makeshift

Life’s Great at greenquarter Manchester (www.crosbyhomes.co.uk)

There are many things that I have seen in the last year that have concerned me when it comes to what is being built in the UK, but nothing comes close to what I saw in Manchester’s so called “greenquarter” today.

As part of a planned walk by the collective of artists and architects called the Building Initiative; I, along with several other native and adopted Mancunians participated in the event to walk an area of Manchester and was asked to bare in mind the question: How Yellow is Manchester?.

“The Building Initiative uses the concept of ‘Yellow Space’ as a metaphor for shared social space within the public domain. All around the world, yellow is used as a sign for useful things, shared objects, and public goods. Yellow can be understood as the colour of consensus, utility, and universal access. It denotes what could be called an ‘active neutrality’ – a common ground created through usefulness”

Yellow Press – October/December 2008, Issue 4

The Building Initiative’s position is “if we can say that cities can be yellow, than we would have to admit that in many ways cities everywhere are getting less yellow.”

To paraphrase one participant today; “Manchester is a muddy yellow”.

Part of the walk took us through a new residential development in Manchester called ‘the greenquarter’. The greenquarter site occupies Brownfield land to the north of the city centre and lies next to the River Irk and a redundant railway. The development is made up of a collection of 15 to 20 storey residential blocks that uncomfortably rub shoulders with one another. Not only is it not green in any sense of the word, it is certainly not yellow either. Put simply the greenquarter is a monument to Capitalism and worse, a future slum in the making. The scheme is a perfectly built specimen of the ‘Boom and Bust’ circumstances that accompany the ‘Credit-Crunch’ times we live in.

We stood beside a dull patch of grass which naturally demonstrated the poor levels of daylight available for near ground dwellers living here. Car-parking oozes out of the basement to occupy the first two floors of each tower block. Sandwiched between two slab blocks is a pissing water feature that sprays beneath identikit suicide balconies that overlook this depressing space. Bolted to one of the black steel fences that borders this controlled space from the base of one tower is a sign that reads: “NO DOGS ALLOWED”. I feel glad that dogs are not subjected to such a poor experience, unfortunately for the human inhabitants this is home life – their kennel.

What makes this situation potentially worse is the unsurprising knowledge that the majority of these flats are not selling. High levels of privately funded residential surplus and increasing demands for affordable property makes the possibility of them being purchased by the local authority for social housing stock all the more likely. Unlike social housing though, the private housing market only has to meet building regulations and does not need to satisfy any sort of minimum spatial or social standards, and therefore profit is not only king but it is for country as well. This overwhelming sway for privatised profit is I would suggest, proving to be to the detriment of yellow space as it consumes the public domain and spews up vulnerable built and social environments. That is not to say that profit should be removed from the built equation, but that it should be rethought to factor the importance of making life better for everyone who lives, works and walks their dog. I join the Building Initiative by asking: How yellow is the place you live? and go one further to say: and What are you going to do about it?