Urban Forum – Manchester: Towards a Just City?

cities@manchester are organising a public panel debate on Tuesday 18 June at the Anthony Burgess Foundation. Full details here.

Manchester like many cities at present suffers from growing divides, poverty and inequality. The Council has cut jobs and reduced services, while the centre of the city and surrounding retail high streets are blighted with a growing number of empty store fronts. With house prices stagnant or falling and unemployment levels across Greater Manchester continuing to rise, it is unclear how housing or labour markets can improve the living conditions of the local area. Some analysts point to possibilities for job growth from the creative industries and financial services sectors, but these opportunities remain as yet unrealised. In this research forum we bring together a number of stakeholders to explore where manchester is now, the challenges it faces and what it needs to do to become more at ease with itself and more socially just.

Panel:

Neil McInroy, Chief Executive, Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES); Allison Foreman, Project Development Coordinator, Greater Manchester Pay and Employment Rights Advice Service; John Holden, Deputy Director of Research, New Economy Manchester; Clive Memmott, Chief Executive, Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce. Chair: Adam Leaver (Manchester Business School, University of Manchester)

Some of the panel give their viewpoints below:

Clive Memmott, Chief Executive, Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce

In the current economic and political climate it can be difficult to get behind the headlines and uncover what the real situation is.

Whilst the ongoing drive to cut spending dominates much of government thinking, it would be incorrect from a business perspective to say that all is lost and that there is no money available.

Since the financial tornado struck in Autumn 2008 the private sector has borne the brunt of the maelstrom caused by a combination of seemingly reckless activity by banks and successive governments’ inability to react adequately to promote growth and help create adequate employment opportunities.  The public sector too has suffered greatly from these tough economic times.

Things are better than they were – this isn’t denying the seriousness of the situation – but let’s be clear this means flat or low growth. Our most recent Quarterly Economic Survey, completed by over 800 businesses, showed that one of the worst hit sectors, construction, showed some signs of growth. This sounds promising, but the reality is that this is from a breath-takingly low starting point.

Some sectors have fared better but set against the broader economic conditions these results are often difficult to see. On the one hand private sector jobs figures remain positive but this is counterbalanced by weaknesses elsewhere, ensuring that the overall situation (for those out of work) is still challenging.

However some of the present issues predate present experience and will need more than an economic upturn to rectify. Ask any employer about skills or rather the lack of them and it’s apparent we have a startling wide range of shortages.  The figures make stark reading: with over 15% of Greater Manchester residents having no skills. The challenge of inadequately trained and work ready employees dates back to issues caused two or even three recessions ago. We feel the brunt now because of the acuteness of circumstances.

Likewise the state of our high streets. Previous recessions dealt severe if not fatal blows to our large manufacturing base. This time around major high street chains – some of which have been around for generations – have gone out of business. However as we sit shopping on Amazon whilst shaking our head at the news of another boarded up shop, should we ask ourselves about the role we have played in this?

One price of a reasonably robust level of employment is the significant rise of part-time working which has benefits as well as some obvious downsides.

Yes, there are increasing numbers of high value, high skills jobs, but there are also plenty of low skill, low value jobs.

We do have a part to play however in putting things right. The Chamber is tackling the skills issue through its Employer Ownership of Skills work, our members want to help reinvigorate our town centres; more businesses are showing an interest in trading abroad – those that do are better placed to develop and grow in the future.

Whilst it can be dangerous to pick winners, it is sometimes more dangerous to ignore them. We have and always have had some world class businesses in Manchester, and many more aspire to be so.  They don’t want special treatment just an environment that encourages enterprise which will allow them to grow and create the opportunities for the future so desperately needed to lead the economic recovery. They generally understand the social role they play and the impact they have on communities.

I see this everyday and I see what can and must be done. It isn’t beyond anyone’s ability to make this happen but everyone has a part to play either as catalysts for change or giving support to those that take action.

John Holden, Deputy Director of Research, New Economy Manchester

Books have been published, phds written, and raging debates held on what exactly it means to be a Just City. There isn’t scope in these few words to do any of that work justice, so I will take as my starting point a narrow definition that I think most people would broadly agree with: a Just City is one that provides equality of opportunity to all residents, especially the young. The interesting question then becomes: what can local policy makers do to ensure that all residents share the same opportunities in life? The weight of research tells us that the single most significant differentiating factor between those who succeed in life and those that do not is their level of skill. This underscores the need for a single-minded focus on improving education. This needs to start in the very earliest years, certainly before school and ideally from birth onwards, to ensure a radical improvement in life chances. At the same time, while improving educational outcomes across the spectrum is the archetypal easy thing to say but difficult thing to do, do it we must. The need to improve skill levels also holds for those who have left education and find themselves either unemployed or in low paid work.

If that sounds too easy, it’s probably because it is. In the current economic climate there are two factors which mean making Manchester a more Just City is all the more challenging. First, despite the labour market holding up better than expected at the start of the recession, there is still a shortage of job opportunities. Public agencies have to focus on generating economic growth and jobs for our residents to move into. It would be foolish to focus simply on the distribution of wealth without concerning ourselves with where that wealth is to come from. Second, public sector budgets are reducing and the pressures on services that support many of our most deprived residents increasing. It is not enough to identify what more policy makers can do, we need to identify what can be done differently to achieve better outcomes with less money. Through its economic growth objectives and public service reform programme Greater Manchester is ahead of most places in tackling these issues head on and making the city a more just place. If we achieve all we want to, we might yet write the definitive book.

Symposium report: The Making of Post-war Manchester, 1945-74: Plans and Projects

On the 8th May we organised a successful one-day symposium examining urban change in post-war Manchester, focussed upon infrastructural projects and the local implementation of central government initiatives in the three decades following 1945. Over one hundred people attended the event and engaged with a fascinating set of presentations from a range of geographers, historians, planners, architects and archaeologists composed of a mixture of well known professors, established scholars and new researchers. Fittingly for the symposium’s temporal focus it was held in the concrete bunker formerly known as the Kantorowich Building, designed by Professors Roy Kantorowich and Norman Hanson and completed in 1970. The speakers presented in the Cordingley Lecture Theatre, named after Reginald Cordingley (shown in full instructive mode below), Professor of Architecture at the University of Manchester between 1933 and 1962.

Source – Rylands Collection, Image Number – JRL1201094

Aim: What changed in Manchester and what drove the changes?

The presentations were intended to reference transformative events and large scale built projects of the era in relation to civic plans, infrastructural initiatives, local and national government policies, technological innovation and the wider fiscal climate. The intellectual objective of the symposium programme was to reveal a selection of the significant narratives of the shifting social and physical development of the city during the years 1945 – 1974. Whilst we recognise that the two dates are, in many respects, arbitrary bookends for processes of change and urban development that are often long running and cumulative, they do provide a set of sensible marker posts – running from the end of the Second World War in 1945 up to 1974 and the wholesale political reorganisation of the conurbation in the wake of the Local Government Act (1972).

City of Manchester Plan

As a departure point, 1945 is particularly interesting and equally problematic, as it is all too easy to assume it as a pivotal moment, when, in actuality, it simply marked the end of the wartime hiatus and the resumption of many schemes and strategies devised in the decades before 1939. That said, many of the speakers made explicit reference to Rowland Nicholas’ 1945 City of Manchester Plan as a signature ‘visionary’ document of the era and it is evidently a useful narrative touchstone. It is perhaps unsurprising that the other end of these three decades was less considered. There were markedly fewer references to the formation of Greater Manchester, possibly reflective of its ambiguous status at the time and its limited legacy in the makeup of contemporary Manchester. It is now an apposite time to consider this period, via a public symposium, for several reasons, not least of all because some of the personnel directly involved in the projects are still around and can be ‘brought out of the woodwork’ to tell their stories. Moreover, primary documentary material is newly emerging into archives and becoming publicly available, and more generally it taps into growing scholarly engagement and broader public fascination with these three decades not just in this city, but across Europe.

This symposium built directly on our experience of curating a successful public exhibition in spring 2012, entitled Infra_MANC, that considered the role of infrastructure in the making of post-war cities by looking at the planning of the Mancunian Way elevated urban motorway, the never realised Picc-Vic railway tunnel, the Guardian ‘secret’ underground telephone exchange and fanciful notions for a rooftop city centre heliport. The 200 page illustrated catalogue from this exhibition has just been released online as free PDF book. The study of both built and unbuilt projects has the capacity to reveal new histories, particularly political relationships and the interplay of local interests with national policy directives. Unrealised urban schemes, be they for buildings or infrastructure, frequently leave unrefined traces of their gestation, promotion and failure that do not gloss over the fractious and antagonistic relations of policy makers and power players. In this regard the active debates and discourse around the things that did not physically alter, but still had the capacity to change, the city were as relevant to the symposium as the obvious large scale extant developments, which were also considered.

The Symposium

Speakers Laurence Brown and Niall Cunningham. Photo source – Joe Blakey

The event itself was arranged into four sessions. It began with a contextual overview, eloquently chaired by Professor Brian Robson and in the opening talk by Professor Michael Hebbert, a former professor at Manchester, dissected the limits of the assigned time frame and provided passionate prose on the relative shift from the modern industrial metropolis to a something approaching a post-modern service city and its refraction through the lens of Granada Television’s Coronation Street. Subsequent sessions dealt with spatial changes related to housing renewal, the development of key social institutions including higher education and the NHS, and the impact of pollution control on the environmental quality for the city and its citizens. Midway through the day a stimulating presentation was given on population migration in the post-war period contrasting the situation in Moss Side to Cheetham Hill, presented by University of Manchester colleagues Laurence Brown from History and Niall Cunningham based in the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) (shown in the photograph above). The day concluded with presentations on the development of aviation facilities for Manchester, the broader culture of the Mancunian Way and a description of the ‘disconnected city’ caused by distinct shadow of unbuilt ring roads in the urban form of the city centre.

Each participant received a 36 page printed booklet containing the full programme and speaker details. The symposium also included a gallery of reproductions of nearly twenty of the key plans and maps from the era and the Manchester Modernist Society were on hand with their ‘pop-up shop’. The full programme and abstract of the presentations are given on the supporting blog, PostwarMcr. With the kind permission of the speakers we have been able to provide copies of the slides for the majority of the talks, which are also available via the blog.

The symposium was made possible with financial support via a Seedcorn grant from the Cities@Manchester initiative and with complementary fund through the Campion Fund of the Manchester Statistical Society. Behind the scenes logistical support was provided by colleagues in SED and several student volunteers from architecture and geography. The Manchester School of Architecture kindly underwrote printing costs.

The Future of Post-war Manchester

 

We plan to develop an edited book following the themes of the symposium and we are pleased that many of the speakers have committed to contributing chapters. In broad terms the volume will be a compendium of new and existing works and organised in the manner of a ‘regional study’ with chapters covering key themes (housing, transport, education, industrial change, etc.). As such, the book will have clear resonances with earlier edited volumes, such as the survey prepared under the editorship of Charles Carter for the meeting British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Manchester, August 29 to September 5, 1962. As currently proposed, our new title, The Making of Post-war Manchester will, hopefully, be much broader in style and with discursive space for commentaries, shorter essays and visual interpretations of how city changed during the thirty or so years after the end of the Second World War. It is likely that it will be published and distributed by bauprint, Richard’s cottage publishing arm, designed and priced to appeal to wide readership interested in the city’s histories. Once the initial print run is sold we will also make the book available free online as a popular and educative resource.

The Making of Post-war Manchester symposium brought together scholars from a range of disciplines and professionals in planning and architecture, along with students studying aspects of Manchester’s development, and some members of the general public, interested in the recent history of their city. It is hoped that the crossing of disciplines will provide new narrative associations previously unexplored that may act as a platform for further research and discourse.

Richard Brook, Senior Lecturer, Manchester School of Architecture 

Martin Dodge, Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Manchester 

 

Suspended spaces

A map of suspended spaces in Manchester city centre. Click to interact or add more spaces

by Sam Baars, PhD candidate, Institute for Social Change

At first sight the city is all noise, movement and purpose – a place where people, vehicles and buildings jostle for space and every last inch of ground is accounted for by its function. But in this bustling urban environment inactive, suspended spaces are abundant. Manchester city centre is host to dozens of them – stalled construction sites, abandoned buildings and empty plots – and many can be found within walking distance of Piccadilly. This is a brief guide to a selected few.

If you’re coming to Manchester by train you can enjoy some of the city’s most prominent suspended spaces before you’ve even set a foot down. Arriving into Piccadilly, the view to your left is dominated by the derelict Mayfield Station, empty since 1986 and with no firm proposals for redevelopment, while to your right is a hole in the ground the size of Piccadilly Gardens, occasionally filled with parked cars, which was to be the site of the 58-storey Piccadilly Tower before the recession brought construction work to a halt in 2008. On exiting the station to the north you’re greeted by the meandering S of Gateway House which, currently empty save for its ground floor shops, forms a slightly decrepit entrance to a smart city. To the west, nestled between some of the city’s most expensive hotels, are the broken windows of the Employment Exchange, whose tortuous journey from drawing board to construction was interrupted by the Second World War. The recession, which put paid to the Albany Crown Tower proposed for the site, has granted the Employment Exchange temporary respite from the bulldozers – and afforded this former labour office a glimpse of a recession-stricken Manchester in which unemployment currently stands at 12%. To the south of Piccadilly Station sits London Road Fire Station, a fume-blackened Edwardian gem which has been empty for fifteen years while various proposals for music venues, hotels and a museum have come and gone. Urban explorers 28 Days Later reveal that the building is now home to an impressive collection of stuffed animals.

Arriving by car, it couldn’t be easier to find somewhere central to park. Piccadilly Basin, once a hub of canalside warehouses and home to the headquarters of the Rochdale Canal Company, is, as irony would have it, now home to the parked car – a symbol of the victory of the twentieth century motorway over the Victorian waterway. There is a masterplan for Piccadilly Basin which includes offices, retail, apartments and leisure, along with the flagship Eider House, whose triangular site is currently home to Linda’s Pantry and a van rental depot. But until the masterplan is realised, Piccadilly Basin will continue to be a space for stationary vehicles. One of the few suspended spaces in the city centre not to be transformed into a car park is a meagre patch of grass and goose poo next to Tariff Street, which is a popular spot for barbecues in the summer and will become homes and shops when the masterplan eventually comes to fruition.

A short walk along the Rochdale Canal into Ancoats reveals the single largest suspended space in the city centre. New Islington is at last beginning to take shape, over a decade after funding was secured to transform it into a Millennium Community. While some set pieces such as the Chips building were completed by 2006, the rest of the project stalled as the effects of the financial crash a year later trickled through into the credit and housing markets. The site is still largely a wasteland of debris from the demolished Cardroom Estate, although new houses, a marina, a public park and a school are now in progress. Northwest along the ring road sits the skeleton of Nuovo, which has graced the entrance to Ancoats since 2007 and remains incomplete six years later after its developer filed for bankruptcy.

Turning back towards the city centre, immediately opposite these totems of space suspended by the (in)operation of private finance, is a suspended space of an altogether different nature. Between Dean Street and Port Street is a triangular plot hosting a single house (number 75) surrounded by temporary car parks. This suspended space isn’t a physical incarnation of the vagaries of the market, a la Nuovo and New Islington, but the ghost of a government plan. Sketches drawn up by the City Council in the 1960s and 70s show the proposed new Inner Circle Road blasting its way through this gap en-route to an interchange that would have wiped out much of Ancoats. As with many grand highway-building plans from that era, such as the extension of the M57 along the Hyde Road, even when the roads were never realised they often left behind scars of deterred development along their route.

Further towards the city centre, sandwiched between Port Street, Hilton Street and Newton Street is a small wedge of land occupied by Bradley House, Manchester’s Victorian take on New York’s Flatiron, and the Hatters hostel with its equally stateside metal fire escapes. There is a gap between these two buildings where a pub once stood – the Sir Sidney Smith, which became the Old Windmill and finally the Kensington before it was demolished in the 1970s. One of the smallest suspended spaces on the route, the Kensington gap is a temporary car park and home to a giant blue tit who arrived in 2012.

Outside the Piccadilly area Manchester city centre has many more suspended spaces: Origin, the Faraday Tower, the Tib Street Horn, Smithfield Market and the Ancoats Dispensary to name but a few. The intriguing thing about all of these suspended spaces is their variety. Firstly, they exist for different reasons. Most of these spaces are artifacts of market collapse – planned towers, Millennium Communities and entire swathes of canalside land all hibernating for the protracted economic winter. Some, however, are shadows of a centrally planned future that never left the page. Secondly, suspended spaces appear in different guises. Some are empty voids of bare earth or rubble – Picadilly Tower and much of New Islington, some contain buildings whose useful function has lapsed – Smithfield Market and the Employment Exchange, while others are home to structures that were grounded before they were even completed – Origin, Nuovo. Finally, suspended spaces accommodate a variety of interim uses, both official and unofficial. While car parks are de rigueur, such as at Piccadilly Basin, some are graced with public art – the Tib Street Horn, the Kensington blue tit, and, very occasionally, suspended space can become green space, such as at Tariff Street. Suspended spaces, by their nature as redundant, forgotten realms, have also been appropriated organically – The Kensington is a popular space for band shoots and Saturday night altercations, the London Road Fire Station and Faraday Towers are frequented by urban explorers, and a small patch of Piccadilly Basin is now home to a cluster of allotments.

Suspended spaces are an inevitable component of the cityscape: paradoxically, as pockets of inactivity they are a byproduct of a dynamic, changing urban environment. Stalled transitions between the past and the future, suspended spaces demonstrate what can happen when plans meet a hostile reality, but also how we can, at least on occasion, find innovative interim uses for the resulting land. Some suspended spaces are gems; others are eyesores, but they are a fascinating and important part of our city’s story. Take the tour, discover your own suspended spaces and add them to the map.

Flexible, Adaptable, Sustainable: Building for the Future

by Angela Connelly, School of Environment and Development

1 Angel Square: Central Atrium, (c) Matthew G. Steele

I recently had the opportunity to tour the newly opened (though only partially occupied) 1 Angel Square[1]: the latest addition to The Co-operative Group’s real estate portfolio. Led by the architects 3DReid, the tour began with an insight into the genesis of a building likened to a “sliced egg” or even a “walnut whip” (McLachlan 2013).

The Co-operative Group, we were reminded, has long been a visionary client. Whilst Manchester’s city centre still showed the scars of the 1940 Christmas blitz; rebuilding work being inhibited due to austerity, the Group commissioned what became the tallest structure in the UK: CIS tower. Opened in 1962, and Grade II listed in 1995, CIS Tower looms above a foundational podium: 25 storeys of glass, aluminium and black enamelled steel, a design that owed more in its conception to American skyscrapers than the concrete structures more commonly found throughout Europe (Forty 2012). Indeed, concrete and stone were not chosen because of their tendency to discolour owing to the polluting atmosphere (the Clean Air Act had only been passed in 1956).

CIS Tower fulfilled a wish that the building should add to the prestige of the Co-operative Group; improve Manchester’s appearance; and provide the very best in accommodation for their staff (Hartwell 2001: 241). The lush teak-clad interiors of the executive suites on the upper floors, designed by Mischa Black and the Design Research Unit, are now deemed inappropriate by the client because of the implied prestige and power they represent. More recently, when the mosaic tiles of the service tower needed replacing, the Co-operative Group retrofitted weather proof, photo-voltaic panels that generate electricity for the building in line with company commitments to tackle climate change. However, when it came to appraising the sustainable credentials of a portfolio of buildings that stretches across 150 years, it seemed rational to build afresh given the costs of refurbishing and retrofitting.

Whatever one thinks about the aesthetics of 1 Angel Square, its selling point is the outstanding BREEAM rating – the highest rating of any building in the UK – at 95 per cent (Wilding 2013). Some very old ideas in architecture such as passive ventilation and building orientation are integrated with the new. Building Information Modelling (BIM) aims to ensure that, up until the year 2050, the building will still function as originally intended given projected climate changes. 1 Angel Square’s double skin facade minimises heating and cooling loads by using brise-soleil. Further, the architects have fitted a closed loop energy system: the combined heat and power (CHP) units are fuelled by waste rapeseed oil produced on the Co-operative Groups UK farms. Not only adaptable to the future climate, the flexible (and democratic) office spaces are designed to be easily reconfigured or extended. This also responds to the perceived inflexibility of the CIS Tower’s working space given subsequent developments in technology and the changes wrought by mobile telecommunications.

Seduced by the superb views of Manchester available from the roof terraces on the 14^th floor of 1 Angel Square, I nevertheless had a nagging question. It is not about sustainability, however that might be interpreted, instead, it is about “designing” flexibility and adaptability: how much can we anticipate? Here, my mind turns towards the past rather than the future.

Exterior Oldham Street October 2010

The Albert Hall in Manchester

The research for my thesis concerned a particular type of religious building. Not the traditional sort of church that immediately springs to mind with a Gothic spire, intricate detailing, naves, pews, and glory-unto-God. Rather, the Methodist Central Halls (those that do remain) are very commercial looking buildings. The first of their type is located on Oldham Street in Manchester. An innovative development at that time, the Methodists took the step of including rent producing shops on the ground floor – a necessity in a city with high land values (Connelly 2012). The brief for such churches, as I discovered, was relatively simple: the buildings had to be flexible and adaptable, sufficiently anonymous perhaps, should the Methodists have to sell the building. Alternatively, if a success, the rent-producing shops could be easily converted to religious work. They never were.

I suspect that most people who have had cause to enter the Manchester Central Hall recently may have done so to buy some music, attend a residents meeting, the Girl Guide’s HQ or perhaps a Weight Watchers meeting.  One lesson that I learned from looking at the Methodist Central Halls is that what one generation bequeaths to another is not necessarily a gift readily received. New becomes old, people move away, social practices change, the building becomes perceived as inflexible and constraining. Sometimes, someone new will come along with enough money and vision to turn it into something that has relevance today – as the bar chain Trof are doing with another old Methodist hall on Peter Street.

What such musings should highlight is that the relationship between building design and people is complex and not one-dimensional. Buildings should be regarded as systems that need to work as a whole and nourish the human beings who use it. They change slowly; often imperceptibly. And they need to be studied in their entirety: not only in terms of space but also time. Their meaning will subtly alter and this can be traced through narratives of buildings at work. As the sociologist Thomas Gieryn (2002: 35) points out:  ”They [buildings] are forever objects of (re) interpretation, narration and representation – and meanings and stories are sometimes more pliable than the walls and floors they depict.”

When the ecologist Stewart Brand wrote How Buildings Learn (1994), he identified three forces that result in change: technology, money, and fashion. He inverts Louis Sullivan’s classic dictum: “Form ever follows function” to become “function reforms form” (Brand 1994: 3) and in doing so points out that how buildings learn over time is just as important as the question of how they are designed in the first place.   In a similar vein, Richard Sennett lauds the inventiveness and innovativeness that comes through the repair and restoration of old buildings (Sennett 2012).

And so, I come back to 1 Angel Square. The real test will also come through time; there will undoubtedly be a period of social learning whereby the occupants will have to adapt their behaviour. One hopes that it will indeed realise the Co-operative Group’s aims and that it can act as a catalyst to regenerate what has been a problematic area for the city planners. But I suspect that time, and occupancy, will also result in a slow realisation that the initial ideas are not as flexible as presumed: what new technologies are around the corner? Just how far, and what knowledge do we take into account, when planning for the future?

References

Brand, S. 1994. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (London and New York: Viking)

Connelly, A. 2012. “A pool of Bethesda: Manchester’s first Wesleyan Methodist Central Hall”, The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library  [special edition 'Architecture and Environment: Manchester in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries'], 89:1, 105-12

Forty, A. 2012. Concrete and Culture: A Material History. (London: Reaktion Books).

Gieryn, T. 2002. “What Buildings Do,” Theory and Society, 31:1, 35-75.

Hartwell, C. 2001. Manchester, Pevsner Architectural Series. (Yale: Yale University Press).

Sennett, R. 2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. (Yale: Yale University Press).

Wilding, M. 2013. “3DReid scoops highest ever BREEAM rating”. 17^th January, Building Design [online]. http://www.bdonline.co.uk/sustainability/3dreid-scoops-highest-ever-breeam-rating/5048575.article

McLachlan, J. 2013. “Co-op’s vast Manchester HQ by 3DReid” 18 February, OnOffice [online]. http://www.onofficemagazine.com/projects/item/1917-co-ops-vast-manchester-hq-by-3dreid

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[1] http://www.co-operative.coop/estates/Developments/1AngelSquare/

 

Angela Connelly is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She completed her thesis at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre in 2011, a collaboration with the Methodist Church Property Office and funded under the AHRC/ ESRC Religion and Society Programme.

She is interested in how people, buildings and institutions innovate and adapt over time. She is currently working on the EU-FP7 Project: Smart Resilient Technologies, Tools and Systems and is developing best practice guidance to flood resilience technologies for England and Wales.

The Original Modern

Grid image of arches – Brian Rosa

by Brian Rosa, PhD candidate in Geography

Manchester is a city of superlatives: it was the prototypical “shock city” of the Industrial Revolution, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s model for everything that was abhorrent in the industrial capitalist city, and one of the birthplaces of the labor and women’s suffrage movements.  In its heyday, Manchester was depicted in literature of Engels, Alexis de Toqueville and later the paintings of L.S. Lowry, as an uninterrupted, chaotic anti-landscape of chimneys and smoke, strewn across a featureless topography. Its unprecedented configuration invoked equal parts awe and dread, moral panic, and tempestuous visions of the future. In 1833, Toqueville described the crowded conditions, poorly constructed housing, hulking factories, and environmental degradation of Manchester: “From the foul drain the great stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world.  From this filthy sewer pure gold flows.  Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage” (cited in Konvitz 1985).

Like so many formerly industrial cities that followed, the inability to eradicate the industrial history in Manchester was not out of a lack of desire. From the post-World War II period of deindustrialization until the late Seventies, Manchester city planners’ main goal was to not repeat the ‘indiscriminate building of the industrial revolution’ (Nicholas 1945, p.87), and to counteract the ‘image of grime and obsolescence inherited from the industrial revolution’ (City and Council Borough of Manchester 1967, p.39). In his 1978 description of Stockport, just south of Manchester, historic preservationist Randolph Langenbach described the demolition of the mills around Stockport Viaduct: “the destruction is so complete that one can only believe that it must have been the result of an intentional effort to expunge the 19^th-century industrial image” (cited in Parkinson-Bailey 2000, p.203).

We can see these phantasmal landscapes in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants in Max Ferber’s walks through 1950s Manchester: “In Ardwick, Brunswick, All Saints, Hulme and Angel Fields too, districts adjoining the centre to the south, whole square kilometers of working-class homes had been pulled down by the authorities, so that, once the demolition rubble had been removed, all that was left to recall the lives of thousands of people was the grid-like layout of the streets….  On that bare terrain, which was like a glacis around the heart of the city, it was in fact always and only children that one encountered” (2002, pp.157–158).

Despite the wholesale erasure of industrial-era working-class housing, what is left of Manchester city centre still bears considerable evidence to its industrial past: the monumental warehouses of Whitworth Street have been converted to residential lofts and offices, the opulent Cotton Exchange building has been transformed into the Royal Exchange Theatre, and the Manchester Central Railway Station is an exhibition and conference center.  In the areas closest to the employment, entertainment and retail center of Manchester (and accordingly, of the Northwest of England), the “Dark, satanic mills” are now the realms of the yuppie.  Throughout much of the city, the soot has been removed from industrial facades to reveal red bricks, made more vibrant by consistently cloudy skies.

Just as “Cottonopolis” was the first industrial city, and accordingly, for a moment, world’s most futuristic city, it was also one of the first ‘postindustrial’ cities.  Since the 1970s, this city of red brick has become the master of municipal entrepreneurialism based on a sanitized industrial history—a new heritage industry emerged, repackaging the city in the sepia tones of nostalgia. Branding itself as “The Original Modern”, city boosters Marketing Manchester project an outward image as a risk-taking city that shirks convention and always has.   After decades of embarrassment and disavowal of its industrial dowry, the city’s well-branded “urban renaissance” has been predicated on a reinvention that both conceals and reveals its cultural heritage, in an amalgam of selective memory and outright amnesia.

In a visual and material sense, what symbolizes a demystified Mancunian modernity? It’s a more difficult question to answer than one might presume. Domestic scenes of back-to-back tenements are the realm of dusty dioramas in museums—mannequins behind glass, nestled among obsolete machinery. In Ancoats, just east of the city centre, the world’s first industrial suburb has been reworked as an “Urban Village” inviting in the new pioneers, real estate developers have built an ornamental extension to the Rochdale Canal, site of a former housing estate, to increase waterfront real estate.  In Castlefield, the central node of industrial era productive networks, simulacral warehouses provide residential lofts where real warehouses were demolished in the 1960s.

Amidst all of the erasure and reconfiguration, industrial-era transportation infrastructure looms large on the built environment of the city in the form successive layers of canals and elevated railways. Within the sea of brick, the scoliotic railway viaducts stand as the primary beacons of a bygone era that is still central to Manchester’s identity. Accordingly, the arches serve as a backdrop to many a Manchester mise-en-scène:  in the opening credits of every episode of Coronation Street, the everyday environment of Manchester is signified in the railway viaduct that is nestled in the background of a working-class neighborhood.  By the same token, the arches become so familiar in the everyday life of the city that they rarely seem to be in the foreground. From the ground level, they interweave through the urban tapestry, appearing and disappearing, but never far away.

Foregrounding the Backdrop

To identify the “original modern” in Manchester would be to excavate material traces of Manchester’s ascent into industrial modernity- the maelstrom of rapid change, technological discoveries, social upheaval, exponential urban growth, and the fluctuating markets of proto-globalization. The industrialization of Manchester was predicated on the development of a vast, networked transportation system and the colonization of the countryside, with the railway playing a central symbolic and material role in this upheaval.  As political philosopher Marshall Berman explains, if we move forward a hundred years from when Jean-Jacques Rousseau first used the term moderniste in its contemporary form “and try to identify the distinctive rhythms and timbres of nineteenth-century modernity, the first thing we will notice is the highly developed, differentiated and dynamic new landscape in which modern experience takes place.  This is a landscape of steam engines, automatic factories, railroads, vast new industrial zones; of teeming cities that have grown overnight, often with dreadful human consequences” (Berman 1988, p.18).  In this sense, the railway becomes the apotheosis of modernity, and nowhere more so than in Manchester.

We are left with the brick railway viaducts: structures that must have seemed so futuristic at the time, time-space platforms hewn from the same red brick as the temples to industry that they supplied. This infrastructure is not superimposed on the city; its presence continues as an imposition that still affects the reshaping of the city.

References:

Berman, M., 1988. All That is Solid Melts into Air:  The Experience of Modernity, New York: Penguin Books.

City and Council Borough of Manchester, 1967. City Centre Map 1967, Manchester: City and Council Borough of Manchester.

Konvitz, J.A., 1985. The Urban Millenium: The City-Building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.

Nicholas, R., 1945. City of Manchester Plan.

Parkinson-Bailey, J.J., 2000. Manchester: An Architectural History, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Sebald, W.G., 2002. The Emigrants, London: Vintage.

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Safe to breathe yet?

by Andrew Speak, PhD candidate Geography

Remember the hole in the ozone layer?  It’s amazing how little discussion is given now to what seemed like a major global crisis just 20 years ago, but such is the nature of the media.  A huge hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer was discovered over the Antarctic in the mid 1980s which prompted a ban on refrigerators and aerosol sprays that contained the culprit – CFCs.  It was another example, of which there are many in recent years, of how the whole of the developed and developing world was forced to wake up to the consequences of altering the composition of our atmosphere, and the media was full of cartoons of giant hairspray cans burning a hole in the planet.  Well the good news is that the hole is repairing itself since the CFC phase-out, albeit very, very slowly but a whole generation are coming along now with no idea that it ever existed.  This brings home the fact that environmental issues, that no longer seem important, can get neglected from media coverage and thus escape the attention of the majority of people.  So what about urban air pollution?

The UK has a long history of urban air pollution, with laws introduced as far back as the 13^th century to regulate the use of coal in London in a bid to reduce smoke pollution.  In Manchester in 1792, the town hall emphasised the need for industrial chimneys to reduce smoke from coal combustion.  Many of Manchester’s buildings were covered in a layer of soot and grime, which undoubtedly found its way into the lungs of Mancunians.

View from Blackfriar’s Bridge over the River Irwell, 1870’s.  Engraving by Charles Roberts (Evans Picture Library)

The Clean Air Act of 1956 was introduced as a reaction to the Great London Smog, caused by burning low grade, sulphur-rich coal in a winter temperature inversion period, which caused an estimated 12,000 excess deaths.  Since then, the quality of the air in our cities has gradually improved thanks to a switch from coal to gas, industries moving out of city centres, and improvements in the technologies that reduce emissions.  So now, air pollution feels like something that happens far away in LA with its daily photochemical smog cycle, or in the permahaze-shrouded megacities of China where coal is still a major energy source and car ownership is increasing exponentially.  Well don’t breathe too deeply when walking down Oxford Road just yet.  The reason is road traffic, which is responsible for most of the main urban air pollutants – carbon monoxide (CO), benzenes, oxides of nitrogen (NO_x) and particulate matter (PM).  The latter consists of fine particles, smaller than 10 micrometres in diameter (a human hair is about 50 micrometres wide) which can penetrate deep into the lungs, causing inflammation and allowing harmful substances present such as lead and copper to exert effects.

Illustration of the size of particulate matter fractions, PM₁₀ and PM_2.5

Car ownership in the UK is still increasing (DfT, 2009), despite efforts to convince people to cycle or use public transport, and this is offsetting the impact of vehicular emission controls.  These emissions are linked to 50,000 premature deaths a year in the UK, and shorten our life expectancy by an average of seven to eight months.  They have also been linked to childhood asthma and even type II diabetes.  So the effects of air pollution are a bit more profound than just a blackening of bogies, personally experienced in London, a place not lightly called ‘The Big Smoke’.  Just because it is invisible, and only infrequently mentioned in the newspapers, does not mean the problem has gone away.

Monitoring stations have been set up around Manchester to provide information on the urban background air quality.  Ever wondered what that little building is in Piccadilly Gardens?  The website www.greatairmanchester.org.uk provides online access to these air quality data.  Most days the air quality is acceptable but there are spatial and temporal patterns to be aware of.  For instance, there is a peak twice daily coinciding with rush hour traffic, and this appears to be strongest in the city centre and on a Monday morning.  Also, roadsides are places to avoid being in for long periods of time.  Interestingly, a study in Lancaster found that if you are walking on an inclined road it’s better to walk on the side of the road that cars goes downhill because trees on the side of the road next to cars driving uphill were found to have higher loads of PM pollution on their leaves from the increased emissions of cars struggling up a slope (Maher et al., 2008).

Urban air quality monitoring station in Manchester city centre

This particle-capturing property of vegetation is being exploited to improve the air quality in cities.  Strategic roadside tree planting can remove a large amount of pollution by trapping it on the leaf surface where it is subsequently washed off by rains.  This is yet another example of the benefits of urban greenspace, which include keeping people cool in heatwaves, reducing the risk of surface flooding, and simply lifting people’s spirits and making them feel better.  Tree-planting schemes are hindered, however, by a general lack of space within cites, and the fact that there is a considerable dollar sign attached to urban land.  For example, the site of the old BBC would make a lovely park but we all know it is destined to be a glass and steel multi-purpose hotel/supermarket/student accommodation/leisure complex.  Or something.  So it would appear that air pollution is here to stay, as technologies to reduce vehicle pollution at its source seem to have stalled.

One solution is to use the space afforded by rooftops and install green roofs.  Recent research in Manchester has shown that they can make a not-insignificant dent in the PM concentrations in the city centre, with 0.2 tonnes being removed a year in a scenario that involved all flat roofs getting a sedum green roof (Speak et al., 2012).  Larger plants, such as grasses and shrubs, would have a bigger impact, but are a bit more expensive to install and maintain than an ‘extensive’ sedum green roof.  See A (Green) Roof Above Your Head? for my other blog on green roofs in the UK.

An extensive green roof on the Number One First Street building, Manchester

A helping hand also comes from that seemingly permanent fixture in Manchester – the rain.  The rain droplets scavenge pollutants from the air as they fall, and recharge the capture efficiency of urban surfaces by giving them a good wash.  This, along with frequent strong westerly winds, means Manchester’s air quality isn’t as bad as in some other European cities, especially those in central and southern Europe.  However, the European Commission recently gave the UK a final warning over failures to meet limits for PM in London.  Perhaps it’s time to see urban greenspace as more than just an optional design feature for our city centres.  When combined with a decrease in car usage, maybe then we can ‘safely’ forget about this invisible threat.

References

DFT 2009. Department for Transport: Transport Trends 2009 Edition. London: HMSO.

MAHER, B. A., MOORE, C. & MATZKA, J. (2008) Spatial variation in vehicle-derived metal pollution identified by magnetic and elemental analysis of roadside tree leaves. Atmospheric Environment 42: 364-373.

SPEAK, A. F., ROTHWELL, J. J., LINDLEY, S. J. & SMITH, C. L. (2012) Urban particulate pollution reduction by four species of green roof vegetation in a UK city.  Atmospheric Environment 61:  283 – 293.

Progress on a cities@manchester seedcorn project to investigate the consequences of the 2011 riots in Greater Manchester

Jon Shute, Centre for Criminology & Criminal Justice, School of Law

Image via flickr from NightFall404

Memories, like attention-spans, can be short, and it already seems a long time since the community of Pendleton in Salford, and Manchester City centre erupted into full-scale public disorder in August 2011. It is also difficult to recall the radically different nature of those riot sites only a few kilometres apart; the former associated with strong and longstanding anti-police sentiments; the latter being much more consumer goods focussed. Nearly 400 people were arrested, and 300 charged with riot-related offences; and the bill for policing, property damage and loss ran into millions of pounds. A disproportionate number of poor and (in the City centre) minority ethnic youth were arrested and given an unusually high proportion of unusually long prison sentences. A significant number of first time offenders were also dealt with harshly. The riots therefore raised a serious set of issues relating to legal and material inequality, and on the urban landscape in austerity-era Britain.

In this context, a proposal was submitted and accepted by cities@manchester to develop a major research proposal to investigate the consequences of the Greater Manchester (GM) riots. Bringing together colleagues from criminology, politics, psychology and environment, the project funded the employment of a Research Associate to research and develop innovative methodologies for the bid, and to liaise with research partners in GM Probation Trust and Manchester City Council. Over the course of 2012, we contributed to the literature on the riots (see Lightowlers & Shute in issue 106 of Radical Statistics), and made a range of local contacts including Dan Silver of the Social Action & Research Foundation (SARF), in Salford. In order to produce a richer, deeper level of qualitative data than available in the very limited published work on the GM disturbances  we carried out several narrative interviews with convicted rioters, and worked with the Council to develop strategies for accessing this hard to reach population. The data arising from this work, together with more in-depth quantitative statistics is being written up as a major mixed methods piece for the British Journal of Criminology. An ESRC Research Grant proposal is also close to submission and will investigate the individual, community and systemic level consequences of the riots, hopefully starting in late 2013. This will explore, among other things, the possibly counterproductive effects of harsh sentencing, and will attempt to construct a comparison ‘snowball’ sample of people involved in the riots but not arrested and sentenced. In this way, we hope to move on from a media-driven agenda of quick-response research and simplistic causal reasoning to a fuller understanding of the lived experience and long-term trajectories of those involved in – and affected by – the disturbances.

Manchester Piccadilly Vertical Gardens

Manchester Piccadilly Vertical Gardens

by Piccadilly People / Manchester Piccadilly Vertical Gardens

As a stakeholder in the local area, I am writing to enquire whether you would be interested in supporting the following idea for the improvement to Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

For Manchester, it seems a terrible shame that the first/last and most dramatic view of the city for the majority of visitors and residents remains Piccadilly Gardens. As an area which has been existed for over a century as a Manchester hotspot and has been immortalised by Lowry, it has fallen into a rather humble existence. Although there is some wonderful architecture, dramatic water fountains and some fabulous street performers, unfortunately the most eye-catching part of the area is the drab imposing wall that splits the public space with the aim to reduce the negative effects of the bus interchange. Erected in 2002, the wall is 130m long and over 4m tall, mostly as one part curving around the central pedestrianised area, but also with another part separated by a footpath.

Wouldn’t it be brilliant to significantly improve this structure by adding a vertical garden? This is a well-tested technique that has been used from Paris to Hong Kong, both indoors and outdoors. A vertical garden is also an efficient way to clean up the air and improve the general environment. In addition to the leaves absorbing carbon dioxide to release oxygen, the roots are also able to trap and help decompose pollutant particles.

The vertical garden could be trialled on the standalone part of the wall, where it would consist of a metal frame mounted onto the wall, so avoiding any root-damage to the existing concrete. The plants would grow on a felt layer built into the metal frame. The plants on the bus interchange side would consist of a range of bushy, evergreen plants. But the real treat could be on the pedestrianised side, where the garden could be planted full of vigorous growing strawberry plants that can thrive in the Manchester urban climate.

Once the trial wall was established, the remaining bare grey concrete could also be given a vertical garden cover, for the more space covered, the better the absorption of not only pollutants, but also traffic noise.

Piccadilly Gardens has a great potential to return to former glories. We hope that you are as excited as we are by this idea. We would appreciate if you would support this idea in some way, from pledging your support, to your time and expertise, or maybe even some funding to contribute with other partners who also wish to bring back some of the former charm of Piccadilly Gardens.

Thank you for taking the time to read this through. Let’s hope that many people support Manchester and Piccadilly Gardens so that we get it up and growing!

Kind regards,

Piccadilly People

Email: McrPiccVerticalGrdns@gmail.com

Find us on Facebook: Manchester Piccadilly Vertical Gardens

Find us on Twitter:  @McrPiccVerticalGrdns

For more information about vertical gardens, go to:

www.patrickblanc.com

www.verticalgardendesign.com

www.vertigarden.co.uk

Garbage, the City and Sustainable Transitions

via flickr by Editor B

by Sally Gee, David Evans and Elvira Uyarra.

At certain times of the year, ‘rubbish’ can replace the weather as the go-to topic of light and polite conversation.  Christmas is certainly one of those times that we start to worry about the scheduling of bin collections, debate whether or not it is possible to recycle wrapping paper and revisit the time honoured predicament of just how to get rid of that Christmas tree (we are firm believers in putting it outside until it goes brown and dealing with it later!) Of course, rather more fundamental anxieties come to the fore as we confront the consequences of our own material abundance – and gluttony! It is probably no accident that the Institution of Mechanical Engineers chose the middle of January to launch its report – and startling figures – about the amount of food that we waste[1].  Yes, even during record-breaking levels of rainfall and a particularly unpleasant cold snap, rubbish, waste, garbage, excess – call it what you will – is something that friends, neighbours and colleagues appear to be talking about. Maybe this seasonal vogue will pass, maybe it won’t but for some of us – waste is something that occupies our thoughts throughout the year. Although the effective management of waste is deeply un-sexy and almost invisible in the day-to-day running of things; the ‘water cooler’ chattering mentioned above holds some clues as to its significance. I mean, think of the inconvenience and mild irritation that unfolds when bin collections are delayed or rescheduled during the holiday period. Now imagine what would happen if taken for granted infrastructures of waste collection and disposal were to disappear for good and its place, we were left with overflowing bins. Just how big a step would it be to civil unrest, a decline in public hygiene and outright chaos? Our point is this: waste and its effective management is critical to the economic, social and environmental welfare of cities, and as such is an exciting topic for academic research.

The development of appropriate infrastructures of waste management are intimately linked to the growth of cities, and it is at the urban level where challenges associated with waste collection (including recycling), disposal (e.g. landfill shortages) and treatment (e.g. incineration) are most clearly felt. But cities also play a critical role in shaping infrastructures more generally. They can provide the scale, institutional arrangements (including intermediaries) and political leadership to enable transitions towards more sustainable forms of waste management. Sally Gee and Elvira Uyarra have recently conducted an in-depth case study on the emergence of a recycling-based waste infrastructure in Greater Manchester that tries to understand the various dimensions (institutional, political, governance, social and technological) underpinning the transformation of urban waste infrastructures. In the course of this research, they have developed close contacts with the Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority (GMWDA) and other key stakeholders in waste policy both at the national and local levels. From the case study it emerged that one major challenge for waste practitioners is managing the dynamic relationship between household practices and the physical waste infrastructure. The active participation of consumers and households is key to the transformation of waste infrastructure. Yet understandings of household behaviour are seldom informed by understandings of what people actually do ‘behind closed doors’.  Indeed, research exploring home consumption, material culture and everyday life rarely ‘talks’ to waste policy and research. David Evans has recently finished a project looking at the everyday waste practices of Manchester households and reached the conclusion that bins are fascinating, not least because they signal the importance of understanding what goes on at the intersection of domestic spaces and public systems of waste management.

Through various discussions of our respective projects, we realised that ‘waste’ might just provide a useful hook through which a range of academic perspectives (from urban studies, innovation studies, material culture, the sociology of consumption etcetera) might be brought together to address a practical and real-world problem. And so an idea was born. With the generous support of cities@manchester and the Sustainable Consumption Institute, we have been able to get our heads together and start thinking this through. We recently organised a workshop ‘Urban waste transitions: connecting innovation, infrastructure and households’[2] to involve other experts and stakeholders in our discussions.

In the morning Professors Frank Geels, Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin gave fascinating talks on how to conceptualise and understand the governance of sustainability transitions at the urban level.  Professor Nuno Gil complemented this ‘macro’ analysis with insights into the development of infrastructure and its relationship to the wider socio-technical system.  All speakers emphasised that innovation in complex systems is protracted, spatially embedded and contested. They also reflected on the challenges of governing sustainable transitions.  These presentations invited pointed questions about how these insights, tools and perspectives might be turned to the analysis of waste.  In the afternoon, it was time for the ‘wasters’ (if only there were a better collectively noun for people who specialise in waste!) to take to the stage and bring us up to date with what’s happening in waste scholarship and waste management.  Professor Nicky Gregson argued that ‘waste’ is not open to obvious or static definitions but an outcome of socio-economic processes, and emphasised the efforts to marketise outputs of resource recovery processes where waste becomes a commodity to be transacted.  Reflecting on this Professor Catherine Alexander explored the classification and re-classification of waste, highlighting the importance of challenging waste categories and understanding what they include as well as exclude.  She argued that the current focus on “bankable” volumes of waste collection redirects attention away from waste reduction and the reality of household processes.  Dr Tom Quested from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) discussed immediate policy issues and emphasised the importance of problem-orientated and multi-disciplinary research to support policy makers in their efforts to affect change.  John Bland (Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority) shared the GMWDAs experience of governing a sustainable waste transition in Greater Manchester involving not only the construction of new physical infrastructure in a complex political, organisational and economic environment, but also the authority’s efforts to promote behaviour change in households.  The speakers all reflected on the questions posed by the presentations given in the morning sessions and the ways in which these perspectives might be extended (or not) to waste.

A number of insights came out of this lively and well attended workshop.  Different speakers tackled different aspects of this dialogue and demonstrated the complex interconnections between innovation, infrastructure and consumption practices – and emphasised the spatial, temporal and economic dimensions to sustainable urban waste transitions.  There was unanimous agreement that technology and society are inseparable, and although this may appear obvious, it challenges some popular perceptions that transforming systems is merely a matter of matching supply and demand, or that sustainable transitions are simply a matter of technological fixes and/or straight forward changes in household behaviours.

This workshop was the first step in what we hope is an on-going process, helping us to identify gaps in research, as well as questions of academic interest and policy relevance.  So watch this space!  As Christmas festivities fade to a distant memory and our attention turns to failed resolutions for the New Year, tidying up the garden (including that brown Christmas tree) and the steady munching of Easter eggs.  As you struggle to remember which bin to put out this week, or how to fit all that cardboard into the cupboard under the sink; spare a thought for how your waste is created, who collects it and where it goes.  There is a whole system out there (and you – we all – are part of it) transforming waste in a variety of ways; some of which are more sustainable than others.

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[1] http://www.imeche.org/knowledge/themes/environment/global-food)

[2] http://www.sci.manchester.ac.uk/events/sci/urban-waste-transitions

Uyarra, E. and Gee, S. (2013) Transforming urban waste into sustainable material and energy usage: the case of Greater Manchester, Journal of Cleaner Production, at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652612006403 .

Gee, S. and Uyarra, E. (2013) A role for public procurement in system innovation:  The transformation of the Greater Manchester (UK) waste system, Technology Assessment and Strategic Management (in press).

Evans, D. (2012) Binning, gifting and recovery: the conduits of disposal in household food consumption Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30(6): pp. 1123-1137

Evans, D. (2012) Beyond the throwaway society: ordinary domestic practice and a sociological approach to household food waste, Sociology 46(1): 43-58

Evans, D. (2011) Blaming the consumer – once again: the social and material contexts of everyday food waste practices in some English households Critical Public Health 21(4): 429-44

A (Green) Roof Above Your Head?

by Andrew Speak, PhD candidate in Geography

There are some exciting, positive changes going on in some of the world’s cities and most people don’t even know it is happening.  That’s because it is happening above their heads!  I’m talking about green roofs.  A green roof is basically replacing conventional bitumen or concrete roof surfaces with a layer of plants.  The main type is known as an extensive green roof and consists of a thin layer of soil, which supports a mat of Sedum plants.  Sedum is a succulent plant that comes in many varieties, and has pretty flowers, but importantly can withstand the harsh conditions on a rooftop – periods of drought and high winds for example.  At the other end of the scale is an intensive roof which has a thicker soil layer that can support a wider variety of plants such as small trees, shrubs and even vegetables.

Extensive sedum green roof on Number One First Street, Manchester

 

Urban vegetation has many benefits, which are increasingly being recognised by city planners.  Street trees possess these benefits, but there is generally a lack of space at street level for tree planting schemes, so the space afforded by rooftops is a perfect site for urban greening.  There are a number of specific benefits:

1. Reduced solar energy gain by building materials, through shading and replacement of concrete surfaces.  This lowers the need for air conditioning in summer which can lead to huge financial benefits.  Plants reflect more radiation than conventional urban surfaces.  Vegetation also has a cooling effect from the process of evapotranspiration which uses incoming long wave radiation to change water from liquid to gas.  The altered thermal budget of cities leads to a reduction in the Urban Heat Island phenomenon, which can make cities very uncomfortable places to be in summer.
2. Plants act as passive filters of urban air pollution by providing a larger surface area for deposition.  Pollutants are then washed off in rains.
3. Replacement of impervious urban surfaces with soil can reduce the pressure on urban drainage systems by acting as a storage buffer in rainfall events.  The water retained by green roofs is then returned to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration.  There is some evidence that pollutants can be retained within the soil layer as well, thus reducing the impact on receiving water bodies.
4. Green roofs can provide habitats for birds and insects, thus replacing the biodiversity lost to urban sprawl.  Using native plants on green roofs is frequently promoted.
5. Urban green space has a strong aesthetic quality and has been shown to reduce stress and promote feelings of well-being.
6. By protecting roof membranes from huge diurnal temperature extremes and UV radiation, the lifetime of the roof is extended, thus adding another long term financial incentive.

The ability of green roofs to counteract high urban temperatures is being promoted as a form of climate change adaptation.  Work done by Manchester University’s Ecocities group has demonstrated the usefulness of green roofs to keep the city cool under future climate projections.

So if they are so beneficial, why aren’t UK cities full of them?  Currently, a lot of green roofs in this country tend to be ‘showcase’ roofs on National Trust visitor centres, garden centres and art galleries.  One inescapable reason is that green roofs do have a fairly high initial construction cost and intensive roofs can also have considerable maintenance costs.  Plus, not all existing buildings can support the extra weight that a wet or snow-laden green roof would add to the structure.  But this hasn’t stopped countries like Germany, Austria, and more recently the US and Japan, changing their googlemaps satellite street views from grey to green.

The contemporary green roof movement started in German-speaking countries.  One theory is that they sprouted spontaneously from flat roofs in Berlin that had been covered in sand as a fire-proof method after the war.   Deliberate roof garden construction was a large feature of the modernist movement, with flat roofs seen as an extra space to be utilised for enjoyment of healthy outdoor lifestyles.   The environmental movements that started in the 70s ensured growing numbers of people would start to look for alternative ways to live more sustainably.  Germany, Austria and Switzerland have always been very proficient at incorporating verdant elements into urban design, as beautifully demonstrated by the architect Hundertwasser.  Perhaps, it is something unique about the German appreciation of nature that has influenced the design of cities with a desire to bring nature into them.  Whatever the reason, Germany leads the way in green roofing with 5 square miles of green roofs being built every year, helped by government subsidies for construction costs, and policies that state new builds of a certain area with a flat roof MUST have a green roof.

‘Waldspirale’ in Darmstadt, Germany, by the architect Hundertwasser

 

Ubiquitous green roofing also exists in Scandinavia, where the turf roof dominates.  These roofs serve the purpose of acting as insulation from extreme winter cold, and have been in use since Viking times.   A recent trip to Norway opened my eyes to the possibilities of turf roofs, with everything from car garages to bin-sheds supporting mini-meadows.

No roof is too small for a green roof in Norway

A traditional turf roof in northern Norway

 

The UK lacks a definite policy at the moment with regards green roofs.  A number of architects install them on new builds, with the motivation being mostly driven by meeting BREEAM sustainability standards and getting an A or B on the Building Energy Rating, but there are no legal or carrot-and-stick methods to ensure green roofs are factored into new building designs.  Some new living roofs are even criticised because they are high-profile and well-publicised, which has led to accusations of them being a form of green-washing of neoliberal construction projects.

There are signs that the UK is catching up though.  The Green Roof Centre in Sheffield is doing great work at promoting green roofs and carrying out research on suitable plants and substrates.  They have also drawn up a UK specific code of best practice for green and living roof installation.  The Centre have been involved in a number of projects on schools, bus shelters  and university buildings, helping Sheffield towards having the highest number of green roofs.  London is also unveiling more and more green roofs of various sizes and types, often thanks to the influence of charismatic urban ecologist and green roof fanatic, Dusty Gedge.  Here in Manchester there are a number in the city centre, such as Number One First Street, The Hive, Spinningfields Apartments, Whitworth Art Gallery and MMU’s All Saint’s building.  There are a couple of notable roofs in the suburbs as well, such as the roof vegetable garden at Hulme Garden Centre and the intensive green roof on Unicorn Grocery in Chorlton which even has a pond on it!  And small DIY green roofs are popping up all over the place in people’s gardens.

So the ball is rolling, albeit slowly here in Britain.  Whether the motivation is to reduce air conditioning bills, attract wildlife, lower the burden on the city’s drains, or just have a conversation piece on the garden shed, more and more plants are sprouting up in the urban roofscape.

Andy Speak is a 3^rd year Geography PhD student, investigating a number of environmental benefits of green roofs in Manchester. Watch Andrew talking about his research in this video.

Further info on green roofs:

www.livingroofs.org

www.thegreenroofcentre.co.uk