in managing their land supply. What Barratt (and the other builders) aren't doing is buying up land with the intention of waiting for it to "accumulate in value".

The problem - if there is a problem - is the securing of speculative permissions. Landowners - especially corporate landowners - seek permissions for housing to secure a putative value increase (great for bulking up slightly dodgy balance sheets). Until a housebuilder sees the land as viable for development nothing will happen. All over the North's cities and towns you'll see cleared land that has a permission for housing. There is little prospect of these - mostly former industrial - sites being developed so long as the housebuilders has to secure, for Barratt at least,:

...minimum hurdle rates of a 20 per cent gross margin and a 25 per cent return on capital employed based on current market prices.

All the compulsory purchase threats, levies and other big sticks don't change this fact. You cannot use force to make a developer spend millions of his (or the bank's) money when they deem it to be unviable. This is why Miliband's soundbite was stupid - it would stop applications and further dry up the limited opportunities for housing development, especially in the North.

Update: A brief and unedifying discussion of landbanking cropped up on Question Time where Labour's Sadiq Khan rolled out the "use it or lose it" line. Sadly no-one challenges his repeated statement that developers hold land in anticipation of future rises in value - this is simply untrue. Nor is the crazy economics of compulsory purchase questioned or indeed whether, in places like Salford, there really is the need for all this housing (one man in the audience said Salford has about 9000 permissions that haven't been built - this tells me there isn't a market not that landowners are sitting on land). I suspect if you asked any of the landowners for undeveloped sites in Bradford whether they want to sell, they'll say yes. But they won't be looking to make a loss.

Finally, the idea that rescinding planning permissions is an option needs challenge. If you grant permission for housing, the site will remain a housing site regardless. All you do is require another permission before building - there will be no impact on value, just an additional cost for a future developer.
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Telling thoughts about the failure of regeneration...

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“Almost all our local economic policies target business investment, and masquerade as job creation efforts. We abate taxes, apply TIF’s and woo businesses all over the state, but then the employees who receive middle class wages (say $18 an hour or more) choose the nicest place to live within a 40-mile radius. So, we bring a nice factory to Muncie, and the employees all commute from Noblesville.”

Change the places - Muncie to Middlesbrough, Noblesville toStokesley - and you get the gist. We throw incentives at an 'enterprise zone' in South East Leeds - where do the people who take the resulting high skill jobs live? It won't be Seacroft or Beeston but more likely Tadcaster, Mirfield or Denby Dale.

The model doesn't regenerate (although big business and big government rather like it) - here's some more:

In short, the blue (Democrat) and the red (Republican) model produced some success, albeit in different modes (think San Francisco vs. Houston, Chicago vs. Indianapolis), for the “haves” side of the equation but haven’t yet proven equal to the “have nots.” The Economist makes it clear the totaly different policy configurations of the UK haven’t made a dent in it either. Post-industrial blight in much of Europe tells a similar tale. 

The beneficiaries of regeneration - three decades and more of investment - haven't been the poor and deprived. Despite this we carry on with the same approaches and the same strategies.

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MIT's 'Places in the Making': I really think this is important...

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...or at least as important as any piece of academic pampleteering:

Public places play a key role in building community and placemaking can empower local communities to create a sense of "belonging" through place. A new report by a DUSP research team, led by Susan Silberberg, examines the interactions between placemaking, community participation, and the expanding ways communities are collaborating to make great public places.

It's not all perfect - there's still too much that suggests grand magicians will wave wands to create great places - but the general thrust is right. As Project for Public Spaces said (OK, gushed):

Places in the Making highlights the importance of people in defining place, a critical aspect that is all too often forgotten by those in architecture, planning, and other related disciplines. “The intense focus on place has caused us to miss the opportunity to discuss community, process, and the act of making,” the paper asserts. “The importance of the Placemaking process itself is a key factor that has often been overlooked in working toward many of these noble goals. As illustrated by the ten cases highlighted here, the most successful Placemaking initiatives transcend the ‘place’ to forefront the ‘making.’”

This is the antithesis of the 'field of dreams' regeneration model beloved of those planners and urban designers - great places are more about the people in them than they are about the architecture, the swishness of the 'shopping experience' or the presence of the great institutions (public funded natch) of art.

I fear that too many people - those regeneration experts and so forth that litter local councils - won't read this or worse will read it and misunderstand. This is what happened in Bradford when we got an anti-development masterplan - instead of going with the idea of removing stuff and making spaces we tried instead to translate it into a 'shiny regeneration' strategy, a grand city plan.

As Bradford pays consultants a few more tens of thousands extracted from the council taxes of local folk to produce another grand 'city plan', perhaps we should hesitate and ask whether we're headed in the wrong direction again. And rather than have lots of great plans to spoil the city again, we should read this research from MIT, take down the Alsop plan that's gathering a thick layer of dust and try again to create of city for people - to remind ourselves that:

...many of the best, most authentic and enduring destinations in a city, the places that keep locals and tourists coming back again and again and that anchor quality, local jobs,  were born out of a series of incremental, locally-based improvements. One by one, these interventions built places that were more than the sum of their parts.

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Urbanism and the case for devolution

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Yesterday I went public with a view I've coddled for a while. It is the answer to a question I've posed a few times - why is US and European writing on urbanism so more varied and interesting than our home grown British writing?

British writing and research on urbanism - or regeneration as it is more commonly badged - is trapped in the idea that central government distributes money. Ever more intense screeds are penned about 'multiple deprivation', 'place-based intervention' and the iniquities of how government sets policy. The industry cuddles up to ministers and lobbies for 'business-led' structures to manage the delivery of projects or developments.

Over the years since Michael Heseltine stood on a derelict site in Liverpool and Margaret Thatcher visited similar in Teeside, out regeneration models have been stuck in the same policy groove skipping a replaying the same actions and merely rebadging them as new, as thinking outside the box. In truth, with the exception of Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, nothing changed - either with policy or, more importantly, on the ground.

And here is the problem - a problem that still persists in Britain today. Policy is determined by central government and the funding distributed to those who comply with that policy. There is a great deal of talk about delivery, about innovation and about transformation. But nothing much changes - these are just fine words, no parsnips are buttered.

The reason why urbanism is more exciting in the US, in Holland and in Germany is simply because the creators of policy in urban places don't have to wait on central government for either guidance or money. The situation where West Yorkshire has to crawl up the backside of the Department of Transport in order to get a little dribble of funding for a mass transit system simply wouldn't apply - the money would be raised locally and spent locally.

Across the USA new approaches and ideas are tried - and you only need to read blogs like The Urbanophile or Project for Public Spaces to see the creativity of many US cities and communities. These ideas - good and bad, effective and disastrous - are part of the debate at local level as groups campaign for and against programmes rather than, as in the UK, mostly lining up to shoot down developments.

If we want this dynamism, wish to rediscover the Victorian passion that created out great cities, we have to unshackle local government from central government's apron- and purse-strings. I'd argue that we also need directly elected mayors, fewer city councillors and more everyday activities devolved to community, town, village and parish councils - but the central need is to end the current situation.

Every time Bradford Council meets in full session we pass resolutions asking for the Chief Executive to write to one minister or another, to lobby local MPs or otherwise seek to influence central government decisions. I'm pretty sure that council meetings in Columbus, Montpelier or Freiburg aren't making these sorts of decisions. They don't need to, they have the powers to act, to get things done - there are no central government planning inspectors, no second-guessing on borrowing permissions, no bureaucracies that must agree before anything can be done.

If we want a better urbanism in Britain, we need to set local government free and allow it to innovate, create, succeed and fail. With local voters not inspectors or Whitehall bureaucrats as the arbiters of that success of failure.

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Regenerating the North - a start...

There was a small storm when The Economist spoke of the problems facing the more peripheral Northern towns and cities:

The fate of these once-confident places is sad. That so many well-intentioned people are trying so hard to save them suggests how much affection they still claim. The coalition is trying to help in its own way, by setting up “enterprise zones” where taxes are low and broadband fast. But these kindly efforts are misguided. Governments should not try to rescue failing towns. Instead, they should support the people who live in them.

The articles pointed to places like Hull, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, once thriving places now struggling. The argument is that these places – and the word place is important in this discussion – have got beyond the fixable meaning that we need to manage their continued decline by supporting those who stay and encouraging those who leave.

In one respect this is an understandable, if depressing, conclusion – that places which have contributed so much to England’s glory should be allowed to die. But in other respects the conclusion is liberating.

The efforts aimed at regenerating the North have failed. I know we can point to grand shopping arcades, refurbished mills and many a shiny business park, things that have helped, have provided jobs and have created a sense of economic progress. But the truth is that these things are the fur coat that covers up the absence of underwear. The picture of Liverpool’s brilliant city centre, vibrant with culture, is wonderful. Yet the city still contains some of England’s poorest communities, places unbudged since the jobs went in the 1970s and 1980s.

And, before the wrath of scousers everywhere falls on me, the same picture is seen in Hull, in Teeside and, indeed, in Bradford. Faced with the pull of the South East and the attractions of Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle, these communities continue to struggle. Here’s one observer:

Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle have their stunning new developments and you can tell there are people there with plenty of money just by walking around. Go a few miles up the read, though, and you will find blighted and boarded up small towns. It doesn’t matter how cheap they are, employers are avoiding them. The worse they get, the less likely firms are to relocate. The lure of cheaper property and wages only goes so far. It may tempt organisations away from the South-East but only to the larger regional capitals. Small town Britain is a step too far.

I would go a step further in this understanding – this author suggests that firms may move away from London but only to places with those ‘stunning new developments’ (and I would argue within swift travel of central London – perhaps the only sound argument for HS2). The reality is that – unless, like the BBC, politics forces the move – these firms are not relocating to Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle let alone Bradford, Liverpool or Nottingham.

And the problem is about scale. Here’s a comment about Chicago, a far bigger and more successful city than Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle:

Some may say, “Aaron, weren’t you the one who said Chicago wasn’t a global city?” To which I’d respond, I’ve always said Chicago is a global city. I only think that the global city side of Chicago is not sufficient to carry the load for this gigantic region and state. It can’t even carry just the city, though to be fair if you broke off global city Chicago into a standalone municipality of 600-800,000 like San Francisco, Boston, and DC, it would be a very different story, at the municipal level at least.

In simple terms Aaron is saying that, despite Chicago’s success (the company headquarters, commodities exchanges and cultural excellence), it is not sufficient of an economic driver to drag the wider hinterland – that old rustbelt greater Chicago – along behind. Those communities get left behind.

Back in England, we can see the same in Manchester and Leeds – walk out from Manchester’s city centre and you quickly arrive in places that are the flip side of ‘shiny’ Manchester. Indeed, after Liverpool, Manchester has the highest number of deprived SOAs (‘super output areas’ for the curious). And Leeds with Seacroft, Harehills and East End Park isn’t so very different.

Even these more successful cities may not generate the critical mass to bring peripheral communities along with their thriving centres and odd little bohemian enclaves. If they do, this success will be at the expense of other places further removed and most significantly those sufficiently disconnected – Teeside, East Lancashire, Hull and The Humber.

Faced then with this challenge, what do we do? Right now we’re planning for a larger population, for new jobs in ‘creative’ and ‘knowledge’ industries and for more of the same (or what we believe to be the same). Except this isn’t the case. Quietly we are seeing a new focus – through ‘combined authorities’, local enterprise partnerships and city regions – on the three or four hub cities: Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and, perhaps, Liverpool.

This focus may not be enough (or does there come a point at which London is so expensive, so unattractive that people move away) to prevent continued relative decline but it does at least hold out some prospect of betterment. For us in Bradford – and for that matter, those in Oldham, Chester-le-Street and St Helens – we perhaps need to work out how to do three things:

1. Connect our communities to the City Centres – ideally by fast train or tram rather than by bus or trolley bus. This needs to be ambitious and requires some taboos – about providing free parking at railway stations, for example – to be broken. It’s not enough to simply tidy up the current networks, we need to connect places that aren’t connected as of now
2. Provide transforming space – just because you can get from Saltaire to Leeds inside 20 minutes doesn’t mean you have to do so every day. In these connected places (and especially the deprived communities we’re bringing into the network) let’s offer low rent studios and live-work spaces – on the proviso that those renting put something back in the form of art, music, culture or other improvement
3. Animate and decorate – create a sense of interest and excitement. Rather than some sort of dull positioning – Bradford’s current meme, I’m told, is ‘the producer city’ – we want to be a place where things are happening. But for this to work, we’ll have to let go of control and allow stuff (some of which might be a little odd) to take place.

These aren’t a solution – we can and should expect many of our brightest to go away, to leave for London or even for New York and Hong Kong. And – whatever the planners are saying right now – many of our communities will decline in size, the inner city will hollow out a little and the suburbs will get a little more crowded. But this process presents us with opportunities to do some things differently – to build an urban golf course in Allerton or a cycle track in Barkerend, to have some more new parks and open spaces and to fill them with the wild and wacky.

Rather than sticking our fingers in our ears when faced with (and it’s not the first time) the truth about the prospects for our cities, we should accept reality and work with change instead of pretending it isn’t happening. The alternative is another generation of local politicians (and the pseudo-politicians that clutter up LEP boards and so forth) clattering back and forth to London where they abase themselves before civil servants and junior ministers holding out the cap ready for the next slug of "regeneration".

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On the private sector and urban renewal...

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This quote from Mick Cornett, Mayor of Oklahoma City rather struck me:

But if you can create a city where people want to live and if you can create a strong economy, then you can develop a private sector that can afford a lot of the social spending that a large community needs. If you can be a partner in building a strong private sector, you’re going to be able to take care of a lot of the social needs that most people equate with tax-and-spend government.

How to make it work is another matter but this is a welcome break from the public sector dominated traditions of our failing urban regenerations.

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Regeneration, development and FoI requests...

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Southwark Council, in the spirit of openness and cooperation is refusing to comply with a Freedom of Information request about the deal done with Lend Lease to 'rescue' the Elephant & Castle regeneration scheme:

Fiona Colley, Southwark’s cabinet member for regeneration, went on record to say: “There is nothing I would like more than to publish this document and show the world what a fantastic deal we negotiated for the people of Elephant and Castle. However, we entered into those negotiations with Lend Lease on a confidential basis, and I am not willing to break that agreement because a handful of people wrongly think the document contains something sinister. Moreover, the ICO’s decision has huge implications for councils wanting to enter into commercial partnerships with developers across the country.

“We could find ourselves sleepwalking into a situation where developers refuse to work with councils for fear their commercially sensitive information will be forced into the public domain. That wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests, and that is why we’re appealing the ICO’s decision.” 

This is a pretty big deal - I've no issues with the Council seeking to protect commercial arrangements and it will be very interesting to see how the Courts view Southwark's argument. It seems to me (and Jackie Sadek from UK Regeneration seems to agree) that the content of contracts between private companies and public bodies should be in the public domain. I can see the need for confidentiality during a negotiation especially where there is competition for the business. But once the deal is done the contract should be published.

The alternative is that people - in this case the opposition on Southwark Council - will see bogie men, corruption and scandal where there probably isn't any. And simply saying 'the Council refuses to publish they must be hiding something' makes the point eloquently. If that Council replies with 'no we're not hiding anything' then the response is 'publish'.

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Fiona Colley, Southwark’s cabinet member for regeneration, went on record to say: “There is nothing I would like more than to publish this document and show the world what a fantastic deal we negotiated for the people of Elephant and Castle. However, we entered into those negotiations with Lend Lease on a confidential basis, and I am not willing to break that agreement because a handful of people wrongly think the document contains something sinister. Moreover, the ICO’s decision has huge implications for councils wanting to enter into commercial partnerships with developers across the country.
“We could find ourselves sleepwalking into a situation where developers refuse to work with councils for fear their commercially sensitive information will be forced into the public domain. That wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests, and that is why we’re appealing the ICO’s decision.”
- See more at: http://www.estatesgazette.com/blogs/jackie-sadek/2013/09/southwarks-silence-raises-interesting-issues/#sthash.Y0ZwXeog.dpuf

If you can't be in the place you love, love the place you're in!

This weekend is Cullingworth's scarecrow festival. Not that this is important to you. Or maybe it is, perhaps you 'get' (as Mr Cameron would say) that place matters and how invented tradition is one of the soft things about a place that makes it magic.

And our attachment to a place matters more than you think. It's not simply some sort of pride or defencive reaction to folk who criticise, we're talking about real attachment here - about love:

We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.

So what is that "softer side of place"?

It appears that what people most want out of a neighborhood is a place that is attractive, engaging, friendly, and welcoming. In every place, every year of the study, these factors were found to be the three most important to tying people to place. Why does this matter? As mentioned above, communities where people love where they live do better economically. The best-loved places were doing better in a measureable way.

This isn't about grand civic marketing campaigns replete with logos, embassies in New York and well-resourced teams of regenerators extolling the virtues of a place. Nor is it that grumpy "you can't criticise, you don't live here, that's our job" attitude we see from defensive residents of struggling cities. We're talking about a desire to love the place we're in - and when we love something it's an active emotion, it drives us to do things. To do the placemaking equivalent of buying our place chocolate and flowers or taking it to the movies.

That's what scarecrow festivals, duck races and reinvented traditions are about. It's us - the people who love a place - showing our love by doing things to make that place smile:

Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply.

So, if you want regeneration - even if you're parachuted in from afar to deliver it - you have to fall in love, to remember those words that Steven Stills wrote:

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with

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Quote of the day: on civic character

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Many of these places have been beaten down so hard for so long that a sort of defeatist attitude has set in. This can include bitterness about what was lost, a self-loathing mindset, and cynicism and negativity about any proposed efforts to improve things.

Familiar? I've called this mindset "The Grumpy Old Man Party" and other talk of "glass half empty". And it's all too sadly true.

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Subsidising millionaires - another reason regeneration fails to make change

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...and yes it's Detroit again. Learning the lessons that ruined the city, ignoring them and returning to the same old model and the same old mess:

Just a week after the city declared bankruptcy, a state board approved a $450 million bond issue for a new Red Wings hockey arena near downtown. To help finance it, Detroit would pay $284.5 million in subsidies and an additional $12.8 million annually on bond interest. In return, Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch, who also owns the Detroit Tigers, MotorCity Casino Hotel, and Little Caeser’s pizza, would chip in $365.5 million for the arena and several mixed-use projects. The new complex would represent an upgrade from the dated Joe Louis Arena, where the Red Wings play now, and—boosters say—would potentially revitalize the Midtown area, which is already gentrifying somewhat. The Detroit Development Authority would fund and operate the arena with downtown property taxes. In other words, revenue traditionally used for schools and basic services would instead subsidize a billionaire.

As ever with these projects - and regeneration is riddled with them - the initial impact seems good. A new grand shiny stadium, theatre or concert arena springs up amidst the dereliction promising a new world of prosperity, wealth and success.

But then nothing happens, nothing changes. Except we've subsidised the grand project of a millionaire, provided contract opportunities for than millionaire's friends and raised false hopes in the hearts of suffering local people. And - even if the millionaires haven't stuffed their pockets - we've thrown a load of tax money at another grand and failing project.

In Detroit's case we know the story (as Scott Beyer describes):

The publicly operated Cobo Convention Center opened in 1960 and began losing money immediately, running annual deficits reaching tens of millions. In 1977, the Ford Motor Company financed the gargantuan, $350 million Renaissance Center; two decades later, Ford sold the complex for just $76 million to rival GM. The city connected the two facilities in 1987 with a much-ridiculed, $200 million People Mover. The monorail never came close to covering its upfront costs and still operates with annual losses around $10 million, while doing basically nothing to address transportation needs. Detroit continued to wield its eminent domain power, with attempted or successful takings to accommodate the city’s two remaining auto plants, a private bridge, a business park, a major housing complex, a waterfront casino district, and two relatively new stadiums—Comerica Park and Ford Field.

And did it work? Does shiny regeneration ever work? I don't think so. But we persist (and not just in Detroit) with vast schemes and programmes, subsidising large organisations and wealthy men to do things they wouldn't otherwise do.

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Now the government is seriously underway with the £1bn HCA Build to Rent Fund: we in UKR are proud to be at the final stages of Round One of this programme, together with 44 other organisations, all pioneers in their own way: some house builders, some RPs (registered providers or, in English, Housing Associations) and some new entrants to the market (UKR included). - See more at: http://www.estatesgazette.com/blogs/jackie-sadek/2013/08/the-prs-debate-finally-gathers-momentum/#sthash.qz8tpW5j.dpuf

Now the government is seriously underway with the £1bn HCA Build to Rent Fund: we in UKR are proud to be at the final stages of Round One of this programme, together with 44 other organisations, all pioneers in their own way: some house builders, some RPs (registered providers or, in English, Housing Associations) and some new entrants to the market (UKR included). - See more at: http://www.estatesgazette.com/blogs/jackie-sadek/2013/08/the-prs-debate-finally-gathers-momentum/#sthash.qz8tpW5j.dpuf

Now the government is seriously underway with the £1bn HCA Build to Rent Fund: we in UKR are proud to be at the final stages of Round One of this programme, together with 44 other organisations, all pioneers in their own way: some house builders, some RPs (registered providers or, in English, Housing Associations) and some new entrants to the market (UKR included). - See more at: http://www.estatesgazette.com/blogs/jackie-sadek/2013/08/the-prs-debate-finally-gathers-momentum/#sthash.qz8tpW5j.dpuf

Now the government is seriously underway with the £1bn HCA Build to Rent Fund: we in UKR are proud to be at the final stages of Round One of this programme, together with 44 other organisations, all pioneers in their own way: some house builders, some RPs (registered providers or, in English, Housing Associations) and some new entrants to the market (UKR included). - See more at: http://www.estatesgazette.com/blogs/jackie-sadek/2013/08/the-prs-debate-finally-gathers-momentum/#sthash.qz8tpW5j.dpuf

Detroit and Liverpool: thoughts on urban renewal

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We've all seen parts of the crisis in Detroit - the bankruptcy of the City government, the abandoned houses you can buy for a few dollars (although nobody does) or the endless chatter about racial strife and political corruption. Not to mention crime, violence and urban decay.

And this is nothing new. People have been commenting on the problems of Detroit since the 1950s with each generation of observers seeing the crisis through the prism of that age's prejudices. And during this time Detroit continued to decline. Fingers are pointed at 'white flight' (let's call it 'jobs sprawl'):

One consequence of this dysfunction has been a severe case of “job sprawl” within the metropolitan area, with jobs fleeing the urban core even when employment in greater Detroit was still rising, and even as other cities were seeing something of a city-center revival. Fewer than a quarter of the jobs on offer in the Detroit metropolitan area lie within 10 miles of the traditional central business district.

The result of this is that Detroit's population has dropped from 1.8 million to just over 700,000 with, inevitably, the better educated, the more entrepreneurial and the more ambitious departing the city.

Everyone points to different urban pathologies as the cause, partly guided by ideological prejudice and partly by whatever is academic flavour of the month in urban studies. Yet we never point the finger at 'regeneration' as the heart of Detroit's problems preferring instead to speak of industrial decline or even Detroit as a sort of municipal buggy whip manufacturer.

So let's look at the 'regeneration' efforts:

For decades it has done the opposite, championing a growth policy that mirrored the city’s overly-centralized private sector. It has gambled—with tax breaks, subsidies, and extensive eminent domain—on stadiums, casinos, office towers, factories, and a downtown monorail, only to find that these didn’t produce nearly the anticipated benefits.

We see here the classic inward investment approach - focus on big 'transformative' projects and provide incentives to developers and favoured businesses. And these inward investment strategies were matched by brutal clearance and community redesign:

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s white mayors steamrolled roadways through functioning black neighborhoods like Black Bottom, and housed the displaced in dangerous, high-rise government projects. Funding for this and other “urban renewal” came from federal programs like President Johnson’s Model Cities, and using Detroit as a flagship, was meant to modernize aging urban communities. 

There's no doubt that racism played a part in Detroit's failure but far more important to that failure was the misplaced belief that the solution - always and every time - lay in securing external finance, public or private, to be directed by the City government or its agents. Every time there is a crisis, out comes the begging bowl and up goes the cries for "more resources" or for "more investment".

Here in England we have been shielded from part of Detroit's problem - rightly or wrongly, local government here doesn't have the unrestricted borrowing power of a US city. But the pattern of urban decline is little different. Take Liverpool, once a great city of empire, now a shadow of its past. This isn't to detract from the efforts - some more successful than others - to reinvent the city and to create a vibrant and dynamic cultural and social heart to Merseyside. But Liverpool still lives with that historic decline:

There are persistently high levels of deprivation in the city and Liverpool remains ranked as the most deprived local authority area in England on the ID 2010, with its position unchanged from the 2004 and 2007 Indices. 

All that 'regeneration' hasn't prevented Liverpool from remaining poor - just as was the case with Detroit. Millions in regeneration funding, economic development cash and a myriad of 'interventions' have left Liverpool just as it was in 1980 - the poorest city in England. And still the clearance continues:

...Liverpool City Council’s planning committee gave the go-ahead to a two-phase hybrid application from housing association Plus Dane Group for the clearance and redevelopment of 5.97 hectares of the Victorian-built terraced houses in the Welsh Streets area, which is part of the Princes Park regeneration zone.

Not only does this approach divide communities and undermine the sense of history in a place but it repeats past errors - and mirrors Detroit's errors - by seeing social investment as a parallel to economic development. People may have a slightly newer house (or some people at least) but they still don't have good prospects of personal economic advancement. Liverpool - despite the investment - remains poor.

And people leave. Since its peak in 1931, Liverpool's population has declined by nearly 50% as people have moved to places with better prospects - some not so far away but others far, far away from the Liver Birds. This is pretty similar to Detroit. Yet we still hear the plaintive cries of the urban leader:

Deputy Mayor, Councillor Paul Brant, said: “You cannot cut your way to growth. In Liverpool we are innovating and investing in schemes that will deliver jobs and economic benefit, whether it’s using our borrowing power to kickstart developments, or to generate new income streams as we have done by purchasing Everton FC’s training ground.

Look at Detroit and ask whether this approach - an approach that has attracted plenty of government cash to Liverpool over the years - will do anything to transform the city? Or, when the next Index of Multiple Deprivation is published, will Liverpool still be England's poorest city?

The sad truth is that the 'regeneration' policies we follow - and continue to follow nationally and locally - are part of the problem not part of the solution. Waiting for the Whitehall fairy to wave the magic funding wand is a fine strategy for council officers and the trooping backwards and forwards to London for meetings gives an illusion of activity but it doesn't help the city, whether that city is Detroit, Liverpool or my city of Bradford.

Here we're rabbiting on about being a 'producer city' which suggests a commitment to business creation and innovation. But, in reality, this is simply repackaging the same old approach - big grand projects that will 'transform' and much about how public investment will lead or draw out private investment. Bradford's not as poor as Liverpool but we have adopted the same strategy as that city - a strategy that echoes the failed approach of Detroit.

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