The Enterprising City Centre

Manchester's Development Challenge

Gwyndaf Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134527410
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Enterprising City Centre reveals exemplars of local partnership working, the development and delivery of realistic implementation plans, and the range of instruments available to create both an improved quality to the urban environment and enhanced commercial and cultural competitiveness of our major city centres. That this was largely delivered in Manchester within a five year period of intensive development and renewal activity amply demonstrates the value of such experience for wider dissemination.

Part 1

The governance and
policy context

The contextual framework for the book is concerned with emerging challenges for urban governance arising from increasing competition for resources and policy innovation, both between and within cities. Indeed the search for novel responses to the challenges set by increased competition has focused on the contribution of collaborative action and partnership by key local stakeholders, and the emergence of new approaches to the political economy of the city. Within such an urban framework, a specific interest in city centres – traditionally the focus of agglomerative economies, but currently faced with major challenges arising from the fragmentation of commercial and social production and consumption – has proved of inestimable interest to both academics and policy makers, and has been at the heart of recent debates on ‘urban renaissance’.

The initial chapter briefly focuses on exploring the nature of recent urban change processes and emerging urban system relationships, both between cities and within urban areas. It proceeds to consider the issues raised by such changes for established principles of urban government, and the emergence of a new political economy of the city that focuses on current concerns with the nature of urban governance. Finally, it traces recent developments that debate the nature and form of urban competitiveness, and the scope for local collaborative action to deliver enterprising responses to the problems and concerns of both policy makers and citizens.

The second chapter takes on board a number of these themes, examining the role of city centres within this broader concern for the future of our urban areas. Focusing initially on concerns relating to the development legacy of urban cores, and its impact on both form and function, it considers the nature of recent commercial and societal developments that have affected the viability of town and city centres in the face of ‘edge city’ development pressures, and finally reviews public policy responses to such concerns since the 1980s. This is considered in terms both of the continuing role of the city centre and of changes to the wider urban realm. Finally, it considers the contribution of government and other key interests in responding to the challenge, and in attempting to positively influence the viability and vitality of town and city centres. It attempts to reflect on the nature of pro-active policies and programmes for the core, and the emergence of town-centre management as a stimulus and focus for enhancing city-centre competitiveness.

Chapter 1

Urban governance and
the entrepreneurial city

A set of economic, technological and social forces are currently operating to profoundly influence the role and function of our urban system, interaction and competition between individual cities, and the internal structure of our major urban areas. The challenges of globalisation and neo-liberalism have significantly affected our approach to urban management, this being accompanied by the ‘hollowing out’ of the state apparatus and a shift from government to governance, a reformatting of political capacities at both sub- and supra-national scales, and an increasing preoccupation in strategic terms with our international competitiveness.

This complexity and dynamism associated with the urban arena thus provides an appropriate base for investigation, and this chapter briefly aims to explain recent urban change processes, and to introduce a number of contemporary concepts relating to the political economy of the city. It then proceeds to consider a diversity of views currently being advanced concerning the restructuring of the local policy arena, before reviewing the contribution of current debates on collaborative action, partnership, and the entrepreneurial city.

Explaining urban change processes

Globalisation and the informational economy

A range of economic and political forces are currently operating to create a global market in goods and services. The explosive nature of technological and informational diffusion and deregulated trade barriers has resulted in the expansion of new technologically sophisticated industrial spaces, increased global competition, and facilitated new more flexible relationships with producers. When combined with the growing internationalisation of investment flows and the accentuated competitive pressures on business, our major cities have increasingly sought competitive advantage.

Reinforcing economic globalisation has been the shift in all advanced economies from the production and handling of goods to the processing of information and knowledge. The networking of these technologies has resulted in secondary, much larger impacts on cities, fundamentally testing established assumptions about urban economies and lifestyles, as cities develop lattices of advanced telecommunications networks as nerve centres for the new technologies. This new locational logic is governed by access to information and knowledge, with major cities being the focus for specialised information, key nodes for national and international interaction, and the locus for improved telecommunications. As a consequence, our understanding of the contemporary city requires that we should grasp the complex interactions between urban places as centres for economic, social and cultural life and as electronic spaces (Graham & Marvin 1996).

The impact of new technologies on industrial production and communication systems has increased the spatial scale of markets, enabling the development of new specialised services and goods. Connectivity and integration of network nodes are critical to this process, generating additional synergy for growth and development. Freer entrepreneurial attitudes, access to venture capital and to technological expertise, and public policy promotion of new enterprise formation have all combined to transform geographical space in the search for entrepreneurially innovative environments (Castells & Hall 1993). The impact on cities of modern transport technologies has been spectacular in recent decades, further reinforcing urban decentralisation processes and the growth of new activity centres in suburban nodes. Further improvements in communications are likely to have important impacts on the competitiveness of urban areas, with cities as consumers of high-quality communications technologies enjoying investment in the most advanced applications as central features of their economic competitiveness.

Cultural diversity and social inequality

Cities are not only central to wealth generation but also act as the focus of cultural differences and social diversity. Indeed, whilst their fortunes may depend heavily on their economic and institutional competitiveness, their success will also depend on the existence of social cohesion.

Achievement of social cohesion is no longer seen as merely a costly redistributive activity, but one which contributes to competitiveness through the mobilisation of skills, creativity and active citizenship.

(Oatley 1998: 3)

The increasing emphasis of urban governance on explicit economic development agendas rather than on social redistribution, reinforced by selective migration, has meant that the cores of our major agglomerations have come to exhibit the hallmarks of social polarisation and exclusivity (Jencks & Peterson 1991). Such uneven development is an inherent characteristic of globalisation, and the mosaic of inequality at all geographic scales, providing the basis of the urban management challenge.

Environmental quality and sustainable development

A central focus of the debate relating to the functioning and long-term prospects of cities has been the rapidly growing concern for environmental sustainability and urban quality of life, both perceived as critical components of society’s cultural adaptation to rapid technological change. In discussing the rearrangement of urban governance the key aim has thus been to improve the degree of congruence between levels of administration and scales of human activity, whilst reducing their negative environmental impacts. However, real definitional issues remain over the nature of sustainable urban environments, and the credentials of both the compact city and the dispersed multi-modal city region are actively promoted (Jenks et al. 1996; Breheny 1992).

Emerging urban system relationships

As a result of all these influences acting on cities as network nodes, both externally and internally oriented shifts in urban system relationships have taken place. This has resulted in changing international hierarchies, and variations in the economic performance and well-being of cities within national urban systems. Externally, a global city system has emerged with premier locations transacting a substantial part of their business internationally, with both other global cities and other nationally significant centres (Simmie 2001; Knox & Taylor 1995). They provide the key sites for specialised financial and business services, and the electronic facilities necessary for the implementation and management of global economic operations. A small number of very important provincial cities generally operate at the secondary level, effectively serving as regional capitals, but increasingly attempting to perform international functions. They may serve as administrative and higher-order service centres within their national urban system, may demonstrate considerable dynamism and rising per capita incomes, but generally lack access to global networks and higher-level producer services so characteristic of global cities. The search for agglomeration economies and regional competitiveness is becoming particularly important in such cities, however, as the global marketplace reduces the role of the nation state and increases the importance of the city region.

Internally, decentralisation and deconcentration trends within the modern conurbation have facilitated the process of suburbanisation, and a slow but reactive acceptance by those with responsibility for urban management of the need for policy frameworks to adapt to the poly-centric and multi-nodal nature of the city region (Barlow 1997). In such circumstances, city cores have remained highly attractive to a wide range of services, and they have been actively transforming their economic capacities, often facing more competition from the central areas of other major cities than from their own suburbs. Thus specialisation of higher-value information-intensive producer services, conversion of redundant commercial space and the construction of residential units, and the expansion of urban leisure and cultural facilities have been the backbone of city-centre revitalisation programmes in recent years. Critics have argued that such developments are increasingly externally oriented, with such core redevelopment becoming segregated from the city’s own residents. The increasing duality of economic opportunities and urban quality of life within urban areas thus provides the major urban management challenge for the present and for future policy making.

A question of governance

Since the 1980s, in the wake of such broader economic and political processes, the narrative of urban politics has been substantially modified (Jessop 1998, 1997a). The shift towards the ‘new politics’ of urban governance, focusing more on process than on institutions, ‘refers to the development of governing styles in which the boundaries between and within public and private sectors have become blurred’ (Pierre & Stoker 2000: 32). Its primary focus lies with how the challenge of collective action is met, and the issues and tensions associated with policy interactions that operate at a variety of scales, involving networks and webs of relationships, and with increasing significance being attached to local institutional capacity (Table 1.1).

Hierarchies, markets and networks

More generally, governance has been explained in terms of the minimal state, a new public management ethos and the central role of self-organising networks, and related to broader trends associated with post-Fordism (Rhodes 1997). In reality, concepts have evolved from the hierarchical notion of government associated with the post-war expansion of the Welfare State, a market-driven reappraisal arising from neo-liberalism tendencies of the 1980s, and a current preoccupation with the governance of policy networks.

The process of governing is no longer assumed to involve a single, homogenous all-powerful government, but rather a shifting combination of public departments and agencies, quasi-public bodies, private and voluntary sector organisations, operating at different but interdependent levels.

(Leach & Percy-Smith 2001: 22)

Table 1.1 Modes of governance: markets, hierarchies and networks

Indeed, market principles and the advocacy of ‘public choice’ theory have had a significant impact on management practices in today’s public sector, centrally influencing the move from a concern with ‘government’ to the new style ‘governance’. Yet whilst the language of ‘enabling’ has become almost universal, the variation in possible interpretation from the ‘residual enabling authority’ at one end to the ‘orchestrating and community enabling’ focus at the other end is real (Wilson & Game 2002). Moreover, whilst the enabling role can clearly be linked with the increasing competition and choice involved in the extension of free-market ideas to public service provision, it has also been associated with partnership, cooperation and collaboration, and the development of local policy networks (Leach & Percy-Smith 2001).

Networks are perceived as the defining characteristics of the new governance agenda, focusing on relations between organisations rather than on internal decision-making capacities. The key features of such networks are that cooperation and trust are formed and sustained, horizontal relationships between individuals are promoted, and the benefits and burdens of problem solving are shared (Rhodes 1997; Lowndes et al. 1997). Whilst the concept of policy network is not new, it is particularly compatible with a system of governance involving extensive institutional fragmentation. The rise of policy networks does not of necessity, however, signal a diminished role for government, since such networks don’t appear fully formed, and government (central or local) can dominate networks by determining their operational parameters and objectives, imposing their own value preferences through control of financial resources, legislative powers and political legitimacy (Taylor, 2000).

Restructuring the local state

Within this wider context, an interest in local government – particularly in terms of the relationship between the state and the city – has become the basis of recent theoretical perspectives on urban political economy. Early interest in a local government-based analysis of the process of government focused on central–local government relations as the fundamental channel for managing the dual polity of policy initiation (centre) and policy implementation (local), which saw a functional and political separation of the national from the local (Cochrane 1993). The development of empirical and theoretical accounts of local government in Britain was, however, strongly conditioned by the period of radical reform under successive Thatcher administrations (1979–90). This saw the highlighting of increasing central control over local finance, the commodification and privatisation of public services, loss of local state autonomy over remaining public services, and the expansion of non-elected ‘governance’ and business influence (Leach & Davis 1996).

Literature on urban politics and the local welfare state grew out of a dissatisfaction with the paradigm that had emerged during the 1960s, which focused on the exercise of power by local officials as urban gatekeepers (Dearlove 1973). Castells (1977) in particular argued that urban power reflects the interest of local and national capital, with only limited autonomy for the local state apparatus, these views being reinforced by the development of a body of work on local state theory (Cockburn 1977; O’Connor 1973). This led to subsequent analysis of changing central–local relations in terms of the social relations of the state (Saunders 1980). There were attempts to define a functional specificity for the local state in terms of social/class relations, the possibility of ‘local autonomy’, and the importance of the ‘locality’ in terms of wider processes of uneven development (Duncan & Goodwin 1988). A large body of work emerged on leftist local government, rooted in the belief that the local state was more accessible to popular and community-based pressures, and an obstacle to national restructuring strategies for capital (Boddy & Fudge 1984). By the late 1980s this fairly clear theoretical treatment of restructuring had itself been altered by the comprehensive defeat of municipal socialist ideas, and the replacement of critical research on the local state by a concern with ‘localities’ (Cooke 1990). The search was thus on for a broader theoretical framework that could explain the move to a concern with ‘governance’, a post-Thatcher move to a partnership-based urban competitiveness, and the perceived move from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 1989c).

The ‘Thatcherite’ analysis of the local state focused on ‘neo-liberalism and authoritarian populism’, a radical and strategic project that ‘effected a fundamental structural transformation of the institutions, practices, boundaries and perceived responsibility of the state’ (Hay 1996: 151). The key elements of Thatcherism were perceived to be the institutional and discursive dissolution of corporatist governance; abandonment of a Keynesian policy paradigm; wholesale rebalancing of governance in favour of the private sector; recommodification of state welfarism in line with a shift from universalism of provision to a ‘safety net’; radical centralisation of government power; and a concerted erosion of the autonomy of local authorities (Jessop 1998, 1997b). Such changes to political philosophy led to a review of local government from within, and the espousal of the ‘new public management’, a philosophy taken further by the Blair government’s commitment to the ‘third way’ as a way of renewing social democracy (Giddens 1998). This is clearly part of a wider process of transforming the state in the direction of more complex multi-level governance, of which local governance is an important element.

Political economy of the city

The breadth of recent changes to the functioning of cities and the patterning of government has seen the periodisation of political theories concerning urban development, involving initially the reworking of pluralist and elitist traditions, through to the promotion of notions relating to ‘growth machines’, a ‘regime’ based analysis and to the more recent articulation of ‘regulation’ based parameters. All such concepts have in turn attempted to provide the explanatory basis for the ‘new urban politics’ (Holden 1999).

The theory of the ‘u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Governance and Policy Context
• Part 2: The Local Framework
• Part 3: Delivering the Vision
• Part 4: New Opportunities and Challenges
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: Individual Interviews
• Appendix 2: Focus Group Meetings