As news hits the headlines today that the economic trajectory this wreckless Conservative-led Government is taking us on has caused growth to stall, The Centre for Cities has analysed how Cities around the UK will fare as a result of the cuts that are being levied and where they stand now.  

You can read the Outlook for Stoke by clicking here.

My article for The Telegraph highlighting the campaign to save The Wedgwood Museum from liquidation at the hands of the Pension Protection Fund.

You can read the whole article here or read a transcript below.

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You can read below, the text of the interview of Eric Hobsbawm by Tristram Hunt MP or you can read the article at ‘The Observer’ website by clicking here.

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Hampstead Heath, in leafy north London, is proud of its walk-on part in the history of Marxism. It was here, on a Sunday, that Karl Marx would walk his family up Parliament Hill, reciting Shakespeare and Schiller along the way, for an afternoon of picnics and poetry. On a weekday, he would join his friend Friedrich Engels, who lived close by, for a brisk hike around the heath, where the “old Londoners”, as they were known, mulled over the Paris Commune, the Second International and the nature of capitalism.

Today, on a side road leading off from the heath, the Marxist ambition remains alive in the house of Eric Hobsbawm. Born in 1917 (in Alexandria, under the British protectorate of Egypt), more than 20 years after both Marx and Engels had died, he knew neither man personally, of course. But talking to Eric in his airy front room, filled with family photos, academic honours and a lifetime of cultural objets, there is an almost tangible sense of connection to the men and their memory.

The last time I interviewed Eric, in 2002, his brilliant autobiography Interesting Times – chronicling a youth in Weimar Germany, a lifetime’s love of jazz and his transformation of the study of history in Britain – had appeared to great acclaim. It was also amid another cyclical media attack, in the wake of Martin Amis’s anti-Stalin book Koba the Dread, on Eric’s membership of the Communist party. The “Marxist professor” of Daily Mail ire did not seek, as he put it, “agreement, approval or sympathy”, but, rather, historical understanding for a 20th-century life shaped by the struggle against fascism.

Since then things have changed. The global crisis of capitalism, which has wreaked havoc on the world economy since 2007, has transformed the terms of debate.

Suddenly, Marx’s critique of the instability of capitalism has enjoyed a resurgence. “He’s back,” screamed the Times in the autumn of 2008 as stock markets plunged, banks were summarily nationalised and President Sarkozy of France was photographed leafing through Das Kapital (the surging sales of which pushed it up the German bestseller lists). Even Pope Benedict XVI was moved to praise Marx’s “great analytical skill”. Marx, the great ogre of the 20th century, had been resuscitated across campuses, branch meetings and editorial offices.

So there seemed no better moment for Eric to bring together his most celebrated essays on Marx into a single volume, together with new material on Marxism in light of the crash. For Hobsbawm, the continual duty to engage with Marx and his multiple legacies (including, in this book, some fine new chapters on the meaning of Gramsci) remains compelling.

But Eric himself has changed. He suffered a nasty fall over Christmas and can no longer escape the physical constraints of his 93 years. But the humour and the hospitality of himself and his wife, Marlene, as well as the intellect, political incisiveness and breadth of vision, remain wonderfully undimmed. With a well-thumbed copy of the Financial Times on the coffee table, Eric moved seamlessly from the outgoing President Lula of Brazil’s poll ratings to the ideological difficulties faced by the Communist party in West Bengal to the convulsions in Indonesia following the 1857 global crash. The global sensibility and lack of parochialism, always such a strength of his work, continue to shape his politics and history.

And after one hour of talking Marx, materialism and the continued struggle for human dignity in the face of free-market squalls, you leave Hobsbawm’s Hampstead terrace – near the paths where Karl and Friedrich used to stroll – with the sense you have had a blistering tutorial with one of the great minds of the 20th century. And someone determined to keep a critical eye on the 21st.

Tristram Hunt At the heart of this book, is there a sense of vindication? That even if the solutions once offered by Karl Marx might no longer be relevant, he was asking the right questions about the nature of capitalism and that the capitalism that has emerged over the last 20 years was pretty much what Marx was thinking about in the 1840s?

Eric Hobsbawm Yes, there certainly is. The rediscovery of Marx in this period of capitalist crisis is because he predicted far more of the modern world than anyone else in 1848. That is, I think, what has drawn the attention of a number of new observers to his work – paradoxically, first among business people and business commentators rather than the left. I remember noticing this just around the time of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, when not very many plans were being made for celebrating it on the left. I discovered to my amazement that the editors of the [in-flight] magazine of United Airlines said they wanted to have something about the Manifesto. Then, a bit later on, I was having lunch with [financier] George Soros, who asked: “What do you think of Marx?” Even though we don’t agree on very much, he said to me: “There’s definitely something to this man.”

TH Do you get the sense that what people such as Soros partly liked about Marx was the way he describes so brilliantly the energy, iconoclasm and potential of capitalism? That that’s the part that attracted the CEOs flying United Airlines?

EH I think that it is globalisation, the fact that he predicted globalisation, as one might say a universal globalisation, including the globalisation of tastes and all the rest of it, that impressed them. But I think the more intelligent ones also saw a theory that allowed for a sort of jagged development of crisis. Because the official theory in that period [the late 1990s] theoretically dismissed the possibility of a crisis.

TH And this was the language of “an end to boom and bust” and going beyond the business cycle?

EH Exactly. What happened from the 1970s on, first in the universities, in Chicago and elsewhere and, eventually, from 1980 with Thatcher and Reagan was, I suppose, a pathological deformation of the free-market principle behind capitalism: the pure market economy and rejection of state and public action that I don’t think any economy in the 19th century actually practised, not even the USA. And it was in conflict with, among other things, the way in which capitalism had actually worked in its most successful era, between 1945 and the early 1970s.

TH By “successful”, you mean in terms of raising living standards in the postwar years?

EH Successful in that it both made profits and ensured something like a politically stable and socially relatively contented population. It wasn’t ideal, but it was, shall we say, capitalism with a human face.

TH And do you think that the renewed interest in Marx was also helped by the end of the Marxist/Leninist states. The Leninist shadow was taken away and you were able to return to the original nature of Marxian writing?

EH With the fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalists stopped being afraid and to that extent both they and we could actually look at the problem in a much more balanced way, less distorted by passion than before. But it was more the instability of this neoliberal globalised economy that I think began to become so noticeable at the end of the century. You see, in a sense, the globalised economy was effectively run by what one might call the global north-west [western Europe and North America] and they pushed forward this ultra-extreme market fundamentalism. Initially, it seemed to work quite well – at least in the old north-west – even though from the start, you could see that at the periphery of the global economy it created earthquakes, big earthquakes. In Latin America, there was a huge financial crisis in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, in Russia, there was an economic catastrophe. And then towards the end of the century, there was this enormous, almost global, breakdown ranging from Russia to [South] Korea, Indonesia and Argentina. This began to make people think, I feel, that there was a basic instability in the system that they had previously dismissed.

TH There has been some suggestion to say that the crisis we’ve seen since 2008 in terms of America, Europe and Britain isn’t so much a crisis of capitalism, per se, but of the modern west’s finance capitalism. Meanwhile, Brazil, Russia, India and China – “Bric” – are growing their economies on increasingly capitalist models at the same time. Or is this simply our turn to suffer the crises they had 10 years ago?

EH The real rise of the Bric countries is something that has happened in the past 10 years, 15 years at most. So to that extent you can say that it was a crisis of capitalism. On the other hand, I think there’s a risk in assuming, as neoliberals and free marketeers do, that there’s only one type of capitalism. Capitalism is, if you like, a family, with a variety of possibilities, from the state-directed capitalism of France to the free-market of America. It’s therefore a mistake to believe that the rise of the Bric countries is simply the same thing as the generalisation of western capitalism. It isn’t: the only time they tried to import free-market fundamentalism wholesale was into Russia and there it became an absolutely tragic failure.

TH You raised the issue of the political consequences of the crash. In your book, you drop an insistence on looking at the classic texts of Marx as providing a coherent political programme for today, but where do you think Marxism as a political project goes now?

EH I don’t believe that Marx ever had, as it were, a political project. Politically speaking, the specific Marxian programme was that the working class should form itself into a class-conscious body and act politically to gain power. Beyond that, Marx quite deliberately left it vague, because of his dislike of utopian things. Paradoxically, I would even say that the new parties were largely left to improvise, to do what they could do without any effective instructions. What Marx had written about simply amounted to little more than clause IV-style ideas about public ownership, nowhere actually near enough to provide a guidance to parties or ministers. My view is that the main model that 20th-century socialists and communists had in mind was the state-directed war economies of the first world war, which weren’t particularly socialist but did provide some kind of guidance on how socialisation might work.

TH Are you not surprised by the failure of either a Marxian or a social democratic left to exploit the crisis of the last few years politically? We sit here some 20 years on from the demise of one of the parties you most admire, the Communist party in Italy. Are you depressed by the left’s state at the moment in Europe and beyond?

EH Yes, of course. In fact, one of the things I’m trying to show in the book is that the crisis of Marxism is not only the crisis of the revolutionary branch of Marxism but in the social democratic branch too. The new situation in the new globalised economy eventually killed off not only Marxist-Leninism but also social democratic reformism – which was essentially the working class putting pressure on their nation states. But with globalisation, the capacity of the states to respond to this pressure effectively diminished. And so the left retreated to suggest: “Look, the capitalists are doing all right, all we need to do is let them make as much profit and see that we get our share.”

That worked when part of that share took the form of creating welfare states, but from the 1970s on, this no longer worked and what you had to do then was, in effect, what Blair and Brown did: let them make as much money as possible and hope that enough of it will trickle down to make our people better off.

TH So there was that Faustian bargain that during the good times, if the profits were healthy and investment could be secured for education and health, we didn’t ask too many questions?

EH Yes, so long as the standard of living improved.

TH And now with the profits falling away, we are struggling for answers?

EH Now that we’re going the other way with western countries, where economic growth is relatively static, even declining, then the question of reforms becomes much more urgent again.

TH Do you see as part of the problem, in terms of the left, the end of a conscious and identifiable mass working class, which was traditionally essential to social democratic politics?

EH Historically, it is true. It was around the working-class parties that social democratic governments and reforms crystallised. These parties were never, or only rarely, completely working class. They were, to some extent, always alliances: alliances with certain kinds of liberal and leftwing intellectuals, with minorities, religious and cultural minorities, possibly many countries with different kinds of working, labouring poor. With the exception of the United States, the working class remained a massive, recognisable bloc for a long time – certainly well into the 1970s. I think the rapidity of deindustrialisation in this country has played hell with not only the size but also, if you like, the consciousness of the working class. And there is no country now in which the pure industrial working class in itself is sufficiently strong.

What is still possible is that the working class forms, as it were, the skeleton of broader movements of social change. A good example of this, on the left, is Brazil, which has a classic case of a late-19th-century Labour party based on an alliance of trade unions, workers, the general poor, intellectuals, ideologists and varying kinds of left [wingers], which has produced a remarkable governing coalition. And you can’t say it’s an unsuccessful one after eight years of government with an outgoing president on 80% approval ratings. Today, ideologically, I feel most at home in Latin America because it remains the one part of the world where people still talk and conduct their politics in the old language, in the 19th- and 20th-century language of socialism, communism and Marxism.

TH In terms of Marxist parties, something that comes out very strongly in your work is the role of intellectuals. Today, we see enormous excitement on campuses such as yours at Birkbeck, with meetings and rallies. And if we look at the works of Naomi Klein or David Harvey or the performances of Slavoj Zizek, there’s real enthusiasm. Are you excited by these public intellectuals of Marxism today?

EH I’m not sure there has been a major shift, but there’s no doubt: over the present government cuts there will be a radicalisation of students. That’s one thing on the positive side. On the negative side… if you look at the last time of massive radicalisation of students in ’68, it didn’t amount to all that much. However, as I thought then and still think, it’s better to have the young men and women feel that they’re on the left than to have the young men and women feel that the only thing to do is to go and get a job at the stock exchange.

TH And do you think men such as Harvey and Zizek play a sort of helpful role in that?

EH I suppose Zizek is rightly described as a performer. He has this element of provocation that is very characteristic and does help to interest people, but I’m not certain that people who are reading Zizek are actually drawn very much nearer rethinking the problems of the left.

TH Let me move from west to east. One of the urgent questions you ask in this book is whether the Chinese Communist party can develop and respond to its new place on the global stage.

EH This is a big mystery. Communism’s gone, but one important element of communism remains, certainly in Asia, namely the state Communist party directing society. How does this work? In China, there is, I think, a higher degree of consciousness of the potential instability of the situation. There is probably a tendency to provide more elbow room for a rapidly growing intellectual middle class and educated sectors of the population, which, after all, will be measured in tens, possibly hundreds of millions. It’s also true that the Communist party in China appears to be recruiting a largely technocratic leadership.

But how you pull all this stuff together, I don’t know. The one thing that I think is possible with this rapid industrialisation is the growth of labour movements, and to what extent the CCP can find room for labour organisations or whether they would regard these as unacceptable, in the way they regarded the Tiananmen Square demonstrations [as unacceptable], is unclear.

TH Let’s talk about politics here in Britain, to get your sense of the coalition. It seems to me there’s a 1930s air to it in terms of its fiscal orthodoxy, spending cuts, income inequalities, with David Cameron as an almost Stanley Baldwin figure. What is your reading of it?

EH Behind the various cuts being suggested, with the justification of getting rid of the deficit, there clearly seems to be a systematic, ideological demand for deconstructing, semi-privatising, the old arrangements – whether it’s the pension system, welfare system, school system or even the health system. These things in most cases were not actually provided for either in the Conservative or the Liberal manifesto and yet, looking at it from the outside, this is a much more radically rightwing government than it looked at first sight.

TH And what do you think the response of the Labour party should be?

EH The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements – so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.

TH You knew Ralph Miliband, as the Miliband family are old friends. What do you think Ralph would have made of the contest between his sons and the outcome of Ed leading the party?

EH Well, as a father, he obviously couldn’t help but be rather proud. He would certainly be much to the left of both of his sons. I think that Ralph was really identified for most of his life with dismissing the Labour party and the parliamentary route – and hoping that somehow it would be possible that a proper socialist party could come into being. When Ralph finally got reconciled to the Labour party, it was in the least useful period, namely in the Bennite period when it didn’t really do much good. None the less, I think Ralph would certainly have hoped for something much more radical than his sons have so far looked like doing.

TH The title of your new book is How to Change the World. You write, in the final paragraph, that “the supersession of capitalism still sounds plausible to me”. Is that hope undimmed and does that keep you working and writing and thinking today?

EH There’s no such thing as undimmed hope these days. How to Change the World is an account of what Marxism fundamentally did in the 20th century, partly through the social democratic parties that weren’t directly derived from Marx and other parties – Labour parties, workers’ parties, and so on – that remain as government and potential government parties everywhere. And second, through the Russian Revolution and all its consequences.

The record of Karl Marx, an unarmed prophet inspiring major changes, is undeniable. I’m quite deliberately not saying that there are any equivalent prospects now. What I’m saying now is that the basic problems of the 21st century would require solutions that neither the pure market, nor pure liberal democracy can adequately deal with. And to that extent, a different combination, a different mix of public and private, of state action and control and freedom would have to be worked out.

What you will call that, I don’t know. But it may well no longer be capitalism, certainly not in the sense in which we have known it in this country and the United States.

You can read the original article on the Daily Mirror website by clicking here or you can read the text below.

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YOU can see them jeering across the House of Commons Chamber. In their pinstripes and pearls, these are the Tory MPs who love to blame Labour for Britain’s financial crisis.

“You spent all the money,” they laugh (usually after a good lunch). But today we know the truth: our analysis reveals financial services are the premier employer of Tory MPs. Those Tories now in power were once the bankers, investment gurus and speculators who helped to push the economy over the edge. They should take the blame.

Over the last 20 years, the City has expanded out of control. Ever more complex ways of making something out of nothing have seen banks boom and profits soar, as our ­manufacturing base declined. City boss Lord Turner admitted what his colleagues got up to was “socially useless” – adding little real wealth to the economy. Instead, the banking system became ever more complex and corrupt until it came crashing down.

Now the banks sit pretty on their bail-outs as everyday public services take the hit. My city of Stoke-on-Trent is facing £33million cuts thanks to the Government’s plans for dealing with the bank-brokered deficit. ­Meanwhile, the banks welcome in the new year with million-pound bonuses. Some of the City’s excesses took place on Labour’s watch as we failed to regulate ever riskier money-making schemes.

But when the crash came, Alastair Darling acted with conviction: preventing a monetary meltdown, cracking down on bonuses, taking the lead on ­international reform. All that good work is being undone.

As bonus season begins, the banks know this Tory-led Government is giving them a green light to cash in. Gone are plans for publishing pay scales, while the new bank levy is 0.05%. Nowhere near enough to change a culture of greed and risk. Almost 25% of Tory MPs have made their careers and cash in the City. The very people who created this crisis can’t be trusted to solve it.

So when you hear any guff from Nick Clegg about a bonuses crackdown, know this: the real Coalition governing Britain is the bankers and the Tories. And they are both selling us short.

‘A very public Sociologist’ kindly penned this entry for my blog on Political Leadership and Regeneration.

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In the previous post we examined Mike Tappin’s critique of Stoke-on-Trent’s political leadership and looked at some of his recommendations. Continuing this theme, albeit on a broader canvas, on 14th December I was invited to the Centre for Cities-organised Rebuilding Britain’s Cities: Lessons from the UK and US event at Portcullis House in London to launch their latest report, Grand Designs? A new approach to the built environment in England’s cities. By addressing the thorny issue of regeneration strategy it immediately brought to the fore the problems Mike tackled – of direction, vision, and, most importantly, where the impulse for regeneration would come from. It was in this vein the discussion’s chair, Stoke Central MP Tristram Hunt, opened with, noting that the government’s spending cuts means there is little or no role the public sector can play in regenerating cities.

The morning’s first speaker was Alexandra Jones, chief executive of Centre for Cities. Grand Designs? set out to assess existing regeneration strategies and asked if they achieved the best possible outcomes for the people and built environment of declining cities. It was also interested in how cities adapted to changing population trends, whether strategies were often political exercises in official optimism, and what lessons can medium-sized cities take on board from elsewhere.

Alexandra observed that populations tend to migrate to clusters of economic activity, which helps explains current population decline in the north of England. But the developmental model this implies, i.e. industrial growth followed by postindustrial depopulation, is not an iron law of economics or anything else. Large cities of the Midlands and the North have bucked this trend to an extent because they have adapted to the new climate.

Why have they been successful while others haven’t? Alexandra suggested that much of the built environment of northern cities is not appropriate to the demands of the postindustrial economy, and neither were some of the regeneration programmes. Centre for Cities found that on the indicators used to measure the predicted positive impacts, nearly half (48%) of physical regeneration projects underperformed. Similarly of economic strategies aimed at revitalising particular areas, 40% failed to meet job creation targets. As a way of illustrating the disconnect between strategy and economic/demographic reality, one such scheme saw the building of 12,000 new properties in Liverpool … while over the same period 5,000 people left the city.

One possible way of coping with city decline is to swim with the tide rather than stubbornly setting one’s face against it. Instead of a ‘build it and they will come’ approach, Alexandra pointed to a number of examples from overseas. Youngstown, Ohio has received attention for its adoption of ‘smart decline’. Rather than planning for growth (in 1950 there were 172,000 inhabitants, by 2000 only 82,000) it has allowed nature to reclaim run down neighbourhoods and is concentrating resources on core infrastructures (see here). Variations on this theme have been tried elsewhere. Flint, Michigan has aggressively moved to demolish vacant properties so public services don’t have to stretch so far. Philadelphia has transformed its vacant lots into green spaces, which in turn has increased land values and seen people beginning to return to what has become a more desirable city.

Off the back of these exampled and the lessons learned from UK regeneration, Alexandra suggested five guiding principles for regeneration strategies:

a) The built environment must adapt to economic and population change.
b) Strategies must be focused on the best outcomes for people: mega projects are of limited utility.
c) Regeneration needs to be sensitive to and tailored toward the needs of different neighbourhoods within cities.
d) Community engagement is essential and not an optional extra.
e) Circumstances should be kept under constant review: a regeneration process has to have some flexibility built in.

The next speaker was Bruce Katz from the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC-based think tank. His talk focused on the experience of South East Michigan and how it is meeting the ‘new economy’. Here there are a number of things going on that lend themselves to regenerating UK cities. The first is the role of philanthropy. In the US there is almost a cultural expectation that business elites “give something back”. In SE Michigan’s case this has assumed the form of a $100m fund raised from the largesse of wealthy philanthropy. This fund is too small to address all the problems of such a vast territory, but what it has been doing is providing grants to new start ups as a means of kick starting the internal economy, of strengthening organic processes of recovery and, hopefully, producing a raft of new businesses with commitments to the region.

Secondly, in the wake of the recession local businesses have been forced to think strategically about the future. Before the 2008 crash, under the conditions of the housing-led consumption bubble the SE Michigan economy could not compete. Now that has collapsed there are a number of advantages it has over places like, say, Las Vegas, who did extremely well under the old model. Key to prospering in the global economy now are design and innovation, advanced manufactories, low carbon and green technologies. If recovery is to be export-led then Detroit, which didn’t look healthy under the previous regime of accumulation, is now very well-placed: it is the 12th largest exporting economy in the United States. Hence regeneration policy now is about repositioning and retooling old industrial cities and making the most of what they’ve got.

Therefore Bruce’s lessons were, firstly, the emphasis on economy. Land interventions – whether demolition, refurbishing housing stock, or building a mega project – must be tied into the economic context. If there is a disconnect then chances are they won’t succeed. Secondly local government and regeneration planners have to think about different economic models. The assumptions underpinning renewal strategies of the boom years are outdated. If export growth is the way out of economic stagnation then appropriate policy responses at the local and regional level have to be developed and implemented.

The morning’s final speaker was Newsnight economics editor (and occasional leftist) Paul Mason. He played a short piece taken from his film on Gary, Indiana. This once-booming industrial city has seen its population fall by half from its 1950s peak to just 100,000 today. On his blog Paul describes Gary as a city “suffering from one of the most advanced cases of urban blight in the developed world. Its city centre is near-deserted by day. The texture of the urban landscape is cracked stone, grass, crumbled brick and buddleia.” Since its heyday deindustrialisation has literally pulled the guts out of the city, leaving it populated by hundreds of abandoned buildings, among which are colleges, schools, and other trappings essential to the infrastructure of any modern city.

For Paul, Gary is locked in a spiral of depopulation and decapitalisation. The collapse of industrial employment triggered the decline, but subsequent depopulation has meant the critical mass of organic social capital isn’t there to help the city help itself. But this is a question of distribution rather than total sum. In most former industrial cities social capital (the cultural ties that bind communities together, make them cohesive, and enable them to do things – see here) have high levels of social capital thanks to the social solidarities that grew up in the previous era. It does tend to be highly localised and often obstructed by the atomisation of populations and, in Gary’s case, high levels of crime and morbidity. Therefore recovery strategies have to think about mobilising and harnessing this capital.

Paul suggested the means of accumulating social capital lends itself to the new economy (at least the creative, innovation-driven side of it). He argued the semi-private spaces of coffee shops, shopping centres, library IT suites, cyber cafes accommodate the nomadic workspaces of those whose working life is, in large measure, portable and dependent on internet access. Whether at work or play these are becoming sites where new social relations are forged in conjunction with the new economy, from which all kinds of real world cultural and business spin offs can emerge. He suggested one way of fostering this sort of micro climate would be for local authorities to open up empty shop fronts for use as informal work spaces.

Tristram then opened the the discussion up to questions. One representative from a city that has been through a successful regeneration process asked how to make the connect between existing “low aspiration” residents and the new hi-tech, high-innovation economy his city has managed to grow? Where does the aspiration to be socially mobile come from? Rupa Huq raised the issue of the place suburbs occupy in regeneration strategies, and observed the official optimism that conditions all projects is an effect of politics, of the need to promise the electorate a pot of gold at the end of the regeneration rainbow. But often this flies in the face of realities local governments face. In my contribution, I picked up on Paul Mason’s argument and said his concern with social capital is focused on the working and middles classes (from which his new intellectual workers are overwhelmingly drawn), but what about the level of elites? They network among themselves but how to get their accumulation of social capital to trickle down to contribute to the cultural renewal of declining cities? Is it possible?

On suburbs Alexandra Jones replied that, generally speaking, big employers tend to locate in or very near a city centre because of its amenities. She cited one example where, during the construction boom, one company threw up grade A office space in a suburban location and has since remained empty. Therefore building projects have to be tailored to people and economics, otherwise it’s a waste of time. But she fully agreed with Rupa on optimism. There is a conflict between the realistic, pragmatic approach to regeneration and its politics. As difficult local authorities and politicians may find it, some honesty has to be injected into the expectations they project. On local elites, Bruce Katz recommended trying to pool what philanthropy exists and suggested universities play a good role in facilitating this. And on aspiration, Paul Mason reiterated his points on social capital, calling for more ‘local capital markets’ where this can grow.

There was an awful lot to digest from this session and a great many things that could inform regeneration policy in Stoke. Like other industrial cities its population has been in measured but long term decline. There have been clearances of old terraces but without the building of new commensurate homes. Instead there was, until recently, a move to provide the sorts of identikit urban flats as well as modern three and four bed room semis and detached housing. Before the housing pathfinder scheme was junked by government cuts there were more plans for more new builds of this type. Now this is not going to be built for the foreseeable future, the Stoke-on-Trent city scape is blighted with voids. Small wonder Matthew Rice, MD of local pottery firm Emma Bridgewater, recently compared the local built environment to Helmand province. And, at present, there is nothing coming from the City Council on what should be done with these sites. That is apart from planting down clovers to keep the ground uneven so kids don’t play on them (for arcane legal reasons, of course).

There there are our own mega projects. A hypermodern campus for Stoke Sixth Form College has recently opened on Leek Road, and next door to it Staffs University are building a science and technology innovation centre. These do seem like the sort of things the city needs, especially as the latter will be part and parcel of the university’s continued commitment to providing ‘incubation units’ for graduate start ups. But the other mega project due to arrive – a new bus station in Hanley (current one pictured) – appears to suffer the hubris that comes with building-led regeneration. Its replacement, which looks swish and modern, apparently promises to bring more investment into the city. As welcome as a replacement for the awful and shabby bus station is, I am worried there is more than a soupçon of official optimism swirling around. For starters which ever way you arrive at the bus station you have to first go through the aforementioned blighted lands and derelict properties. When your official gateway is prefaced by devastation will potential investors come away with a favourable impression? As for utility, it will certainly create the space to improve Stoke’s public mass transit and, who knows, perhaps it might win a major architectural prize, but does it meet the city’s current and likely future needs? I’m not entirely convinced.

This returns us to the question of political leadership. If Stoke (or any other city in a similar position) is to be renewed, questions have to be asked about what kind of regeneration it wants, what economic advantages it has that can be capitalised on in the new climate, what can be done to sponsor “homegrown” growth and, ultimately, what is the realistic assessment of its prospects. I think Stoke’s transport links, pottery industry, social solidarities, and growing educational capacity are grounds for optimism. Even the space left by clearances could be turned to its advantage. But unless the city intelligently, creatively, carefully, and pragmatically addresses the challenges facing it, there’s every danger the promise of a regenerated Stoke-on-Trent is one that goes unfulfilled.

You can listen to Tristram Hunt’s contribution to the BBC’s ‘The Week in Westminster’ by clicking here.