Last month another city fell victim to the credit crunch as the £300m Summer Row shopping development in Wolverhampton was axed. But was it really such bad news? It might just be that Wolverhampton has been saved from one of the last of the dinosaurs.
According to its promoters, Summer Row was going to bring ‘world class shopping, leisure and urban living’ to Wolverhampton that would ‘capture the imagination while retaining the original flavour and characteristic style of Wolverhampton’s cultural heritage’. No longer. We have to find different ways to capture the imagination now.
We need to move from ghost town to host town – to create the social town centres that will be needed to create thriving places in future.
Seven major elements are needed. Here is a brief checklist.
1 A living town centre. Town centres need to be promoted as places to live for a wide mix of people. Proliferations of student housing don’t create viable communities: we need to encourage solutions such as living over the shop, short-life housing in properties that have become vacant, live-work premises for artists or small business owners, and community land trusts that create affordable town centre accommodation with a range of uses and activities.
2 A learning town centre. In Victorian times town and city centres had Mechanics’ Institutes and hosted evening classes for workers. A 21st century equivalent would be to combine formal learning accredited by universities and colleges with spaces for informal learning and exchanges of skills. In the short term, empty town centre spaces could be used as peer learning hubs, face-to-face versions of initiatives like the School of Everything; in the longer term, dedicated spaces could be created for informal and self-organised learning in partnership with educational institutions.
3 A greener town centre. Interest in local growing projects is rising as consumers become more aware of the waste associated with global food distribution systems, and climate change is likely to increase the need for local food resources and for the relearning of gardening skills. Town centres can be places where such skills are shared and showcased, with urban allotments, seed swaps, free markets for the sharing of surplus produce, and the transformation of unused public land into vegetable beds, as demonstrated by Incredible Edible Todmorden.
4 A creative town centre. The Meanwhile Space projects and similar schemes have shown just how much creativity there is in our communities, and how central locations can help spread the word about artists, musicians, theatre companies and more. Instead of seeing creative activity as a drain on a community’s resources – something to be treated as part of a company’s corporate social responsibility work, or a burden on the public purse – we should recognise that creative activities will draw people into urban spaces, generating interaction and business opportunities. Many such activities need temporary, flexible space rather than permanent buildings.
5 A networked town centre. The key to a successful centre is not the buildings or the retail offer; it is the people. People attract other people. Our central spaces need to bring people together and link up their activities. Festivals and local trade fairs can showcase community and business activities. The exponential growth of online networks and tools, from Facebook to hyperlocal websites, can be harnessed to support and promote face-to-face networks and the spaces needed to allow them to flourish. Reward systems such as WiganPlus can help to make such networks mutually supportive, linking activities such as the use of public transport with discounts in shops or opportunities to try new activities.
6 Social supply chains. Town centres that support networking and creativity make good business sense. There is an opportunity to recreate the kind of networks that enabled market towns to succeed in the past – the personal relationships between suppliers, links between producers and consumers that inform business choices and create bonds of mutual support as well as price-based transactions. Experiments such as the Lewes Pound are a step in this direction.
7 Planned fluidity. Town centres need to be planned for the future, and planning needs to become more flexible. Walkability is key, but it is just as important that people can easily find the things they want to do. They need to be planned for shifting modes of transport, flexible public space, and changes of use that are likely to become more frequent than the planning system currently allows. The government’s move towards ‘neighbourhood planning’ begins to recognise this at a community level; we need an approach for town centres that balances the certainty investors demand with the ability to respond effectively to rapidly changing circumstances.
Grasping these opportunities will require imagination and courage from owners, investors and planners who have tended to work to stock formulas. The successful town centres of the future will be created locally and will build on local assets – and that will demand very different ways of working.
• This is a shortened version of the commentary in our February 2011 newsletter. To read the full article, download the newsletter here.