Achieving Social Inclusion: Architecture and Design in Retail Environments

Sir Stuart Lipton, CABE chair (1999 - 2004), discusses how good urban design in retail centres could promote social inclusion.

Whenever I am in this building, its history sweeps me back to another age. The portraits of the heavyweights - the Disraeli and Gladstone - lead me to consider what issues they were confronting in their day.

I think they would have both very much recognised the discussion we are having this morning. The 1850s and 60s were a period when those who could afford to do so were choosing to leave the industrialised major cities; both Engels and Fauscher, writing from very different political perspectives, observed on Manchester that the mill owners and other leading citizens were deserting the town every evening, retiring to their houses in the country. The phrase stockbroker belt' came into use in the 1850s to describe the new residential enclaves of the well-heeled who did something in the city' but retired to Surrey and Berkshire in the evening.

In the cities themselves, there was a sharp distinction between centre and the neighbouring districts; in the centres of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester, the civic leaders were busy building their legacies - the great town halls, hospitals, museums and galleries; but the surroundings marked terrible poverty with awful public health fuelled by overcrowding fuelled itself by mass immigration. London, of course, had been coined The Infernal Wen', under its blanket of industrial smoke.

The other interesting parallel with the age of Gladstone and Disreali was that it was the age when our current shopping patterns began to emerge. We began to see the first department stores for the middle and upper classes - places where those with money could escape out of the Wen into a hermetically sealed world where they could undertake financial transactions, have their hair cut, dine, pick up some imported wine, get measured up for a new suit.

The emerging middle class were starting to express a set of values which for them characterised an aspirational quality of life - order, choice, consumption, safety, social interaction.

The rest, as they say, is history, through Haussmann's shopping boulevards of Paris, the wonder art nouveau arcades of Berlin, the Golden Mile of 1920's boom time Chicago, and here in England - the rise of the West End, the golden age of the provincial department store - Busby's of Bradford, Rackham's of Leeds - and the transformation of our cathedral towns into open air shopping emporiums.

And then somehow, in the midst of deindustrialisation, we lost our way. We lost out faith, our nerve, in the heart our towns and cities. We took our retail offer out to the motorised masses, we bought into the American dream of shopping on the edge, the could be anywhere' malls that once again hermetically sealed the shopper from the outside world, the world of unique experiences and real encounters.

The shopper may still have got most of what they wanted - more choice, more convenience, more security - but the cost to our towns and city centres was enormous - lost jobs, underused public transport, derelict land and buildings, insufficient people to create safe environments.

Over the last 10 years we have started to put things right. The planning system and the retail industry have worked in tandem to direct retail investment back into our towns and city centres. There is some great success stories - Leeds with over 2 miles of pedestrianised city centre shopping, Manchester like a phoenix from the ashes of the IRA bomb, Nottingham - using its historic fabric to become the 3rd most successful shopping environment in the UK. There are others - Reading, Southampton, Chester, to name but a few.

There are also more success stories still to come. The renaissance in urban design that this industry is contributing to should lead to great new shopping environments in Liverpool, Sheffield, and Exeter for example, all schemes CABE has contributed to through design review.

However, there is a pattern. All the centres that are undergoing revival are either already in the top 30 retail environments in the UK, in terms of prevailing rental values and size of footfall, or they have the obvious potential to be so.

There is another story to be told, that is of the many secondary shopping areas that are still desparately struggling to turn their fortunes around, still struggling to recruit and retain anchor occupiers. It is no coincidence that areas also tend to be marked by relative economic, social and physical decline. I am talking about places such as Oldham, Bradford, West Bromwich and Hartlepool, or in London - Streatham, Barking and Edmonton. These are the areas where many retail investors and occupiers have shied away from - the prevailing values deemed too low, the complexities of land ownership and infrastructure requirements too great.

But these are also the places where people urgently need jobs and opportunity, young people need training, older people need access to goods and services. The retail industry has the strong potential to contribute to these solutions, and this afternoon I want us to consider how this could happen, and how the Government could help it to happen.

In kicking off that discussion, you would of course expect me to state that good design has to be at the heart of the solutions. As the Urban Task Force stated a few years ago now, Well-designed buildings, streets, neighbourhoods and districts are essential for successful social, economic and environmental regeneration.' - a message that everyone will be familiar with but that is worth repeating.

Good urban design adds value - but it is all too often missing from our retail centres, particularly in secondary locations. For every Bull Ring redevelopment there is a Wolverhampton, for every Manchester city centre there is a Stockport, for every Southampton there is an Eastleigh.

The key is the quality of the environment. The challenge is to build in quality, putting the aspiration, pride and respect back into communities that have had the stuffing knocked out of them.

Turning to the policy-makers I would suggest five issues which you need to tackle to allow the retail developers to make progress. (It will be interesting to see whether the industry shares my views.)

• Planning - PPG 6 has turned out to be inspired policy, and personally I think it could be tightened a bit further to prevent these pseudo shopping malls called designer outlet centres tearing up more of our greenfields alongside motorway junctions. But policy is not enough for these secondary locations. It needs a culture change among the planners to facilitate new development, to work in partnership with retailers to draw up briefs and masterplans that make sense in retail terms.

• Transport - many of the problems in our secondary shopping areas have infrastructure problems at their route. Taking Stockport - who wants to shop on a high street that also doubles up as a six carriageway major arterial route. Perhaps on the Champ Elysee, not in Stockport. In some places, the actual location of the high street may need to be rethought, in others, it may be that humanising the street environment may be sufficient. In other areas, we have to do away with madcap 1970s pedestrianisation schemes that have only succeeded in killing off the high street.

• Land assembly - in some locations, retail investors will only come in if they can control new offer on a sufficient scale. This may require a more proactive role on the part of local authorities and Regional Development Agencies to help create this opportunity.

• Fiscal incentives - we are here in the Treasury, and the Treasury could start to think about whether there are incentives that could help persuade investors to take a risk on some of these secondary locations. The Americans used REITs and other devices to lure investors back to the downtown, what will work for us?

• Business Improvement Districts - the legislation is passing through Parliament but will BIDS be taken up.

In my view, for secondary locations, it will require two pump primers from the Government . One, is an incentive for the owners as well as the occupiers to get involved, remembering that they will be the ultimate beneficiary in terms of higher capital and rental values. The second is some regeneration subsidy to match the private investment in the early years, this is already working successfully down in Waterloo.

We talk an awful lot at present about housing-led regeneration, but can actually point to very few successful case studies. We talk much less about retail-led regeneration and yet there are already plenty of examples. The going is likely to get tougher as the locations get harder, but I have faith in this industry and I look forward to hearing more about how you might go about the task and how we can help.