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We also face an urban challenge. On the one hand we have a number of large sprawling conurbations, their suburbs merging seamlessly one into the other with little sense of identity, while on the other hand, many of our picturesque rural villages lack a population sufficient to support minimum services. In many cases, random housing developments have been created with little reference to any urban or village centre, lacking a sense of place or community.
It would seem that our developers and planners have lost touch with the fundamental nature and patterns of community development which our ancestors practised instinctively.
The old market towns developed as centres for trade and culture serving their surrounding villages, farms and countryside. Movement was on a radial pattern linking the surroundings with the centre. Though movement patterns have now become confused by random development, the basic nature and purpose of the town or city centre remains: it exists to serve as a focal point for the surrounding communities, providing opportunities for work, trade, and culture, linked like a web to its outlying, dependent area.
Villages, each with its village store, church, kindergarten and recreational green, are dependent upon their nearest town which offers a wider choice of goods, services, employment and activities; towns are then linked commercially and culturally to the region's core city, providing those highly specialized employment opportunities, goods, services and activities which can only be supported by the overall regional market. The core city becomes the hub, the centre of its surrounding region.
This regional core concept lay at the heart of our original 'counties'. But with urban growth and economic sophistication, the County no longer reflects or equates with economic regions.
The "core city region" region is not an assemblage of unrelated parts, but a working system of interlocking components which must be properly coordinated, planned and maintained if the whole is to function efficiently and fulfil the demands of its residents whilst preserving character and a pleasant livable environment.
The importance of establishing Regional Centres lies in focalizing commercial development at the centre and providing coordinated transport links. Without this sense of urban focus, industrial, commercial and retail developments spring up haphazardly.
Fundamental to the planning and apportionment of land-use is the provision, not only of space for "static" facilities such as housing and commercial developments, but also the needs of mobility which is essential to the proper functioning of the region as a whole. The nature of the region and the inter-dependence of its component villages, towns and central city, defines the pattern of movement as a hub with radiating spokes. The core city is at the centre with transport routes radiating out to the surrounding towns, each of which has routes radiating out to dependent villages.
This essential concept of centre and radiality which permeated medieval geography has now been at last been revisited, as planners begin a return to the concept of the region with a core city at its hub. The Core Cities Group is a self-selected and self-funded network of England's major regional cities: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. They form the economic and urban cores of wider surrounding territories, the city regions. The Core Cities work in partnership to enable each to enhance its economic performance and make real advances within a highly competitive international market.
The Core Cities share a common set of circumstances and ambitions.
Their shared agenda is to create accelerated economic growth and to distribute it throughout the region, increasing cohesion and benefits for local people.
This significant beginning needs to be widened in scope, identifying further city-regions throughout the country, then using the power of Regional Development Banks to finance the necessary infrastructure.
Infrastructure investment in cities is efficient and good value for money, but currently the core cities routinely struggle to fund the really major schemes. Take regional transportation for example. Nottingham has developed one tramline, and agreed a second, in the time it has taken its German twin - Karlsruhe - to build 14 lines. Funding streams, financing options, bidding and approval processes are too complex and time consuming.
The Core Cities Group report published in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Unlocking City Growth, looks at a model based on tax increment financing. The proposal is to borrow against future income to provide major infrastructure, for example from an uplift in business rates, retaining this temporarily to pay back borrowing.
Applying the model to four live case studies from the cities, the report demonstrates that by using this approach, increases of between 50% and 80% can be achieved in housing, jobs and economic output. It also allows cities to share in the growth dividend, to get a return on their own investments, something that may become increasingly important in a different economic future.
Here's a case in point. Acres of flourishing weeds adorn derelict docks and warehouses on Edinburgh's northern shoreline by the river Forth. In 2007 city planners were busily drawing up 30-year projects to build 30,000 houses, as well as hotels, offices, shops and parks on the waterfront. Then the credit crunch hit. Now plastic sheeting shrouds a bankrupt developer's half-built luxury flats. Forth Ports, the docks company, has written down the value of much of its extensive landholding to zero.
City bosses, however, think they can get things going again. Their immediate problem is finding the £484m they reckon is needed to build roads, schools and other public facilities. In the boom years, local authorities routinely demanded and got a big slice of that money upfront from property developers. These "developer contributions" have now disappeared, and recession means that Edinburgh, like most councils, cannot sell surplus land and property to fill the hole.
The city's solution is to copy an American approach called Tax-Increment financing (TIF). The idea is to draw a boundary round an area, borrow to pay for basic infrastructure and repay the loan from the increase in property-tax revenues inside the redeveloped zone as private firms start building.
Edinburgh hopes to test out TIFs on a square mile in the suburb of Leith, borrowing £50m to build roads, a dock for mooted cross-river ferries and a new pier for the former royal yacht Britannia, now a tourist attraction moored behind a modest shopping centre. Dave Anderson, the city's development director, hopes that 2,200 houses, plus shops and offices, will follow. Accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons all this will pull in an extra £280m in business rates (property taxes) over the next 30 years, more than enough to repay the loan.
Other similar plans are being considered. Newcastle wants one to build a "science city" geared towards commercialising university research. Leeds hopes a TIF will accelerate growth as it tries to create 20,000 jobs in its Aire Valley business park. Birmingham plans to raise £1 billion for seven road and rail schemes across the West Midlands.
Over in the USA, Chicago now has 158 such zones, covering 29% of its land and 13% of its property by value. Businesses were leaving Chicago's Loop before it became a TIF district in the 1980s; now the zone is thriving.
The TIF concept fits in exactly with Regional Development Banking, and provides a perfect example of the sort of impetus Regional Banking can provide local economies, and that's in addition to the Banks' financing of private industrial expansion and new projects.
Individual homes could benefit too from loans to install double-glazing or roof insulation, work which itself provides further employment. Such loans would qualify as investments, being repayable from savings derived by the borrower through lower energy bills.
Regional Development Banks, through Regional Housing Corporations, can also provide lowcost financing for new housing, for rental or lease “at-cost”. The Housing Corporations would acquire “grey” ex-industrial, or unused agricultural land at its current price, rather than the inflated “with planning permission” price for the construction of quality, environmentally attractive cluster housing, yet built using techniques of fast-track mass-production.
Availability of at-cost housing would make it possible once again for young families to afford that most basic of all needs: a decent home in pleasant surroundings.
A major element in the economic and financial disaster of 2008-9 was the phenomenal rise and catastrophic fall in house prices which also made a major contribution to the Great Banking Crisis. A pool of lowcost rental housing would provide an “anchor” to slow down the next housing bubble... and would make it possible once again for young families to afford that most basic of all needs: a decent home in pleasant surroundings.
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