Lecturer Robert Lee in front of the Liver Building _320
Somehow, we should be able to draw them back to our port. "The interface between the urban city and the waterfront is where all the interchange, cultural, economic and social, is symbolised. In a way, by looking comparatively at what other port cities are doing, we can, perhaps, learn ways in which we can improve the relative understanding of Liverpool’s past and maybe make the port more attractive as a tourist location."
You sense that, while he discusses the possibilities of the future, Prof Lee is anxious to express serious worry about how modernisation can happen without sufficient effort being made to embrace the past.
"Another element relates to the way regeneration is connected to what people might term the politics of forgetting. It displaces the reality of what the dock environment was like, even until the 1970s. It involved forgetting that the waterfront was a site of political unrest. I think there is a real danger that, as the regeneration of Liverpool docklands spreads north, we will see very little that in any sense commemorates the reality of what these places were used for and how they were experienced. It is strange because we can remember what life in the dockland was like 20 or 30 years ago."
Is the past being airbrushed?
"I think there is a high risk of that," he says. "Another expression used by academics is ‘spatial purification’. Look at Liverpool One. That is a clean environment. It is more artificially constructed than the reality it displaced. Most urban environments grow through accretion. There are niches, areas, which can be filled-in over time. Many of those niches actually reflect the history of the place – not only the history of different buildings and their architectural importance, but the way people have used those environments. But you can’t say that very much of many aspects of modern regeneration, redevelopment in the port city context. It is unlinked and separate."
In saying these things, Prof Lee has hit the raw nerve between the modernists and the traditionalists.
MANY people argued that Liverpool needed a new image if it was capitalise on the opportunities opened by being this year’s European Capital of Culture. Others still believe passionately that the city’s future lies in the projection of its past, as one of the world’s great ports and the point of embarkation for the European immigrants planning new lives in USA, as well as those who opened the British Empire.
At this conference, delegates will discuss such matters. But some port cities face much greater problems. In addition to the devastation it suffered during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans is blighted by appalling poverty. "American cities struggle to preserve their cultural heritage in the light of declining populations and the scars of post-industrialisation," Prof Eddie Friel, of Niagara University, states in his opening notes.
"The scale of poverty in urban regions such as New Orleans continues to reach levels that are an affront to any civilised society."
Other speakers at the conference itself, and the various "workshops", include Sir Bob Scott, international director of Liverpool Culture Company, who will be examining regeneration in Marseilles, Naples, Liverpool, Gdansk, Istanbul and Bremen; Sir Neil Cosson, chairman of English Heritage; Warren Bradley, leader of Liverpool City Council; Prof John Belchem, of Liverpool University; Prof Xia Shanchen, of Jiaotong University, Shanghai; Dr Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage; Prof Ayodeji Olukoju, of the University of Lagos; and Abha Bahl and Brinda Gaitonde, architects and founders of the Bombay Heritage Walks.
Another speaker is Louise O’Brien, project manager of English Heritage’s Historic Environment of Liverpool Project.
"Liverpool has these issues with heritage within regeneration because of the World Heritage Site," she says. "The World Heritage Site inscription, as well as being about technology, history, architecture, the history of slavery and so on is also about the role of heritage in regeneration. This site is very complex in comparison to some of the others – 136 hectares of prime site with some of the best buildings in the world in it. Yet Liverpool needs to move forward and do things a bit differently as well. Nobody is in exactly the same situation as us, but this conference is about exploring other waterfront cities.
"When you rebuild a city from scratch is heritage the first thing that goes? Every man and his dog has had a conference about regeneration in Liverpool this year, but heritage has very much been an add on. This conference has heritage at its core."
* ON THE Waterfront (November 19-21) at the BT Convention Centre, Kings Dock, is hosted by English Heritage. It is hoped that it will become a regular event with Marseilles as the next host.
