Welcome back: ways towns and cities will emerge from the pandemic

With restrictions being eased around the UK, following regionally defined roadmaps, I was asked, by BBC Wales, what are the best ways for towns and cities to emerge from the pandemic?

Plan for recovery

First, places of any size need to have a recovery plan and action it.  The good news is that most cities and many towns do have a plan, but for these plans to translate into an effective recovery, businesses, council, and the community will need to play their part and work together.

Swansea was one of the first places in Wales in bring out a clear recovery plan. It was led by the Business Improvement District, and the plan coordinated all the operational basics the city needed to focus on through the crisis and put it a good position for recovery. That included making more outside areas available for hospitality businesses to trade, as well as reduced parking fees. The lesson here is to focus on interventions that encourage people back safely, anything that makes it easy for them to support their town centre with their footfall and spending.

People have missed meeting up and enjoying time and treats with friends and family – but even once restrictions start to be lifted, they will still want to do this safely.  The towns and cities that make more outside space available will capture this spend. English border towns may well be the main beneficiaries from a fortnight of Welsh visitors, who can travel out of Wales from the 12th April to enjoy outdoor hospitality at cafes, pubs and restaurants in England, but have to wait until the 26th April until Welsh hospitality businesses are allowed to re-open.

Social spending is where there is going to be most ‘pent-up demand’ as it has been the most COVID-affected category of expenditure.  Some individual businesses can extend onto their own outside space and potentially pavements, car-parks and other adjoining space too. But are there opportunities to use other spaces in the town, like squares or pedestrianized streets, to be used for communal business usage – especially to help those businesses that have limited or no outside space in their immediate vicinity? Perhaps only at certain times (e.g. early evening and weekends) and with temporary shelters and lighting to make areas functional and attractive?

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Taking a ‘micro-spatial’ perspective on researching place management?

Steve Oakes Quartet performing in St Ann’s Square as part of the Manchester Jazz Festival, July 2009. Photo: Gary Warnaby

by Prof Gary Warnaby

For almost the whole of the past year, the Covid-19 pandemic has necessarily limited our horizons, as a consequence of ‘lockdowns’, travel restrictions, curfews, and a range of other measures that have restricted our ability to travel and experience new places.  Consequently as individuals, we have been forced to explore our immediate locales more extensively that would otherwise have been the case.  Perhaps the same could be said for those of us who spend our careers undertaking research into places, as we have been forced (perhaps even more than usual) to focus on our ‘home-turf’ in order to find inspiration for our research activities.

However, in this blogpost I want to argue that limiting our horizons in this way need not necessarily be a disadvantage.  As researchers, we often focus on locations to which we have easy and convenient access arising from proximity, and the experience of the last few months has forced me to think about my own research practice with regards to this.  In doing so, it became apparent that I’ve returned again and again to one particular place, which has provided the spatial context for various research projects (and publications) over the last ten years or more which have explored many different aspects of place management and marketing.

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COVID and the implications for university campus development and place

Part II of a 2-part article

By Dr Steve Millington

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (2020) suggests the university sector faces lockdown-related losses of income from student fees/accommodation and spend, conference and catering operations, as well as financial losses on long-term investments of between £1.4b and £4.3b, with long run losses amounting to anywhere between £3bn and £19bn. To put this into perspective, £19b is half of the annual income of the entire sector. Furthermore, the IFS reports university-sponsored pension schemes now face a deficit of up to £7.6b. Furthermore, UNITE Students are predicting lost rental income of up to 20% across 2020. Mary Pierre-Harvey, a consultant estates executive and former estates director at Oxford Brookes University (quoted in Building, 7th September 2020) argues:

 “Covid-19 has fundamentally impacted universities’ capital investment projects and construction programmes. There have been project shutdowns, slowdowns, deferrals and increased costs and inefficiencies arising from government restrictions and local lockdowns”. 

The post-pandemic campus

The UK government perhaps faces an ideological crisis in relation to higher education, where the dogmatic crusade to push “crude marketization” in a sector some would consider a public service – is undermining one of the UK’s key economic drivers.  There are particular challenges facing new and smaller institutions, and with the IFS speculating 13 universities are at risk of insolvency, prompting the government to establish a higher education bailout fund, the logic of opening up higher education to marketization now appears even more short-sighted, when stability, tradition and reliability are perhaps needed to underpin the resilience of the sector. However, it is not the intention here to debate the politics of higher education strategy.  Rather, this section explores how uncertainty about the viability of future university investment creates serious implications for local economies and future place development.

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The place of UK universities in a post-pandemic world

Part I of a two-part article

By Dr Steve Millington

COVID-19 is utterly disrupting the University sector in the UK.  The shift to remote teaching and widespread media coverage of dissatisfied students in an era of contentious tuition fees, is again provoking questions about the value of higher education. With the spectre of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) replacing traditional degrees looming over discussions about the future of higher education, these challenges could not be more ill-timed, following record investment in campus development by universities in 2019.  Consequently, the global pandemic may fundamentally change the delivery of higher education and unravel the impact of universities on the towns and cities where they play a significant role in regeneration and local economic development. It is timely then, to revisit the relationship between higher education and place, as the basis for exploring how universities might be more proactive in reshaping their relationship to place.

Decoupling the university from place: from ivory to concrete towers

With a history ultimately stretching back to the 11th century, it is entirely imaginable traditional British universities are strongly embedded in place. However, even though many illustrious institutions are synonymous with particular towns and cities, universities seem unable to unshackle the image of the Ivory Tower, and continue to grapple with criticism they are disconnected from local communities.

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Recovery and district centres

Withington: Image by Gene Hunt – https://www.flickr.com/photos/raver_mikey/481854617/in/set-72157600218938673/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2482351

by Steve Millington (Institute of Place Management); Karen Findley and Martin Saker (Manchester City Council); Dave Payne (Withington Village Regeneration Partnership)

Given under lockdown people are beginning to rediscover their locality (see Gary Warnaby’s IPM blog piece), and using centres within walking distance of their homes more often, it is timely to reconsider the role and function of smaller, and specifically district centres,in recovery planning. With people noticing the health and environmental benefits of reduced commuter traffic, adding to the well-documented benefits of walking and cycling, we might now reinforce such positive developments through a commitment to strengthening centres close to people’s homes, to embed ties to localities developed during lockdown. Furthermore, IPM research into 18 district centres in Greater Manchester suggests that around 150 businesses on average are located in each one, although the largest centres accommodate over 300. With 70 smaller, significant local and suburban centres across the GM region, collectively they make a significant contribution to the local economy.  Moreover, if predictions come to fruition the ‘New Normal’ will involve more people working from home, place leaders now need to think more seriously about the potential for district centres to become more than just places for convenience shopping and personal services.

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Arts, culture, and the instinct of recoil

by Gareth Roberts

The COVID-19 pandemic is already having a profound altering effect on our towns and cities. The restrictions placed on business operations and social interactions have rendered places temporarily incapable of offering many of the functions, and ultimately serving the purpose, that we have erstwhile looked to them to provide. Much of the focus thus far has been on the high street, specifically retail, and the implications for places large and small the pandemic presents. However, equally as important to many places, and a by-product of the structural changes we’ve witnessed over several decades which have increased its significance, is the role of arts and culture.

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Post-Pandemic Tourism: Recovery or Reform?

Oia, Santorini, Greece. By User: Bgabel at q373 shared, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22682391

by Dr Heather Skinner

Almost overnight the travel and tourism industry has gone from focusing on the problems of overtourism to undertourism, and in many cases, the real prospect of no tourism at all in 2020 due to the current Coronavirus pandemic. However, as the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) recently warns that international tourism could fall by as much as 80% in 2020[1] and as many countries have started to ease their strict lockdown measures, it is time to think about what we want for the future of post-pandemic tourism when we come out the other side of this crisis. By number, well over 90% of all tourism businesses are categorised as Small and Medium sized Tourism Enterprises (SMTEs), and many of these are micro-businesses employing few if any others outside of immediate family. The demise of tour operator Thomas Cook in 2019 hit many of these businesses hard. Now in 2020, tourism business have been hit by the response to COVID-19, an unprecedented global crises that has brought about travel bans, border closures, event cancellations, closure of tourist accommodation, and the grounding of flights all over the world.

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International Place Leadership Forum, 5 May

COVID 19: Responding, Recovering, Reinventing
International Place Leadership Forum

FREE ONLINE WEBINAR May 5, 2020 (04:00 PM BST; 05:00 PM CET; 06 PM EET)

Join IPM for a two-hour facilitated discussion on how places are reacting to COVID-19 around the world.

– How are city authorities and place managers around the world reacting to the pandemic?
– What can we learn from the different lockdown and recovery strategies that are being adopted?
– What might be the longer-term effects of COVID-19?
– How do we be better prepared for tomorrow and how can we lead change?

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Public Space after COVID-19: Enriching the debate.

by Prof Ares Kalandides

More than six weeks have passed since WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. While we are all trying to cope with our everyday lives, some in more critical conditions than others, there are already discussions about how we shall live together “the day after” – in particular conversations about the future of public space. I would like to share some thoughts here, in the form of questions and work hypotheses, that may help us move forward with the debate. Let me start with three propositions about how to think about public space and we can take it from there:

(1) The way I understand public space here, is as space where chance encounters with the ‘unknown other’ is possible. Let me explain: You do not expect to see an uninvited stranger in your private space (and if you do, you’d be alarmed), but you take it for granted that you will bump into strangers in streets, squares, and parks – but also in pubs, shops or buses. Indeed, following Simmel, that could even be the constitutive element of urbanity. Public space, in this particular understanding, is less about property and access rights, but rather space that has the potential to confront us with people we do not know – not by design, but by chance. Today, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (it is true for other epidemics, too) it is precisely this chance encounter with the potentially contaminated other, that is perceived as a threat. And this could be a threat to urbanity.

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Look around you (If you’re allowed to?)

by Gary Warnaby

A recent post on the IPM Blog has highlighted the importance of urban green space in the time of epidemics (see https://blog.placemanagement.org/2020/04/11/the-importance-of-urban-green-in-times-of-epidemics/#more-2509), in terms of their beneficial effects on the well-being of those city-dwellers able to access them.  Indeed, in the UK, there have been media reports bemoaning the fact that so many people have sought such benefits (especially during sunny weather), that the government’s recommended social distancing protocols have not been observed because of the sheer number of people occupying these spaces.  In such situations, perhaps we have to find alternative, ‘new’ greenspaces?

In my last post on this blog (see https://blog.placemanagement.org/2020/04/10/look-around-you-exploring-your-locality-during-lockdown/#more-2495), I suggested that during the current pandemic, we need to ‘look around’, and explore more extensively the locales in which we live. In doing so, I’ve certainly found new green spaces that I didn’t know existed close to where we live.  More recently, in our local explorations, we’ve investigated another green space that we knew existed only a few hundred metres from our house, but had never ventured on before – namely, the local golf course.

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