On Monday 25 July 2011 I went to Manchester for a meeting. On the agenda was the new Arts Centre, still at the planning stage. The city council is working in conjunction with property developers on First Street – a strategically located area close to the city centre, with railway stations at walking distance and easy access by bus and car.

Manchester is a city with a glorious industrial past. The region has however suffered heavy pollution due to the factories that operated there in the past. A number of superb industrial buildings recall this period. Recently a great deal of money and resources have been invested to reduce soil pollution here. For many years Manchester has worked successfully to revitalize its inner city.

In terms of population Birmingham is England’s second city, but economically speaking Manchester occupies that place. It has a vibrant city centre with monumental historical buildings and high-quality shops. Parallel to the area to be developed and at a short distance, is Oxford Street, a long street with plenty of buses. It is the cultural corridor of Manchester, the street where all the theatres, cinemas, museums and art galleries are concentrated, not to mention two universities with roughly 70,000 students. The First Street development aims to relate to these major players.

The market partners intend to develop student housing and flats, a supermarket, offices, hotels, garages, restaurants and cafés.  The council has been given a plot of land for nothing by the developers to build the Arts Centre with cinema and theatre auditoriums and gallery spaces, which should help boost the area considerably. An urban masterplan has been drawn up for the area, one that differs from those in the Netherlands, in that the most important requirement of an English masterplan is that it needs to be flexible.  Economic opportunities, that is, the state of the market, will eventually decide how the plan is developed in practice. And in the unlikely event that this should lead to a series of planning issues, that is ‘all in the game.’

For an architect from the Netherlands, accustomed to working with the ‘polder’ model, or consensus approach, in ’public-private partnerships’, this takes a bit of getting used to. In the Netherlands the normal practice is for a masterplan to be developed under the supervision of the municipality, which in turn is translated into a detailed zoning plan. The typical Dutch ‘polder’ model – a catchphrase term of the nineties for the consensus model adopted in politics and public life – which has booked considerable success, in particular because the mutual compatibility of the buildings and the quality of the public domain for the city was given a great deal of attention.

In the recent economic downturn however, a problematic aspect has also surfaced – masterplans that are too detailed and zoning plans that are not sufficiently flexible and often no longer economically viable.  A number of local authorities in the Netherlands are confronted with this issue. The challenge in working in the United Kingdom is of a completely different order. There it is not the local authority but the market that decides. And owning your own land has for years been considered the greatest blessing one can have. Anyone on the street who takes a good look at the ‘coding’ in the road surfaces can see where the property lines are drawn.

Achieving a consensus model with one’s market partners to end up with a plan that makes everyone happy has proved a valuable tradition for Dutch cities in recent years. We are also trying to introduce something of this Dutch approach in Manchester. I don’t yet know whether the typical Anglo-Saxon tradition, where it is ultimately the market that decides, would mean the desired breakthrough in area development in the Netherlands in the present economic situation. The market is often only interested in the short term, while sustainable quality usually requires a more distant horizon.

Francine Houben
Het Financieele Dagblad
8 August 2011