MIPIM | Planning for health in Northern cities
How can Northern cities be redesigned to improve the health of their inhabitants? In a wide-ranging discussion, representatives from Newcastle, Liverpool, and Manchester city councils discussed the challenges and opportunities alongside Ryder’s Jonathon Seebacher.
The emphasis placed on bringing health into place is ever-growing, and in terms of urban living, the trend is moving well beyond simply bringing more greenery into city spaces.
Speaking at the InvestNewcastle panel at MIPIM was Karen Kilgour, leader of Newcastle City Council, Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council, Nuala Gallagher, corporate director of city development at Liverpool City Council, and Jonathon Seebacher, partner at Ryder Architecture and designer of Liverpool’s Green Lanes plan.
Liverpool’s Gallagher and Newcastle’s Gilmour had startlingly similar data on inequalities across their respective cities – those living in North Liverpool have a 15 year difference in life expectancy than the rest of the city, and similarly, a 10 year life expectancy difference awaits those living in the less affluent parts of Newcastle.
“If [the public sector] is getting involved in development,” said Gallagher, “it should be to improve peoples lives.” Part of Liverpool’s solution lies in its submission to the New Towns proposal for an urban extension to North Liverpool, which would provide 10,000 homes across six key brownfield sites.
Echoing the symbiotic nature of health and place, Gilmour noted how a member of the public health team is part of Newcastle city’s planning team. “We’re all facing the same challenges as cities,”, she noted. “We are quite a compact city… I think our residential areas on the outskirts, can sometimes fell quite disconnected from the city centre, so one of the challenges for us is about making sure that any development that happens in the centre, we need to make sure our neighbourhoods feel the benefits of that. And health has got to be a part of that.
“Health is not just about being poorly and needing a hospital. It’s about good education, it’s about having a good job. It’s about connectivity, intergenerational living, it’s all of those things. As cities, our responses will be slightly different but the core principles will be applicable.”
In terms of Northern cities, cllr Bev Craig had an interesting take on how economic history has influenced places within the UK: “I think, particularly northern post-industrial cities, struggle in a way that other UK cities with longer histories of significant investment don’t. In other cities, green spaces were built into them from the start.
“You look at Bristol, Bath, York… those places that were more gentrified, the spatial planning had green spaces built in. Whereas, particularly with Northern cities that have had to pull ourselves up, we need to rebuild and arrange what we have.
“One of the ways that we differentiate ourselves in Manchester is we don’t buy this ‘red-line’ thing – if you want to be a significant investor in Manchester and you want to go through what can be a gruelling, not very rewarding, planning process, then you’ve got to buy into what we’re about.
“When I think about healthy cities – you look at our deprivation levels and it is very similar to Liverpool’s. People think of Manchester as having glamour and big towers… but 47% of my kids are growing up in poverty.
“So what we expect from investors is a journey with us.”
Another common topic raised was connecting people with their places. Gilmour noted, “look at Helix, which is brilliant – but beyond that is one of our most deprived areas.”
Craig echoed the need for space to connect with residents, saying that in the past, Manchester had created “pretty green spaces” that went unused, and Gallagher related it back to Liverpool’s waterfront plans, which will go to cabinet this April.
The large walls along the docks that were built to keep people out, she noted, did just that – and the hope is the new plans for the waterfront area will allow residents to reclaim the space.
Rounding off the discussion, Craig highlighted how developments “need to move away from site-based regeneration to place-based… but that takes a long time.”
And Gilmour had positive words about the relationship between the public and private sectors when creating healthy places: “Before I became leader,” Gilmour said, “I didn’t appreciate how strong the relationship is between public and private, how compassionate and involved the private sector is towards healthy spaces.”
