Planning and placemaking
The roundtable opened with a discussion on the ways science and technology-focused developers, and city planners, were working together to create innovation districts, or quarters; and whether the thinking would change post-pandemic.
“Birmingham is in the process of defining the city’s knowledge quarter boundary. I use the term loosely because knowledge should have no boundaries. Any border needs to be porous to allow the free-flow of ideas and talent.
They added that that area which encompassed the new HS2 station, Birmingham Metropolitan College, the children’s hospital and the Innovation Birmingham campus was home to 13 academic, clinical, public and private institutions.
And that the right approach to placemaking, needed to be inclusive and iterative.
Planners, and policymakers, from government down to local councils, are keen to learn from the successful innovation districts around the world, from Barcelona to Boston.
Another attendee agreed, noting: “The direction of travel for urban regeneration in the Midlands has life science and technology at the fore.
It was highlighted that Birmingham is lagging behind cities like Nottingham, with the latter rolling out 40 miles of tram line, in the time taken to lay two miles in the West Midlands’ city.
One expert asked whether Cambridge’s model of establishing the transport infrastructure and housing for sci-tech campuses, before the labs and R&D spaces, was a model to follow.
They said: “When AstraZeneca relocated to Cambridge, they looked at a dedicated transport solution first, linked to where these knowledge workers were going to live. The culture and placemaking elements came next, followed by the investment in the lab and offices.”
Opinions were mixed on whether this model could be extrapolated to other cities: “Cambridge is only about six miles in diameter and it’s already at the point where you could say it’s starting to overheat in terms of capacity.
"There are obvious lessons to take from Cambridge but planners there haven’t been faced with the same challenges of scale and complexity that present in other, larger cities. The residential piece needs careful thought. It must account for the range of demands from knowledge workers at differing points in their lives. The 24/7 vibrant mix of work and culture in close proximity might be what younger knowledge workers want. But others, perhaps looking to settle down and start a family, might put less emphasis on that; instead wanting a good supply of housing, and amenities which appeal to children.”
