Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City by Andy Spinoza is a fascinating  history of the extent to which my home city has changed since I left to go to university in 1978. It is a combination of personal memoir and political history, the latter seen through the lens of popular music – the famous Haçienda, Factory, Madchester phenomenon etc. The book describes the enormous changes in the built environment of the city centre, with property development a key vector of regeneration, led for much of the period covered by the due of Sir Howard Bernstein as chief executive and Sir Richard Leese as council leader. As it notes, this was often a controversial approach in its specifics, and for all the improvements in the centre remains contested.

The book was particularly interesting for me as I had a bit part in the first, George Osborne, devolution deal as the co-ordinator of the 2009 Manchester Independent Economic Review. Spinoza is dismissive of this effort but he seems to under-appreciate its role in getting the Treasury on board with the devolution journey. Anyway, I worked with the two Sirs and many others to put the MIER together, and I greatly admired them for their dogged and long-term determination to revive Manchester – a project 40 years in the making since the depths of deindustrialisation. The MIER in any case provided a baseline against which the city could judge its future progress. This hasn’t been overwhelming – as we noted in the follow up Prosperity Review in 2019/2020. Manchester still punches below its weight in terms of productivity, still has problems of housing and homelessness, still has great inequalities between and within its constituent authorities, still needs to improve its skill base, and so on.

Yet it has changed so much for the better since I left as all the mills were closing down but the rivers remained polluted and the buildings blackened. More than half the students graduating there now stay in the city region. Andy Burnham’s mayor-ship has helped create a stronger political identity. It continues to be a cultural dynamo (Mike Emmerich, a Manchester eminence grise, has written compellingly about the role of culture in cities). I really enjoyed reading Manchester Unspun for the history told through music – largely new to me. One for all Mancunians and all keen to see the UK’s cities other than London regain their mojo.

For obvious reasons there is a lot of debate about the future of cities, after 18 months when many of us have been stuck at home, and much speculation about whether there will ever be a return to commuting into dense city centres for work. The answer given in Survival of the City by Ed Glaeser and David Cutler is yes – probably. The basic reason is the role face-to-face interactions play in creating economic value, all the more so as increasing automation changes the kinds of jobs left to humans. Creativity, care, tacit knowledge – all require personal interaction. These long months on Zoom have depleted past stocks of social and organisational capital.

The ‘probably’ part, though, is that how successful cities will be depends on some key issues. Foremost among them is managing infectious disease. The book starts with epidemics in history and documents the ways cities have battled their effects, such as clean water and adequate sewage, not to mention the broader provision of good public health systems. For example, drug epidemics and pollution are usually urban blights. However, other aspects of city management are important too. The book singles out crime prevention, adequate supply of housing, and education provision too, for example (not least because the average level of education in a city is a strong predictor of life expectancy for its low income inhabitants even though they are generally not the most highly educated).

In a nutshell, the authors write: “A central theme of this book is that the vulnerability of large, dense, interconnected cities requires an effective, pro-active public sector.” Indeed. And the book ends with a series of recommendations: a “NATO for health”, effective across borders in a way WHO is not; better public health provision; education services that improve opportunities for those who are currently losing out in city life; and (this is a very US-focused book) criminal justice system reform.

I enjoyed reading it, not least because it speaks to my own instincts or prejudice about the role of cities. Lots of great detail too. Who knew the US health system might have been reformed in the 1960s if the then chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills, had not been caugh drunk driving with an Argentinian stripper called Fanne Foxe at 2am, and tried to escape the police by jumping into the river? Or that Bayer used to sell heroin as a safe alternative to opium. Or that ‘watered stock’ literally used to be cattle given a lot of water to drink so that they appeared to be fatter?

I’m talking to the authors on 20th October as part of Bristol’s Festival of the Future City – bound to be an interesting discussion.

All economic growth has occured through urbanisation, but modern industrial capitalism dramatically so. Robert Hall once drew a parallel between economic booms in time (business cycles) and space (cities). This is a preamble to saying I’ve always enjoyed books about cities, or perhaps it’s an excuse for my interest. Recently I polished off The Ghosts of Berlin by Brian Ladd, a sort of history through architecture and urban form. This week it was Why Cities Look the Way They Do by Richard Williams. It argues that cities are the result of the interaction of many different processes occuring through time, and the chapters each explore some of these – culture, war, sex – and also money, work and power. In other words, there’s nothing intentional about how cities look, for all the efforts of the planners. Different cities are used as examples; the book’s focus is mainly big global cities but others such as Liverpool and Portland and San Paolo feature too.

I particularly liked the money chapter’s observations on real estate. It points out that some iconic supposedly residential towers such as 432 Park Avenue in New York are only half occupied and that this is intended. For they are not homes but investment assets, whose owners don’t care if they’re never occupied. Money buys space, and the emptiness is a store of value in the context of economic agglomeration. Of course there’s a poignant contrast with a city like Detroit, which is emptying, but whose spaces mark depreciation, not appreciation, of the asset. The chapter about the culture industry and its self-contradictions is nicely spiky, as is the one about the hipsterisation of industrial buildings in the modern world of work. As someone who grew up in an old-fashioned industrial place, I’m happy with the hipsterisation process; Manchester now is a better urban environment for its humans now than it was in the early 80s even though it’s lost the gritty culture/music scene of that era. But I can understand the regrets for lost authenticity.

Why Cities… has loads of pictures, too. The author is an art historian, so reading it prompts one to look. Very enjoyable.

[easyazon_link identifier=”0745691811″ locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]Why Cities Look the Way They Do[/easyazon_link]