Snuggle Cities

“We are the north”, “we are the south”, “we are the east” and “we are the west”, rang around the Etihad stadium in the regenerated Melbourne docklands two weekends ago as Melbourne Victory thrashed the visitors from the Gold Coast 4-0.  The spatial references were based on the compass points of the old Melbourne victory stadium.

Whilst not a patch on our own football chants, it stimulated myself and my host colleague who directs urban revitalization at VicUrban (the Victoria state development agency), into another conversation about how cities are a melting pot of different places.  We laughed, as we had already been having this conversation intermittently all the previous week. CLES work on place resilience had brought me here to Melbourne, and this soccer game was meant to be an opportunity to have some time away from the subject!

Like our own major core cities, Melbourne is characterised by renewal and managing change.  Victoria State Government, the city and VicUrban are having a ongoing conversation about the changing function and role of the various places which make up this rapidly growing pacific rim city of 3 million people, made up of 31 local Authorities.

Their plans are to create a multi centred city, which aims to retain the recent renaissance and effervescence of the Central Business Disrict(CBD), whilst developing the various secondary centres. 

Take one secondary centre - Dandenong.  This is potentially the cultural jewel of Greater Melbourne, with waves of immigration having organically made this an underdeveloped microcosm of Australia’s multiculturalism.  Like Bury in Manchester City Region or Bradford in Leeds city region, Dandenong is in bed with and part of Greater Melbourne and to some extent plays second fiddle to the CBD of the greater city region.  However, it also has its own Local authority, and its own vibrant identity and economic functionality.  Like our own ‘secondary places’, the trick is to create economic development activity in these places, which does not erode the success of the CBD.  They can’t collide. They are forever joined and are in bed together and they need to cosily ‘snuggle’ together.

However, there may be a problem in the UK.  In much thinking, economic success is often conflated to mean the CBD or the peripheral business parks.  In the ongoing Multi Area Agreement process as well as with the new local economic assessment duty (where applied at a pan city regional basis), there is too little thought given to the 'secondary' centres. 

City regions are as much about Bury, or Bradford as they are about the city centre.  These places should never become economic dwarves and/or dormitories which merely serve the CBD. We cannot let CBD’s suck the economic identity out of our local places, or let economic development of the CBD weaken local economic regeneration.  They need to snuggle with the dominant partner which contains the CBD.

If we are to forge new city renaissance, our enhanced city region thinking should create true polycentricity, allowing local place identity to shine through and support the forging of new economic futures in these localities.

In espousing this view, colleagues have said I am either on a nostalgic heritage trip, and/or running against the logic of economic success.  Maybe, but the geography of economic growth of recent times has not really been all that successful.  Spatial trickle down is exactly that and our city regions are more spatially unequal. 

I believe a place based economic function which snuggles places together, makes future sense. It is in these ‘local’ centres where place distinctiveness is most evident.  These places are the guarantors of a richer more meaningful aspect of a cities economic landscape.

 We also need to nurture local economic activity.  Local centres within cities are where the most vibrant manifestations of ‘localisation’ takes place, as regard land ownership, non chain and independent local economic activity.  Bury market, like the Afghan Bazaar or Little India in Dandenong, are not some relic or weird novelty, but a demonstrable and important part of the cities economic identity.

The success of Bury and Dandenong and the wider city regions to which they belong are intrinsically related to all the places within a city region.  The challenge is getting all places within a wider city region to economically snuggle.