{"id":857,"date":"2019-06-21T02:43:06","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T02:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/?p=857"},"modified":"2019-06-21T22:51:17","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T22:51:17","slug":"birmingham-a-creative-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/?p=857","title":{"rendered":"Birmingham : a creative city?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This was written as part of a consideration of how developments might lead a city to think of itself as being a creative city. It started as thoughts linked to an online course run by the University of Toronto. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of population, Birmingham is the UK\u2019s Second City. It is located in the centre of England. Road and rail networks criss-cross the country here. Politically, it sees itself as second in importance to London but keeps a wary eye on Manchester which rivals it for this claim (on the grounds of seeming more inventive and more productive). Its population is steady at around 1million people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This takes it out of any superstar city league, although it has\naspirations to be a modern, world-connected city with a bright future. It is,\nrelatively, a city of young people, a city with a tradition of creativity and\nindustriousness, and a city of opportunity (even if more for some rather than\nfor others).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst not a recognised ‘World City’, Birmingham has a set of formal relationships with cities from around the world: \u2018partner city agreements\u2019 with Lyon, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Milan; and \u2018sister cities agreements\u2019 with Chicago, Guangzhou and Johannesburg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a city that has undergone, and is continuing to undergo, economic transitions. It was settled in the 7th<\/sup> century and grew slowly as a set of farms and homesteads at a river crossing. It was granted a market in 1156 and by the 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> century was a place bustling with small workshops creating swords, guns, chains, machinery, jewellery, household metalware and so on. It had the conditions necessary to move ahead through the rapid industrialisation of the middle-late 1800s. It was regarded (or badged itself) as the Workshop of the World, the City of a Thousand Trades \u2013 certainly \u2018Made in Birmingham\u2019 was stamped on a large proportion of metal goods that supported development at home and in other countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\ngave the city much of the shape that it has today \u2013 in terms of road structures\nand areas of terraced low-rise brick houses (even if the worst of these were\ndemolished in the slum-clearances of the 1950-80 period). By the 1960s it had\nbecome seen as a place reliant  on motorcar\nuse and motorcar manufacture. When this industry restructured and some parts moved\nabroad, Birmingham was heavily affected, although it never became one of those\nsemi-abandoned, semi-boarded up cities as it tried to reinvent itself as a\ntourist destination turning the unused industrial canals in the city centre\ninto wharves for bars, restaurants and meeting places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nhas, more recently, shifted from a largely manufacturing base to an economy\nsubstantially reliant on service\/ retail\/ hospitality sectors and sees a future\nfor itself as a place of finance, knowledge and enterprise. It wants to be a\ncity that works for all, with an ambiguity about whether this is possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The city has made good use of national and European regeneration programmes and has tried its own versions of local decision-making and locality budgeting. Despite some success at regenerating itself, despite having intricate road\/rail links, and despite designating areas for economic renewal, the city is still reputed to have a low productivity base \u2013 partly because it may have a relatively low skills base. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the major city in the West Midlands Region. Recently there have been attempts to define UK activity in terms of City Regions, recognising that some activities (economic, environmental, transport, crime, public health, employability etc) flow across municipal boundaries and that decisions affecting these are best made at a regional level rather than in disconnected ways by the several local authorities that make up the region. There is now a mayor for the region, a police and crime commissioner for the region, and a regional combined planning authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The City Region concept still acknowledges the importance of cities – as centres of population, of activity and of influence. This is not without its tensions. In some ways, the economy of Birmingham may be able to exist without the economies of the rest of the region, whilst the reverse may not be true. Birmingham has traditionally been seen by others as the dominating (and to some, domineering) force in regional decision-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Birmingham,\nadditionally, has its own city plans. There have, over recent years, been a\nCity Growth Strategy, a long-term Community Strategy, a Community Cohesion\nStrategy, a Big City Plan, and so on. These have been outputs from Birmingham\nCity Council, the local government body made up of elected representatives of\nthe numerous local wards across the city. Whilst there have been consultation\nprocesses, and whilst such strategies are agreed by the local representatives,\nthese are seen as essentially top-down broad aspirational route-maps to the\nfuture of the city. Whether they are actual drivers of change may rely on the\nextent to which they are mere frameworks-of-intent with no practical\nimplementation energies, or the extent to which actual developments of cities\nin the UK is reliant on a set of increasingly centralised national government\nprocesses, or the extent to which local public-body responsibilities are\nincreasingly being replaced by private-sector activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Birmingham\nhas always been an attractor of people. Rural-dwellers headed into town as\nemployment opportunities grew; it brought in people from other parts of the UK;\nit benefitted from the planned immigration of workers to fill job vacancies.\nThis has maintained a level of economic activity, has created a noticeable\ndiversity across the population, and has brought in new ideas. At the same\ntime, there is a sense in which the settling, clustering, connecting, diversity\netc are all there but are no longer driving an economic productivity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have always been relative inequalities across groups of residents and neighbourhoods in the city. Despite a range of intentions and interventions, these still exist. Some groups are doing well; others are not. The city has a small number of localities where the average wealth is obviously high and a much larger number of localities where there are high levels of relative poverty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a spikiness to the city and also a spikiness within many of the local neighbourhoods. Some neighbourhoods appear to structurally be able to flourish whilst others, despite strong local cultures, do not. There are many residents who feel that things in the city are not working for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, though, in the past few decades, progress has been made in many ways. There has been a substantial reshaping of the central area of the city. This has encouraged tourism and retail activity (Birmingham as a destination city) and has also brought back city-centre residents (often in low-rise apartment conversions in former industrial premises or on unused industrial sites). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is recognition that, whilst this has been good for Birmingham, there is an ongoing need to improve the facilities and amenities in the middle and outer neighbourhoods of the city. Many of these were once \u2018villages within the city\u2019 with thriving local economies. The neighbourhood High Streets in these places now have a danger of being places of charity shops, fast food outlets, hairdressers and nail bars, mixed in with some cut-price fashion shops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is Birmingham experiencing a drawn-out new urban crisis – in the sense that those things that make it attractive can begin to make it unaffordable in terms of housing, challenging in terms of social cultures, or difficult-to-manage in terms of transport, waste and air quality? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\nhave always been crises. The original \u2018Civic Fathers\u2019 had to solve the\npractical issues of a rapidly-growing, economically-bustling city: the sewerage;\nthe gas and electricity supplies; the water systems; the early need for\nroadways; the introduction of schools and health systems. The post-war planners\nhad to manage slum-clearances and the need for decent housing; routes for\npublic transport and traffic flows; the shifting employments needed, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From some perspectives, the image of Birmingham rests on a few high-architecture buildings, the hosting of occasional world-class events, and a ready access to retail\/entertainment venues – but there are concerns that this may have been bought at the expense of a focus on localities, neighbourliness, affordable homes, extended support infrastructures, and street-level environmental attractiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are layers of the established population who have been affected in different ways by changes over the past decades. It is sometimes difficult to equate their situations with the city’s aspirations around creativity, enterprise, and social and economic dynamism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the majority, there is a settled social situation (albeit one not free of frictions and inequalities) but little sense of economic stability let alone economic growth. There are a number of issues around the casual, precarious nature of jobs; the stagnation or reduction in wages; the austerity-squeeze on welfare and public services; and a hollowing out of the population profile with increasing numbers of older people and an increasingly young population being sustained by the activity of an economically-active middle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Older (often white, working-class, male) workers were amongst the relatively well-off residents in the 1970s who have increasingly found themselves out of that employment without many transferable skills and at an age where re-employment is difficult in a city with a lot of young people, with better education, broader skill-sets, and cheaper to employ<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UK in general (and Birmingham as part of that) welcomed people from abroad to fill job vacancies. Choosing to relocate here was often accompanied by high levels of motivation and high levels of aspiration for their children. Many of these children are well integrated into city life. There are other groups, however, who may have been brought over as wider family members, who may have less in the way of fluent English language, who stay in their communities, or who are religiously and socially traditionally conservative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There may be a sense that different Birminghams are\nemerging. This is nothing new. Throughout the city\u2019s various developments,\ndifferent groups have experienced the city in quite disparate ways. The issue\nmay be the extent to which Birmingham sees itself (and wishes to be seen) as\nOne City, or as an aggregate of differences, or as variety and diversity within\nsome unifying set of mutual understandings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future may appear uncertain in a number of different\nways for different groups of residents, but is there an overall sense of hopefulness for the\nfuture?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\ncity has a set of frameworks that, if implemented at a scale and pace required\n(and with the subtlety and care required) can produced real change and\nreassurance in people\u2019s lives. At the same time, and not unique to Birmingham,\nthere have been difficulties moving from agreed plans on paper to sustained\nimprovements out on the streets. There is some criticism that the city is\nshackled by past decisions: that it is a city using 20th<\/sup> century\nmethods, within 19th<\/sup> century structures, to try to make decisions\nabout 21st<\/sup> century puzzles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future is predicated on flexibility, innovation and\ncreativity. Certainly, Birmingham has undergone a successful transformation\nfrom an established industrial city to a city based on service industries\nlinked to hospitality and tourism and is making steps towards being a city with\na larger creative sector. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Birmingham\u2019s claims to be a Creative City can most obviously be linked to a number of disparate localities: <\/p>\n\n\n\n