Thursday, August 16, 2018

People define places and people value style



This is the video arising out of our recent Vibrant Economy event where we looked at how places can thrive and find new purpose.

My pals at Influential Communications pulled it together and made a very fine job of it.

In this short film some of the participants offer reflections on what they have learnt during their careers in property, retail and academia – led by the entrepreneur Nick Johnson, whose inspired reimagining of Altrincham Market as an independent food and drink destination has won widespread acclaim. In his career Nick Johnson has taught at Yale, chaired Marketing Manchester and served as a commissioner for Chartered Association of Building Engineers. He was a director of the developer Urban Splash for 15 years before taking the plunge with his vision for his home town. What I love is the break with the orthodoxy from Nick Johnson, who I have to say, was absolutely magnificent on the night.

He's been involved two different phases of change in the way the public use buildings and prioritise space - which he talks about in the video. While, the last 20 years have seen a complete transformation of UK regional cities, with decades of industrial decline replaced by flourishing regeneration schemes and booming popularity, there's still a long way to go. Our regional centres have progressed beyond the best hopes of civic leaders in the 1970s and 1980s but many of those mitigating solutions have contributed to new problems.

What Nick has priortised now is shaping places based on how people want to interact. That's the way Altrincham Market and Mackie Mayor market hall are structured. Unreserved seating, everyone piling in together, an open source and uncurated space. And a pleasant place to try new food. I don't wholly buy the argument that he's broken with the past commitment to design excellence. There's an unconscious aesthetic around both places that probably comes from habit on Nick's part as much as anything, and even if you do place people's needs and behaviours at the centre the love of somewhere that feels good helps to build that emotional connection to a place.

All of this is incredibly pertinent to my own home patch of Marple and to Stockport. To Marple, it's about understanding what the people who live there need. While the challenge is to achieve what Altrincham has done, while appreciating the very different set of circumstances and demographic.

Anyway, I'm on the video as well, talking about the view from my window of my old student halls.

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