Liverpool. The city of the Beatles, the Docks and the Merseyside Derby – but also a struggling post-industrial city still characterised by high levels of poverty and unemployment. It continues to be classified as the most deprived city in England. Yet anyone walking southwest from Liverpool’s main Lime Street station towards the waterfront will get a very different first impression of the city. Liverpool’s main shopping area looks modern, new and clean – eerily clean in fact, to the point of being almost sterile. A small plaque tells visitors these streets were opened in 2008, the year Liverpool was the European Capital of Culture. Fences or gates are nowhere to be found, but the contrast with the surrounding area is immediately clear even to the untrained eye (provided it isn’t too preoccupied with window shopping). So what’s going on here? Well, here’s the catch: we are in fact not on urban public space at all. The entire estate is built on private land, owned by a private property corporation called Grosvenor.
South John Street, the heart of the Liverpool ONE shopping area. Photo by Florian Langstraat
Welcome to Liverpool ONE, the largest privately owned and privately managed retail development in Britain. No less than £920m has been invested in this huge 170,000 m2 estate, which now boasts some 170 retail outlets (anchored by the department stores Debenhams and John Lewis), a cinema, a golf centre, a Hilton hotel, a high-end apartment complex, a small park, and a brand new bus station. It has lifted Liverpool into the top five retail destinations in the UK almost single-handedly. All of this is private investment on private land, however. Having sold off the land to the private developer (or rather, technically speaking, having granted them a 250-year leasehold of the site), Liverpool City Council has essentially relinquished all control over the development. The bins, the street lighting, the round-the-clock security team – all are under corporate control. Liverpool’s city centre has effectively been privatised. It is a model of outdoor urban public space that has become increasingly common in the UK. Ever more inner-city public spaces in cities across the country are now ‘pseudo-public’ spaces: spaces that appear to be fully public at first sight, but are in fact privately owned, and therefore managed and controlled with private interests in mind. And therein, critics argue, lies a real problem.
Thomas Steers Way, Liverpool ONE. To the right is the new Hilton hotel, with the John Lewis department store directly behind it. Photo by Florian Langstraat
One of the most outspoken opponents of this privatisation of urban public space is the British writer and journalist Anna Minton. In her 2009 book Ground Control, she worries that the creeping privatisation of British cities will result in spaces that are nice-looking, clean and safe, perhaps, but at the same time spaces that are stripped of every form of spontaneity, and crucially, cleaned of ‘undesirable’ groups such as youths, Big Issue sellers, political protesters and the like. Ultimately, critics say, this is a highly undemocratic model of urban public space – a model in which those of us who shop at high-end department stores and buy frappucinos at Starbucks are welcomed, valued and catered to, while those who do not can, in principle at least, be branded ‘undesirable’ and denied access to these giant outdoor shopping malls at any moment. Such privately-financed redevelopments may save the public purse millions of pounds, but they nonetheless come at a cost.
Yet while walking through these pseudo-public places in Liverpool, London and elsewhere, you may be forgiven for thinking that these academic concerns might be, well, somewhat academic. Yes, Liverpool ONE’s slick design and relative lack of seating facilitate the efficient movement of consumers, and probably discourage those just wanting to hang about from spending too much time on the estate. Yes, the space is all but deserted after dark – but so are most publicly-owned retail areas. And, as the journalist Martin Wainwright suggests, the concerns about rights of access may be justified in theory, but that alone does not make Liverpool ONE an exclusive and exclusionary space. On a sunny summer afternoon in Liverpool, with the small park on the western edge of the development filled with a large, diverse crowd of people, there is precious little evidence that this is somehow an exclusive corporate estate resented by most Liverpudlians.
A sunny day in Chavasse Park, Liverpool ONE. Photo by Florian Langstraat
Among academics, too, there is an increasing awareness that the continuing privatisation of urban public space is not that black and white an issue. The privatisation of what is now the Liverpool ONE estate may have been quite a drastic measure, and on a scale that is still largely unprecedented, but in most cases the picture is often a more nuanced one – as the urban planning scholar Claudio De Magalhães, amongst others, has pointed out. Far from a straightforward corporate conspiracy to turn our city centres into sanitised shopping privatopias for the middle classes, he suggests, we instead observe a complex redistribution of rights and responsibilities in public space governance to both state and non-state actors. What matters most is the ability of people to enjoy urban space on a daily basis, and we should be open-minded about the possibility that this can be delivered using other forms of governance than the traditional local-council-takes-care-of-everything model. It is a hypothesis at odds with those bemoaning the demise of ‘truly’ public space as a symptom of the erosion of democracy in contemporary urban society – but one that seems to fit the crowd enjoying their summer afternoon in Liverpool’s new city centre. While the controversy over spaces of this kind will most likely continue for some time, it is clear is that these pseudo-public spaces are becoming increasingly common in Britain and elsewhere, and as such, the Liverpool ONE development provides a fascinating glimpse into what the future of our city centres could end up looking like.
Further reading
De Magalhães, C. (2010), Public Space and the Contracting-out of Publicness: A Framework for Analysis. Journal of Urban Design 15: 559-574.
Langstraat, F. & R. van Melik (2013), Challenging the ‘End of Public Space’: A Comparative Analysis of Publicness in British and Dutch Urban Spaces. Journal of Urban Design 18: 429-448.
Minton, A. (2009), Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city. London: Penguin Books.
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