We love this review by the Institute of Place Management of the findings from High Streets Task Force engagement with partners working to improve 140 town and city centres. We love that this report about “making the most of high street investment” offers empirical evidence about the ‘how’ of town centre revitalisation and most specifically the value of place partnerships.
We love that the report reflects on the learning of the High Street Task Force’s interventions to conclude: “Where we’ve seen high streets managing to reverse decline and plot a route to reinvention, it’s largely been down to passionate, committed individuals from different organisations working together around a common vision for their location. Growing place leadership capacity by helping these people work in more effective partnership structures has been key to getting things done.”
Lack of partnerships and shared vision
The report recounts how such town-wide partnerships are still remarkably rare. Partnerships that help in making the most of high street investment by bringing together police, businesses, community groups, BIDs, health providers, and housing associations.
The report reveals that 37% of all locations visited by the Task Force, lacked the local partnerships and place governance required to deliver change at the high street level. Visiting experts observed a lack of engagement between local authority and other stakeholder groups including residents and businesses. Across all place visits made by the Task Force, less than 40% of local stakeholder meetings included representatives from the community.
Over-reliance on capital ‘silver bullet’
We love how the report uses evidence to call-out how whilst there is some increased recognition by local government about the urgency of issues facing town and city centres, this is not largely being mirrored in new ways of working. The report recounts how the levelling up experience has been that many local authorities have looked to a small number of major capital projects to be the silver bullet’ to transforming their high streets. In contrast the less glamorous and more piece-meal work of animating streets with events, improving public realm and working to diversify the town centre offer fails to get done.
Master-planning mistaken as leadership
We love that the report articulates the limits of a masterplan-led approach to regeneration and revitalisation. The report concludes that the execution of a spatial ‘masterplan’ approach is often mistaken for place vision, leadership and management. We love that the report boldly states that this is not the case “as it excludes the lived experience of the community, the detailed understanding of the dynamics of the centre from local organisations, and the wider curation of place.”
National place leadership deficit
The report clearly concludes that the prospect of progress is not aided by “a national deficit of place leadership and management” because regeneration is enacted through the prism of physical development. Many authorities, the report states, do not recognise the essential need for wider placemaking skills focused on enabling collective working across individuals, departments and organisations who collectively can support renewal.
Partnerships driving the repurposing of places
Lastly, the report comes back to the need for greater collaborative working and states that the most significant omission across many towns and cities is the lack of place-wide, integrated and strategic partnerships. We love the conclusion that such partnerships must be recognised for what they have to be; “engines to drive a set of short, medium and long term actions that individually and collectively work to repurpose places“.
Find out more
People & Places are authors of the Local Government Association’s revitalising town centres toolkit. This toolkit includes practical guidance on the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of town centre revitalisation through work that we lead such as reopening East Suffolk’s towns and planning for recovery in Letchworth.
Read our perspective on transforming public spaces as part of the wider revitalisation of our town and city centres. Our guiding light in this, is to try and bring local expectations and experiences of transforming public spaces, closer together. This echoes the IPM report findings that transforming places needs to be more tactical and engaging, and less about generic masterplanning.
