Brian Robson was one of the most distinguished economic geographers of recent times. He hailed from the North East and after starting his career in Cambridge he came to Manchester where he remained for the rest of his life.
He founded the Centre for Urban Policy Studies at the University of Manchester in 1983, which he ran until his death in 2020. In a career spanning 50 years Brian pioneered new methodologies in urban research and dedicated much of his life to work on his adopted home city of Manchester.
When I was asked to give the second memorial lecture in his name, there seemed an obvious choice of topic: The economy of Manchester and the changing nature of the way it has been researched since the 1970’s.
The lecture was structured around a series of key points, based on UK and UK sub-national research, alongside a detailed reading of the literature on economic geography and city regions.
The twelve take aways are as follows:
The UK has underperformed internationally for decades. That underperformance gap underpins all that follows.
Shockingly poor productivity performance has made the task of any purpose economic policy of redistribution much more difficult. We have had an unplanned experiment in de-growth. Its results are not ones we should welcome.
There are really very large differences between the different parts of the UK economy including between regions, and whatever we have been doing has not worked albeit that we have no counterfactual for the policies we have tried.
There is no consensus view on the primacy of cities or regions but a clear view that the towns led agenda makes no economic sense.
Our objective given the hyper centralisation of our country should be to find a way to create an unignorable evidentially based counterfactual that demonstrates the ability of subnational governance to make a meaningful difference to our economy and polity.
The profound nature of deindustrialisation of Greater Manchester is something that needs to be borne firmly in mind when considering what happened next. It has been a long haul back.
Manchester consciously tried to accelerate the process of recovery with a highly unusual investment model in the development of a new approach. It is too soon to know if it worked.
More research is needed but the data seem to suggest that Greater Manchester’s model can be associated with somewhat positive impacts on the towns around the city region. How much of the better performance by Manchester is due to the city’s monocentricity, industry mix or city led model is not known. If it is the latter, and if other places were to try the same approach with similar observed outcomes, it would be possible to postulate that just because cities are situated in deprived regions, it doesn’t follow that a regional approach is needed.
There are increasing inequality between different parts of the city. This seems likely to have been driven by inadequate supply of housing. The argument that policy in East Manchester and Hulme has driven gentrification is not consistent with the evidence we have.
If we are to raise our game, we need to understand better what we can learn from elsewhere in the world. We need to dig deeper and broader into the trends and our understanding of them, in this country and in the city. All this is to enable us to shape its future to the maximum extent we can.
Manchester has been a unique, long term, broad and deep experiment in place making. My contention is that this great experiment has been caricatured in the literature and under-researched even while policy of much less significance takes up years of research time.
For research to be actionable it needs to be convertible into plausible propositions, policy ideas and then plausible business cases. We need trials and we need evaluation. All the more so if we want to understand how businesses work in order to deliver sustainable, inclusive growth for local and regional economies. For sure it is the job of public institutions to write the business cases but who creates the ideas for policy experiments? Academics, policy people and businesses. Everyone has a role to play.
The take ways throw new light on the relative success of Manchester’s economy but also ask searching questions for policymakers and academics alike. They invite us to reconsider what we think we know about this most celebrated case study of urban renewal and to dig deeper to help us understand it better. Above all, I conclude, we need to keep focussed on what happens next. Recent city regional governance and English devolution may have Mancunian roots. But the opportunities to be seized and challenges to be overcome are formidable. It will take an effort from everyone involved in policy, politics, academic and other research as well as business and the community deliver on them. The lecture was, in the end, a call to action.
The full lecture notes can be accessed here, and a video recording is available through this link.
I hope they stimulate thought – if you would like to discuss the points I made in the lecture please get in touch