Latest News | 4 June 2020
Imagineering the city
Lathams
Blog Author: John Forkin – Managing Director, Marketing Derby
Today, Marketing Derby releases a brief film, we’re calling it Lockdown Derby.
Produced by Bondholder, ‘AV IT Media, we wanted to capture a unique moment in history – a ghostly city, laid empty in the midst of a global pandemic.
Covid-19 led to the shutdown of cities across the world and there is something strangely eerie in seeing streets and buildings lacking people.
Bondholder Derby City Council has established an Economic Recovery Task Force and the city centre stream has quickly recognised that incremental evolution will not deliver renewal.
Research, carried out for the group by Bondholder Rigby & Co, shows a potential vacancy rate in central Derby averaging a disturbing 30%.
To recover, Derby is going to need, what Disney calls, ‘imagineering’ – a case for this approach was made at a Marketing Derby event by Dean Jackson from Bondholder HUUB.
Decades ago, Disney mashed the concepts of imagination and engineering – ‘imagineers’ – employing people to dream up (and deliver) new experiences that drive custom to their attractions worldwide.
I believe Derby city centre has a future but it must be radically ‘imagineered’, based on creating an experience that attracts customers.
Urbanisation has been the global direction of travel for millennia and, whilst some argue this will now change, I beg to differ.
Cities are urbane centres of ideas, culture, trade, commerce and yes, contagion.
The cocktail of disease and density is nothing new – any cursory glance of history reveals repeated patterns of plague – yet, always the city survives, more than that, the city reinvents and thrives.
So, far from being the end of the city, Covid-19 may be the catalyst for a new chapter.
UK city centres have been in post-industrial decline for decades, and for every regeneration pin-up like Manchester, there are far more like Middlesborough, struggling to survive.
And, let’s be honest, Derby is far from immune. Our city centre stumbled its way through the past 50 years and by the close of the 20th century a dearth of investment led to Derby becoming a place of convenience not choice.
The decline has not been linear, for example the injection of £340m by Westfield in 2007 raised footfall from 16 to 25million people, and in 2016, the revival of the historic Cathedral Quarter led to it winning Best British High Street.
However, whilst other investment has brought many new cultural and leisure facilities, the 2008 crash limited any hoped-for trickle down.
Now, Covid-19 has accelerated – what deep in our hearts we already knew – the need for a radical overhaul of Derby city centre, a repurposing and diversification to rely less on retail and truly become a place to live, to work and to visit.
Bondholder Lathams, the architecture and urbanism group, recently identified central Derby as having a ‘frail heart’.
It’s no surprise, therefore, to hear the respected Centre for Cities think-tank designate Derby as having a ‘weak’ city centre. This is because there are too few people living and working there and a healthy centre cannot rely on weekend spending.
So, if we care about our city, then we need to start listening to our potential customer to better understand their frustrations and desires, and then to shape the place accordingly.
Our primary customer base is the 750,000 people who live within 30 minutes of the Market Place, though we must also have an eye towards the 4.6 million who live within a one-hour travel time too. Derby’s potential market is massive. As a comparator, Nottingham has only 3m people living within one hour of its centre.
There are positive straws in the wind. Why did 125,000 people come into the city centre to see the poppies at the Silk Mill? Or, 50,000 descend on Bondholder Derby Museums to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition? Or, the 100,000 come to see the Knife Angel at Bondholder Derby Cathedral?
These, and many more, provide glimpses of something different and unique, an experience that cannot be achieved at home, nor in a suburb or business park, something only city centres can do, as clusters of commerce, culture and community.
Let’s put it like this; had the Knife Angel been located at say, the Wyvern Retail Park, the experience would not have matched that of its position by the Cathedral.
Core to our challenge though is that of perception. And, perception of place is driven by people’s experience – good or bad, fair or unfair – so, to fix perception we must fix experience.
The jewels in our crown – and we do have plenty – are pockmarked by too many empty plots and shops. The Task Force recognises that Derby is too grey, with not enough green or blue.
However, in moving towards a post-Covid recovery we must ensure we do not throw out the baby with the bath water.
We still need to support the delivery of our major strategic pipeline – the residential projects at Castleward and the Nightingale Quarter, the mixed development at Becketwell and others – but we also need to bring forward small-scale, quick wins that provide confidence and give insights into a different place.
In short, we urgently need to pro-actively curate the city centre experience.
The first challenge is to win the hearts and minds of those people who live in our immediate hinterland, which brings me back to Disney and their imagineers.
Maybe the City Council should nominate a Director of Experience and Team Derby create a cadre of imagineers?
They could be tasked with creating a place where the experience is not only that of being clean and safe (on any Maslow measure this is number one) but is also pleasant and attractive, planned and co-ordinated by partners working together.
By this, I mean a city that is human, customer-centric, quirky and ever changing; a city full of imagination and surprises, parklets, pop-ups and meanwhile uses. Derby is a compact, walkable ‘life-sized’ city that should be a tree-lined, well-lit, pleasurable neighborhood of choice for 750,000 people adaptive for the future.
As the UK Capital for Innovation we have excelled in imagination and engineering for centuries –as imagineers. We know we have the right talent living and working in our communities today and we now urgently need to draw on them more than ever before.
To enable Bondholders to engage and input into the city’s recovery, we are establishing the Derby Economic Development Advisory Group (DEDAC) which we will draw on for perspectives, focus groups and the like. If you wish to join us then please email simon.kirk@marketingderby.co.uk.
