2: MANCHESTER'S DEVELOPMENT MODEL (+ German elections, + UK local government reform, and more)

In this month's feature (21:09), Tom & Beth turn their attention to Manchester’s model of property-led development. As the UK government pins hopes on enabling greater private sector investment to boost economic growth, can the 'Manchester model' deliver the expected outcomes? They are joined by Adam Leaver and Richard Goulding to discuss their new report, co-authored with Jon Silver, on the "Centripetal City: A Critique of Supply-Side Urban Development". 

In our wrap-up of what’s on our radar (01:49) we also cover:

• What fatbergs and sinkholes tell us about the urban underground 
• How Artificial Intelligence might affect  urban culture
• The spatial implications of UK cuts to aid to finance defence spending 

And, with Madeleine Pill, we dive (08:23) into the urban dimensions of the German elections and the governance questions that sit behind current concern about local government finances in England. 

Guests:

Madeleine Pill is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography & Planning. Her work takes a critical approach to the theory and practice of governance and policy at the urban/ local/ neighbourhood scales. 

Adam Leaver is Professor in Accounting & Society and Director of the Centre for Research on Accounting and Finance in Context (CRAFIC). Adam’s primary research interest is in the financialization of the firm. 

Richard Goulding is a Lecturer at the Management School. His interests lie in the interaction between finance, social reproduction and urban space, exploring how these combine to shape housing geographies.

Feature References:

New report critiques supply-side urban development | CRAFiC | The University of Sheffield

The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis - Repeater Books

The Greater Manchester Gentrification Index

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: urbanradarpod@gmail.com

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:17

Hello and welcome to episode two of Urban Radar, a podcast series brought to you by Sheffield Urbanism at the University of Sheffield. I'm Beth Perry, Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

And I'm Tom Goodfellow, a professor in the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield. And thank you very much for joining us for this second episode. We uh were very pleased to get the first episode finally out, as well as the trailer. So if you've not seen it and you don't know the format of the show, there is a three-minute trailer out there. And we've also had some really helpful feedback on episode one, which we're thinking about as we go into the second episode. So just a reminder that you can provide feedback on any episode by emailing us on our email address, which you can find in the show notes or on our LinkedIn page.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Yeah, it's been great to see how many listeners we've got from around the world, definitely more than just my mum.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Yes, and in some incredible places as well, actually.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

So, as usual, we're going to cover a bit of what's on our radar this week from having scanned the news. Then we're joined by Madeline Pill, our colleague in the School of Geography and Planning, to dive into a couple of features in more detail, including the German elections and the devolution and local government reform agenda here in England.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

And then for our feature this week, we're going to go into a discussion of a report by our colleagues Adam Lever and Rich Golding, also with our colleague John Silver, which is a report about Manchester's development model, a report on what they're calling centripetal cities, and it's a kind of critique of the Manchester's approach to urban development. So, Beth, what is on your urban radar this week?

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Well, obviously on Sunday, the 23rd of February, we had the German elections to the Bundestag, the German federal government, and that's revealed some really challenging results in terms of the rise of the AFD, the Alternative für Deutschland Party. It raises a whole set of questions that have been covered in the media quite extensively around immigration, terrorist attacks in large cities, and a lot of analysis of the geopolitical dimensions of this. But some of the urban dimensions haven't really been featured. For instance, how we can understand the result through the lens of urban-rural polarization or relationships between the East and the West, and what that means for Germany's position in Europe and the world more broadly.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Anything else?

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Yes. I want to talk about fatbergs. So just bear with me for a second. Some of you might know the singer Brian Adams, who was due to give a concert in Perth in Australia. And the concert had to be stopped because there was a large blocked sewer by a fat berg. Now, this isn't actually a one-off. For those of you that don't know, fatbergs are caused when fats and oils that we chuck down the drain bind with rags and wet wipes and solid objects to form these kinds of masses that then block the sewers. And it is particularly an urban phenomenon because we have large underground sewage infrastructures, often in states of disrepair and underinvestment. There's a high volume of people with a concentration of restaurants and fast food outlets, whole load of wider issues around diet, public health, and obesity. So actually, there was a fat berg weighing 35 tonnes that was removed from a sewer in East London. There have been fatbergs removed from city sewers in New York, Melbourne, and Valencia. And academics were on this as far back as 2006. So my colleague Simon Marvin, who's in the Urban Institute, actually wrote a paper back then about how fatbergs were changing urban metabolism.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Okay, so we've had mountains last week and fatbergs. It's a whole range of new urban issues. Okay, great. And I think there's one other thing you wanted to raise.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Well, it links, doesn't it? Because it's another underground story. And the question that I've been asking myself is whether the earth is swallowing cities, taking its revenge on us for all of this underground work. So in the last week, there have been two stories in the news. Firstly, a massive sinkhole appeared in a city in uh the Brazilian Amazon, and a large sinkhole also opened up in a town in South England, both within a couple of days of each other. And again, generally this is becoming more common. There's a whole set of urban issues that uh come out of this. If residents are evacuated from their houses because of these sinkholes, there's questions over who owns the land, who owns the building. There's a debate over who's responsible for rehousing people. Is it the landlords, is it the insurance agencies? There's a whole set of issues around development and how we're destabilizing the very fabric of the earth through different kinds of infrastructural projects. Um I think all of this sort of speaks to kind of the link between movements and mobilities and flows and systems. We have to stop just thinking about cities above ground and also think about what's happening beneath. How about you? What is on your radar?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

So my radar is entirely quite a different issue this week. I mean, this is partly very reflective of what's been in the news, really, in the last few days. One was the story about AI and creative industries. You know, I first saw it in relation to this album of blank space being recorded by, you know, Kate Bush and various other people as a protest against uh AI-generated uh music. And I think there's a really interesting story here about AI and creative industries. I mean, most obviously perhaps because of the struggles of music venues and artists to make money in recent years, could that be worsened? Or might we see something quite different where there's a performance space that maybe interacts and engages AI in some new way and creates new forms of urban culture? I also found it really interesting, there's a kind of generational divide. You know, I was listening to the radio, and it does feel like older people and musicians who were saying this is terrible. And then there were young people in the creative industries in AI who are really standing up for this move to deregulate. And I think it's going to be a really uh a kind of struggle within the kind of creative and cultural industries, which is quite bizarre. I also wondered, by the way, whether we might see some interesting forms of protest against AI that um speak to that record and other ways of contesting artificial intelligence. I think the idea of an AI-generated music rave that really upsets all the neighbours with terrible fake music could be. You can already have silent discos as well as silent protests, can't you?

unknown 6:38

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Then um in an in totally different issues, uh really, I've been thinking a bit about local government finances because of all the stuff in the news about a crisis in local government financing and how that connects to wider issues around devolution reform, which we've been hearing a lot about.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

In England, in the UK.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

In England, in the UK, including questions of like the postponement of elections and more city mayors. How does this all uh solve the problems we're seeing of local government finance? I'm not sure. And then the third thing really is well, uh you know, in my area of research, I can't but help think about the urban consequences of further aid cuts. We heard about USAID last week.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

You were predicting.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Uh well, yeah, and there were some there were some stories about how this had hit countries like Kenya where cities were just you'd see economies kind of collapsing, shops closing, businesses closing, and now the UK is is weighing in in the same dynamic. But I think what's quite interesting as well is that this is an aid cut to finance defence. So on the one hand, there's what are some of the consequences of it's a substantial cut in aid, it's 40%. It's a it's a less substantial increase in defence, it's only about 10%. But I think we'll see real effects in a lot of cities that have these aid-inflated economies. Um and we will also see, you know, real concerns about a lot of the work that the UK has done with civil society groups and vulnerable groups, women's groups, LGBT groups, um, and a kind of real concern that authoritarianism in cities is going to be given a boost because of a lack of work on kind of democracy in civil society. Um then on the other hand, I'm kind of curious about an increase in defense spending and what that means for cities. So I was trying to look at the geography of defense industry in this country. It seems to be heavily southwestern. I think there's a lot in Bristol. So you might see some some strange kind of economic boosts or dynamics around cities that are the center of the defence industry as well. And we're gonna actually pick two of those to dive into in more detail now, aren't we?

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yeah, I'd like to talk a bit more about the German elections. And I think that's partly linked to questions of devolution, governance, and who makes decisions at what level of government.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

I want to dive into the UK devolution, local council finance issues, and to talk about all of these things, we are now joined by our colleague Madeline Pill.

SPEAKER_03 8:57

Hello both. It's very, very lovely to be here.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Excellent to have you. So, Madeline, do you want to tell us and our listeners a little bit about yourself, your research interests?

SPEAKER_03 9:07

Of course. So I'm um Dr. Madeline Pill. I'm a senior lecturer in uh the School of Geography and Planning along with uh Tom. And my research is really focused on issues of local governance, and I'm also really interested in what goes on at that kind of sub-local kind of neighbourhood level as well. Um, in doing that, most of my research has been global north. I've done a lot of research in the UK, but also the US in Baltimore, where there was a massive fat bug a couple of years ago. They're everywhere. Um, they are everywhere, and also in Australia, where I've spent quite a lot of time in a previous life working at the University of Sydney. So kind of comparative local governance uh studies, really.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Okay, brilliant. Well, I think the discussion we're about to have is probably one in which that comparative lens is going to be quite useful, and that is about Germany and the German elections. I mean, the thing that strikes me uh first of all from talking to people in Germany and looking at the news is that this urban-rural divide in Germany is often talked about as being particularly strong. I mean, do you think, both of you, that that's the case? Is that an oversimplification? What kind of an urban-rural divide are we seeing?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

I think inevitably it's a lot more nuanced than is often popularized in the media. I was reading some interesting analysis from an academic called Rolf Frankenberger at the University of Tübingen, who was saying that alternative for a Deutschland, the AFD, is explicitly using this idea of the urban-rural divide to polarize voters. So presenting this idea that cities are negative forces, that they contain a lot of individualism, consumerism, cosmopolitanism compared with the rural being the archetype of nature and tradition. And that's backed up to a certain extent in how we can understand the election results. A lot of the strongholds for the AFD are in Eastern Germany, and the AFD is stronger in rural areas than urban areas. Um there's some truth behind that, but it's also not a new phenomena because regional and rural support's been growing for a long time, and there's this idea that cultural remoteness from regions is really exacerbating this idea that the political elite serves cities, it serves the urban population. Um, and that's why in East Germany, actually, only a few major cities like Berlin and Leipzig weren't dominated by the AFD.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

I mean, I find this so fascinating because we all have these different ideas of a rural urban divide in our politics. Um obviously there's a sense of that that's always been there in the UK, with the big metropolitan cities being largely Labour, small towns associated with conservative. Also, just thinking about the context where I do research in in Eastern Africa, it's it's really often been the case that the the rural politics has often been one of left-wing communist rebel movements moving towards the city to take power, and the cities being the association associated with those kind of more conservative elites. And then in Germany, of course, we have something that is quite distinct from many, if not any other countries, which is that legacy of East and West and the political divides there. Is that again something that can help us understand this election result and what it means for urban governance and regional governance?

SPEAKER_01 12:25

To a certain extent, um, the analysis that I've read has shown that there has been a lot of support in the East compared with the West, but at the same time, support is growing in urban centres. There's a widespread sense that reunification hasn't delivered the prosperity that people expected in post-war Germany. Um, and there's some evidence that it's actually a lot more complex when you look at the level of government below the regions. So there's another article by some academics called Katia Solomo, Marcel Heibig, and Suzanne Markert that shows that there's actually truth in the fact that residents in cities with larger and faster growing immigrant populations are more likely to vote for the far right. But at the same time, within neighborhoods rather than the bigger scale of the city, it's more complex because sometimes the levels of economic inequality or poverty drive people towards the far right. But at other times, the fact that they live closely together with neighbours from different communities forges stronger bonds and greater social cohesion. And so in those instances, sometimes the vote for the far right is less uh is less strong.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

I wonder if we could explore a bit more that federal system and what it means for cities and regions, particularly Madeline, because obviously you've done a lot of work around city-regional entities and governance of those kinds of uh levels.

SPEAKER_03 13:47

I mean, Germany provides a really fascinating contrast with the UK, but if anything, the UK is kind of regarded as the outlier in terms of how centralized it is, and obviously Germany has a sort of powerful kind of federal system of the 16 Lander, but I've got some sort of killer facts in front of me, and looking at the kind of sub-national governmental structure and kind of below the lander, in Germany you've got over 11,000 municipalities and their average populations between seven and seven and a half thousand people, and I find that provides a really powerful contrast with how we are structured here, where we have currently, though shortly to change, 389 local authorities with average populations of around 166,000. So the institution of local government is very different, much smaller and arguably much more connected to the locality in the German context. Obviously, sort of pros and cons of that, depending on what its role is in relation to public service delivery and so on. And when you look at it in a kind of fiscal sense, certainly in the UK, only about 7% of our taxes in this country are collected locally, whereas in Germany it's a third. And that also accords power to that local level in Germany, which is really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

But what's quite interesting is that that post-war settlement hasn't really been put up for grabs at the moment in the current debates around the German elections. So the post-war settlement was about guarding against the concentration of power through Germany giving certain kinds of powers up to the European Union and then enshrining it in the federal system so that you actually have two elected chambers in very different kinds of ways. So I think it's going to be really interesting to see the extent to which that does act as a check and a balance against the rise of the far right and whether or not we see more conflict about the east versus west, the urban versus rural kind of playing out in the second chamber.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

I think this is probably a good moment to move into thinking more about the UK. As you will remember, in my radar scan of news items, I drew attention to local government issues in the UK. Um, and as we've just been making that comparison with Germany. Madeline, I I want to ask you first of all. It seems to me, as someone who doesn't work on the UK, that we seem to be stuck in a kind of cycle since at least the 90s of kind of agonizing over being such a centralized country, introducing various kinds of devolution and decentralization, and it not solving the problem. What what is what is wrong with how we manage the issue of local government in this country?

SPEAKER_03 16:31

That's that's a that's a great question. Um it's also a hard one to answer. I think you know you can actually say we're comfortable, I think, in this country with temporary fixes, with rampant incrementalism, with constant churn. I think the one thing we're all conscious of or aware of um in this field is you know that there will always be a new round of reform coming. Certainly, though, um the the relatively new now government went really hard in December. In December 24, we had the devolution white paper, we had the reforms to the national planning policy framework, and we also had the planning reform white paper. So there are a lot of changes afoot which have all received a lot of press coverage.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

It's interesting the idea of agonizing over these reforms as well, because actually, on devolution there's quite a lot of cross-party support. If you look for which governments have introduced which kinds of reforms, there's been quite a remarkable amount of consistency, and that's because it's largely being driven by the desire to improve economic performance. So you have to ask devolution for what? It's not necessarily about democratic empowerment or citizen power. These discourses get used, but the reason that actually devolution takes place the way it does here is largely because it's driven as part of industrial policy.

SPEAKER_03 18:02

And that's really clear when we look at more some of the detail, particularly in the planning reform proposals. The absolute central driver is growth. And we hear that really powerfully in all the media coverage. I find that interesting in as much as the word inclusive was increasingly being associated with the word growth in a lot of the rhetoric that's been dropped for now. And one of the sort of most powerful critiques of the devolution white paper as it stands is well, where's the democracy? How local is this new vision for local government? So I think one of the big issues for um us, in line with our understanding of how centralized we are as a country, um, how how much of an outlier we are globally in that structuring is well, local government is a creature of the centre, and increasingly, particularly since the reforms we've seen since the late 80s, it's become regarded as the sort of delivery arm of central government. The parallels with proposed changes to the planning system, I think, are really important to think about in terms of the democratic implications and also the likelihood of cont of significant contestation in some quite rich areas of the country and what that will mean for subsequent changes to these proposals.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Okay. To bring it back to specific places, one of the cities you mentioned a bit earlier was Manchester. And obviously that's the place we're going to be talking about in our future, but it's also a place that has been hailed as a model, you know, in terms of city-regional governance. And I wondered if you could just say a little bit more about where Manchester features in these debates.

SPEAKER_03 19:49

I mean, Manchester is really interesting, and particularly with my sort of Australian perspective. Manchester was regarded as the model when the prior Australian federal government decided to introduce city deals into its policy. And that was really interesting because in all the policy papers, they weren't necessarily really talking about UK city deals, they were talking about the Manchester model. So it's already been very kind of internationally significant and kind of policy mobilities work. I think in terms of the timing right now, April this year, they are going to be a trailblazer along with the West Midlands for the first single settlement. So basically, that means the deal with central governments will be that they'll have an integrated set of funding streams and more power over determining how those are spent. Obviously, in terms of planning, in terms of housing, in terms of public transport, which is really significant in terms of health, bringing them closer to the London model. London devolution is still the most powerful model within England for this being realized.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

So, Madeline, thank you so much for coming on. It's been wonderful to have you here and to just hear about all your expertise in relation to these issues. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 21:06

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Okay, so for our feature today, we are delighted to be joined by Adam Lever, who is a professor in accounting and society in the management school here in Sheffield, and also the director of the Center for Research on Accounting and Finance in Context, also known as Craffick. And we're also joined by Dr. Rich Golding, who's a lecturer in the management school, also working with CraffIC and on this same project that we're going to be talking about today, on what they call centripetal cities. And we'll get a definition of that in a moment.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

We saw recently that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was glorifying redevelopment and investment around Old Trafford in Manchester. And so it's really timely to have you here today to talk about what Manchester's model of urban development actually is and why everybody's so keen to copy it. So can you tell us, Adam, a bit? First, about the background to this report.

SPEAKER_04 22:05

Yeah, so I I mean for some for some time Manchester's been held up as the kind of the emblem of a particular form of urban regeneration, of kind of post-industrial regeneration, that that other areas could emulate. Um central to it is the idea I guess kind of based on on what what is often termed kind of new economic geography ideas or agglomeration kind of economic ideas. That what you do is you build a whole bunch of buildings in a t in a city centre that this pulls people in from afar who have a particular set of skills, you get productivity increases, and this all then kind of flows out not just to the city but into the kind of the outlying surrounds. So it's it's really a kind of a model of property-led economic regeneration, and Manchester is its is its kind of guiding light in that respect. So that's the background to the report. And really what we're doing is we're asking whether that model or rather those outcomes, the outcomes of that model are really what we're seeing there when we when we kind of dig a little deeper.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Can you use these ideas of centripetal and centrifugal cities for the listeners in a nutshell? What do you mean?

SPEAKER_04 23:20

Yeah, so I mean that was a kind of a provocation really to this kind of you know the the the dominant view of how kind of cities develop. You know, there the idea, as I mentioned kind of at the beginning, is that you build loads of property, people come in, you have skill sorting, this produces productivity-enhancing outcomes, prosperity, everyone gets wealthy, it trickles out into the region. So we were saying, well, what what what happens if if something rather different is happening? What happens if you build a load of property that rents go up and that the people that own these properties are kind of outside of the city? You pull in resource and skills and other factors into the city centre, and this all gets kind of pulled out of the city into what you might think of. I know you were talking about this a bit earlier, but into kind of the the sinkholes of of kind of uh uh kind of global wealth chains. Nice link, metaphorical sinkholes into factors, into you know, into tax havens and and various other places, which is where the the ownership kind of chains ultimately kind of end uh in property. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Because you mentioned trickle down, and of course that only works if the investment that goes in stays. And that's the main problem, because you're really drawing attention to the extraction. Whatever's going in, it's coming out, so therefore it can't benefit the local economy.

SPEAKER_04 24:43

Yeah, that's right. I mean, that was one of the things that we were very keen to kind of focus on because we do seem, I mean, going back to the kind of your kind of pre pr previous discussion of Rachel Reeves's policies, this is all about how you get capital in, how you draw investment in, and and which becomes the kind of the centerpiece of of kind of social democratic politics of our time. One that is deeply kind of kind of confused and filled with tension, I think, in in in my view. Um so this what is always forgotten in this focus on bringing investment in is that you know capital expects a return, right? Investment investors expect a return. And so how you weigh up, you know, whether this is beneficial or not, really depends on the rights, the extractive rights effectively that you give away. And it seems to me that that's lost. And and what we're trying to say is that there that there comes a point when those extractive rights effectively become, you know, undo the benefits that might accrue to kind of agglomeration in in in in in the first instance.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

So for those of you who who who won't have perhaps seen this, there's a very helpful visual in the report, right, which is explains that it's not just the sucking of resources to the centre in a centripetal way, but it's it's also that funneling out, it's the funneling of wealth out of the city. Um What I want to ask now is why Manchester, is there something distinctive about Manchester that has encouraged this model? Can you tell us a bit more about why you chose Manchester and what it represents more broadly?

SPEAKER_04 26:13

Yes. Uh I mean, we chose Manchester because I guess um out of any post-industrial city that you would kind of find in the UK, it best exemplifies this kind of model of property-led development. I think uh there was a time when Manchester had more cranes per square foot than any city in the whole of Europe. And so, you know, it is fundamentally built on, you know, developing the property first and then hoping all of these kinds of economic benefits follows.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

It's really interesting in the report, in the very first paragraph, you say how half of the UK's population live in areas with lower productivity rates and poorer services than the former East Germany, which we were talking about earlier in the podcast as well. And I think that really brings this question of why Manchester down to the places there as well. You've got some quite powerful examples of how this is really impacting people in neighborhoods in Manchester.

SPEAKER_04 27:08

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I I always like to think of it it as as kind of building the skin before the skeleton almost. That you have you kind of have the this kind of epidermis of tall, glistening buildings, but beneath it is a fairly a fairly kind of untransformed and with one or two areas you know, you there are one or two areas where you have kind of some growth in kind of IT and tech skills and things like that. But but ultimately it's still filled with lots of people working sort of sort of five nights in a bar to spend one night in a bar. You know, it's kind it's it still has that very strong kind of you know, not particularly well-paid service sector there, too.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Aaron Powell I mean what's interesting is you show that Manchester relative to the surrounding towns sort of benefits disproportionately from this model. But also people working and living in Manchester don't necessarily benefit, right? Because the wage increases are not proportionate to the growth benefits that Manchester gets.

SPEAKER_04 28:05

Yes. I mean, we're we're certainly showing that there has been I mean it's it's a kind of we're showing a quite a mixed picture. So it's certainly true that the the two main urban conurbations, Manchester City Centre and Salford, have improved relative to the to the national aver national average, and indeed are now above the national average in in terms of productivity. Trafford has has declined, uh Bury has declined, and then you have a whole bunch of outlying towns where the productivity is is kind of quite significantly below the uh the national average. So in terms of this being a model that drives productivity through all of these areas, we're clearly not seeing that. There's then the question of what well that's great for productivity, but I mean productivity is meaningless unless it benefits the people, really. And that's what you should have an urban generation model geared towards. And there what we're seeing is that yes, there are some archipelago's wealth, you see it see it in Stockport and Trafford. But actually, because house prices and in particular kind of rental uh costs have increased so significantly, after you look at the disposable income of people living in the city centre after housing costs and all those other costs that that are incurred, it's it's actually, you know, these are not particularly well-off people.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

Aaron Powell Yeah. We were very fortunate actually a few weeks ago to have Isaac Rose come and talk to us about his book, The Rentier City, which was powerfully telling some of those stories about who benefits and who doesn't benefit from Manchester's model of urban development.

SPEAKER_04 29:41

The idea of of kind of that very mainstream economic geography kind of understanding is that you know all the benefits circulate locally, and so you get this kind of very benign, self-reinforcing kind of wealth flows. But actually, if so much of your your wage is being taken as rent and that rent is being paid out of the city, then you have the potential for those those kind of forces of circulation to kind of sit somewhere quite differently sp in in in a spatial sense, right? They they kind of are locked in in kind of investment circuits rather than consumption and demand and invest and and kind of local investment circuits.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

So it's not necessarily because one of the things certainly suggested by the graphic and by some of the other work you've done is a lot of this goes literally offshore, right? So it's this this is being sucked out of the UK in some cases. But I also wonder to the extent to which is it is it going to London, is it going to other parts of the UK, benefiting the Southeast at the expense of the wider region, or is it really a lot of it the case that a lot of it is offshore?

SPEAKER_04 30:49

So I think a lot of it will go offshore. I think central to this are kind of a whole bunch of allied services around valuation, around audit, around legal advice. And again, there you would see uh money shift. Some of that might stay in Manchester, some of it might kind of go back down to London. So again, you have these kinds of where the gains end up is uh is actually quite ambiguous. Yeah, that's part of the mystery.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

That's really interesting to hear, Adam, because actually this is a collaboration between accountancy and urban studies. And so to both of you, like what is the value of that collaboration? What have you been able to identify and see through the research that you wouldn't have been able to do if you weren't collaborating across these different disciplines?

SPEAKER_02 31:36

Yeah, well, for me, I come from a critical urbanism background. So I think uh learning more about accounting and the methodology has really been important in trying to get the kind of financial logistics that go into actually creating assets, uh, valuing them, making them into something that can be priced and traded if necessary, but also something that can be used to basically capture like an income stream, to capture revenue. Like I think it's really crucial to be able to get inside like the black box of the firm and understand how these power relations are shaped and how they play out through accounting.

SPEAKER_04 32:12

For accounts, we're much more pragmatic and we're much more kind of you have to lift the bonnet on processes of evaluation and actually look at how that is done in a particular time and a particular space, and then look at how money flows around and ends up in particular across corporate structures, from company to company, from company to people, to jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So I think this idea of kind of the marriage of accounting and and urban studies is incredibly fruitful and it it just creates lots of opportunities to study all kinds of new economic and social phenomena, I think.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Aaron Powell It's basically forensic accounting. Where you're following the money. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_04 32:54

It is it is forensic accounting. Until you hit a sinkhole. Until we hit the sinkholes, yes, indeed. Where everything disappears and you don't know what's happening. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

And I was very struck reading this work. I've been involved with colleagues working on issues around urban peripheries. And in some other parts of the world, we see sort of related but quite different dynamics where, yes, there's property-led development pouring into central areas in parts of Africa, for example, but there's also infrastructure-led development pushing out. And it's all in the interest of global capital, but it does have a slightly different effect in terms of that. It's not all going to the centre and being sucked out. But it seems in your case that you know you've got so that something's being sucked in, but other things are being pushed out. I wondered if you could say a bit more about that kind of dynamic.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely been a displacement in Manchester of working class communities and minority communities as well, further out to the peripheries as part of the result of this process. I guess one of the pushbacks that we've had sometimes is that when we're looking at Manchester City Centre, a lot of that was former industrial land or commercial warehouses. So people say, well, where's the displacement? But I think you need to look at the city centre in its relation to its hinterland. So in its relation to uh the inner city estates that surround it and how they're being impacted by this process. Uh lots of places like Colliehurst, for example, in North Manchester are experiencing rent rises. Hume has uh experienced huge gentrification. Uh the think tank Commonwealth has just um constructed a quantitative index actually like showing the extent of um displacement and population turnover that's been associated with this process. So I think it's important to look at how, you know, if you're talking about peripheries, look at how the periphery and the centre structure each other and shape each other.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

It begs the question of how your report has been received because it is quite critical of this model that, as you've just said, is being widely adopted and looked to by other cities.

SPEAKER_02 34:49

Yeah, I mean our work in general is had um it's been I think it's been received as challenging in some quarters for policymakers, but like for others. I think a lot of like I work a lot with um tenant activists and housing groups in Manchester, and I think there's an appreciation for this kind of like, you know, real nitty-gritty work in actually like getting together databases, getting together the stats, and kind of like construction a picture of what's out there. Like, you know, I think there's a lot of interest in like other cities for people to try and use that as kind of like uh counter-accounting, you know, in a sense of actually finding out who owns what, what are they actually doing and who's profiting from it?

SPEAKER_00 35:27

It's interesting to reflect on how it made you feel about your home city. I mean, doing this kind of work, which kind of reveals the entrails of all this stuff going on that's um stripping out a lot of the social and economic fabric of the city. Has it changed your relationship with Manchester?

SPEAKER_02 35:42

Yeah, it's got me a lot more engaged with it. Like I've learned a lot more about the city, learned a lot more about its history, like the different sides of Manchester, um, like a lot of the different dynamics that have gone into making it a place and the histories. So um that's all been really valuable. And I think it's important to try and, you know, get that kind of like in-depth knowledge while we're also trying to think about how these relations fit in terms of the bigger picture.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

So where next?

SPEAKER_04 36:07

So watch this space, I guess. One of the one of the things that we're we're always acc we are accused of, Rich, would be that we are we are critics and don't don't have anything constructive to say. So we thought we would try to think about what a more centrifugal model would look like and what are the features that we can take from existing examples that we we kind of seen it, see it around the year.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

Yeah, actually existing. Actually existing.

SPEAKER_04 36:33

That's right. That's right. And um and we're working with the uh Centre for Local Economic Strategies on what that model uh might look like. Uh and that hopefully should be out relatively soon. And so it's about how do you embed how do you embed the kind of the circulation of income and and investment locally in in the infrastructure and and create a more democratic way of having control over the the kind of city that you want to live in.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

We'll wrap up there. So it's been wonderful to have you both on, helping us think about cities and circulations and flows of capital differently. And um hopefully we'll yeah, I'll hear much more about this soon.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

Thank you. Thanks very much.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

It's a bit like that hokey kokie model of urban development, isn't it, Tom? Where for those of you that don't know, the Hokie Koki was a dance that popularised in the UK around the 1980s, but actually has a really long history back to the 1940s and even for some people back to the 1600s.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

I love your historical knowledge of the.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Anyway, the hokey kokie is a dance where with a group of people, you put your left leg in, you put your left leg out, in, out, in, out, then you shake it all about, you do the hokey kokie and you turn around. And this is what they're talking about. You put the wealth in, but then if it's extracted out and in and out and in and out, no one benefits at all. So with their new model of the centrifugal city, they're going to shake it all around, and that's what it's all about. So, really looking forward to the report on the centrifugal city, which will present this alternative model of urban development.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

Yeah. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to it as well. I mean, for me, it's really interesting just to think about the idea that this is part of a growth model and it's part of this big push for growth, and yet so much of it is being extracted. You know, it's like it just really illustrates how hollow growth can actually be for wider populations when we know that poverty's been rising, when we know that that growth does not spread, does not trickle down, or filter out, or get shaken apart.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And yet that's what actually it is all about at the moment is that we're open for business and the government's just removing any kind of regulation in order to attract that kind of investment. So this report is definitely something that needs to land on Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves's desk.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

Yes, and we will update, of course, if that happens and if we hear more about this report in the future. So uh unfortunately now we're gonna have to wrap up, but before we do, we want to say a little bit more about events and other things coming up that are maybe of interest to listeners.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

Yes, so next week the Urban Institute with the British Academy is organising a conference down in London on ecologies of black living, which will be fascinating and hopefully we'll report back a bit on that. There's also a book launch that's open to the public on the 12th of March from a colleague of ours called Tanzil Shafiq in Architecture and Landscape, who's going to be discussing his book City of Desire, which is all about Bangladesh.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

And that's an open public event that people can join online or in person. Excellent. Uh, and I would also like to point out that in our next episode, which we haven't recorded in full, but we can tell you that there will be a feature on cities and authoritarian politics, which of course is a rising concern around the world today.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Thanks for joining us today. You can give us some feedback by following the email address in our show notes.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

And don't forget, you can follow us and Sheffield Urbanism's work more generally through our LinkedIn, Blue Sky, and now also Instagram accounts.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

Wonderful. See you next time.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

Bye.