Placemaking down under

While homogeneity too often rules in UK towns and cities, Australia has been taking a different path. Neil McInroy says it’s time we put more effort into discovering what makes places tick

In the UK, many of our town centres are imbued with a deep historical identity and form. Forged through decades and often centuries, they reflect different waves of pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial population and economic growth and development.

In the new world, in places like Australia, there is a very different historical legacy, with waves of population growth and economic development following a very different path.

However, as our town centres face a crisis, the UK can learn much from the approach Australia has developed over the last 20 years. One of the key lessons is the recognition that the interplay between place, economics and people is of vital importance.

In the UK, especially in the 60s, 70s and 80s, we often forgot about how town centres play an important social and public function. We sold off public spaces, got rid of shared and free public functions and replaced them with retail. We also, under the guise of redevelopment, allowed cars and urban motorways to scythe through our cities.

We more often than not placed a modernist template and vision onto town centres and neglected the connectivity between the social, commercial and public that cities and town centres need if they are to thrive.  We allowed out of town retail to flourish unrestricted and built shopping centres on top of historical Victorian or Georgian town plans. In doing this we hollowed out the identity of our cities and towns.

In times of plenty and retail buoyancy, our town centres masked the underlying lack of plurality, the weakness and lack of resilience of a town centre dependent on retail. It is no surprise that with the decline of retail the underlying over-reliance and homogeneity of our town centres is revealed. We are now left asking – what have we done?

This is not to say that the urban renaissance which took place in the UK in the 90s has not been good. We’ve done some great placemaking, but now we need to learn from that and do more. The age of retail – which many of our city centres are based around – will not return to the scale it once was.

At CLES we believe we need to create a new spirit for our town centres. The key to this is a move towards an age of networks and connections and better public, commercial and social functionality of cities. This is an age in which we create more adaptability and flexibility, where we build on assets, correct market failures and forge the potential for new links and collaboration between various elements.

This is where lessons from Australia are important.  In the late 80s and early 90s Australian town and district centres had reached crisis point. New migration and population growth during the 70s and 80s had led to the creation of new neighbourhood and district centres that were functional, bland and lacking in identity. Out of town shopping and the Australian dream of the ‘quarter acre’ block had created sprawling suburbs and hollowed out centres.

The crisis led to a change in mindset for some. Learning from Europe and Asia, where many new Australians had come from, they sought to recreate the intimacy and heterogeneity of village and town life. Some yearned for town centres which were energetic and where the social, cultural and public elements mixed and fused. This consciousness has meant that while we in the UK remained complacent about the erosion of the pre-existing historical cores and identity, Australia began to reimagine their town and district centres and set out new plans.

Some Australian cities are now seen as the most liveable in the world. However there is still a lot to do. There are still awful places – sprawling suburbs in Melbourne – but I detect that some developers and planners and all those disciplines interested in placemaking are increasingly aware of the importance of place in its broader sense, something which is starting to happen here in the UK.

Some work, especially in Melbourne, has seen the reimagining of the city centres through new public squares, tram systems, rejuvenated parks and markets. They have activated communities to revive their local economies. Most of all they have created new connectivities between the public, commercial and social elements of city life.

Furthermore, in Adelaide, design principles are bleeding into the social, commercial and public functionality of cities. The key thing here is not just what happens in town centres. Whatever we do with them is significantly influenced by the context and any systemic problems. The fundamental resilience and future function of that town centre and high street is predicated on how it relates to – and is networked within – the town or city.

For example, the future of a town centre relates overwhelmingly to the economic health or ill-health of the wider area. It can also be down to the extent to which it has good or bad transport links to a neighbouring and bigger city centre. Or perhaps based on future housing provision and tenure mix within any given locality. This will impinge significantly on what can or should be done to a town centre and high streets.

• Neil McInroy is chief executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES)
• To read our special Australian edition of New Start click here