We can reinvent our city from historic buildings
NO SAYS Dougal Paver, MD, Paver Downes and co-editor of Residential Review EVERYBODY needs a misspent youth, if you want my opinion. A big chunk of mine was spent, respectively, in Barcelona and Dublin, two cities that demonstrate how the appeal of quality architecture can help sustain long-term growth. In 1988 Barcelona was on a par with the Liverpool of 2005: heady with optimism at a prize hard-won and busy pondering how to manage the investment premium the Olympics had secured. The buzz was palpable and the sense of place compelling. Barcelona felt big and important; it throbbed with energy and creativity; and its sense of itself was utterly engaging. "Barcelona, Mes Que Mai", went the slogan. Barcelona, more than ever. You could fall in love with this place in an instant. Its own citizens had. Returning to Britain, I found myself in a weekly commute to Dublin. Here was another bruised city beginning to reinvent itself, with a 1000th birthday party in 1987, followed by a year as European Capital of Culture in 1991. Sound familiar? Dublin, like Barcelona, wraps you in its embrace, warm in the comfort of its human scale and generous humanity. You can't help but dive in and see how long it takes you to surface from its myriad cafes, bars, pubs and winding streets. If anything overwhelms you it's its sheer busyness. There's an indefinable quality to Dublin that draws people - you can sense it, even if you can't articulate it. So, two cities most frequently cited as examples for Liverpool to follow in its impatient rush to re-cast itself as a premier European city. And no-one could argue that they haven't done an outstanding job. But how many tall buildings are there in either? And would you say that any of them, individually or collectively, have been the key to their respective progress? Hardly. There's only one tall building in downtown Barcelona - an unloved government monolith at the port end of the Ramblas. Up the coast you've got two elegant buildings facing the Olympic harbour and then there's MACBA two miles north of town (think London's gherkin and you'll be about right). In Dublin it's the same story: one 14 story block next to Store Street bus station, with only one other tall building under development, two miles east of the city centre. The rest is determinedly low-rise - "city scale", as one Liverpool planner recently described it to me. So, tall buildings don't, per se, hold the key to regeneration, nor are they necessary to create world class cities. In the cases of Dublin and Barcelona, far more sophisticated factors were at play. I like most of the tall buildings schemes proposed for Liverpool and I'd like to see them built. But that's different from recognising that we're capable of crafting a world class city to rival others from our existing stock of historic buildings. NEXT YES: The case for >>> | 
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