When Manchester poet Tony Walsh closed our first Placemaking, Culture & Leadership festival, it felt right.
Not just because Tony symbolises the city’s tradition, resilience and progression, but also because he stands where place and culture intersect.
Our aim has always been to knit together various threads, to reflect the diversity of thought that underpins progressive placemaking in the built environment.
The Pattern 2023 festival felt like both a consolidation of what we’ve been working towards and a promise for what’s to come.
Here’s how the day played out.
Piccadilly: Lost Futures
Our first guest was Jonathan Schofield, an expert city tour guide and author of Lost & Imagined Manchester.
Piccadilly: Lost Futures - Jonathan Schofield
Jonathan took us through the history of Piccadilly Gardens and showed us some intriguing, sometimes startling, concepts for its development that never came to fruition.
These included the wholesale demolition of much of the city’s historical buildings to create an ambitious new city centre in 1945 and a true curiosity from the 1890s involving an elevated hospital building on a metal structure similar to the base of the Eiffel Tower.
These alternative schemes illuminated the ambitions and placemaking challenges of a city in flux. But they also felt pertinent with new plans for developing Piccadilly Gardens imminent.
Placemaking, Culture & Leadership
Next up, the Pattern members led a set of mini-roundtable discussions with the other festival invitees.
Placemaking, Culture and Leadership: Quick-Fire Workshop
These focused on several issues, including:
Conscious decision-making
Re-framing the value of architects
Future-proofing developments
How to educate for change
Social value in the design process
Resilience and adaptation in the face of climate change.
Facilitated by SODA’s Dr Rob Potts, these individual group discussions covered the same topics but from different angles, depending on the makeup of each group.
It was a valuable and thoughtful exercise in harnessing the collective power of diverse viewpoints.
What Makes a Place?
After lunch, Pattern co-founder William Seabrook hosted a panel discussion with Sarie Mairs Slee, Rob Henderson and Martin Stockley.
What Makes a Place - Pattern Members: Sarie Mairs Slee, Martin Stockley and Rob Henderson
Each contributed to a lively discussion about the interaction of people with places and what culture means in this context
Running through this discussion, with contributions from the audience, was the theme of meaning and how to create it in physical spaces.
The conclusions from this?
Placemaking is more than simply housing – now that housing has frequently become more about investments than habitats, it's fundamental to development.
But ultimately, it’s the communities served by housing who must provide the answers.
Purpose and people make the difference between a space and a place.
Is This the Place?
From the moment he recited the first of two poems, “Silver Sparks”, Tony Walsh held the room.
Is This the Place: Tony Walsh in Conversation
And if this first poem, originally written to support the Forever Manchester charity, wasn’t compelling enough, Tony’s personal story amplified it.
He talked of his own and his family's background, his working life and his eventual emergence and success as a poet.
Here was someone who completely embodied the idea of culture as a relatable, progressive and essential part of life itself.
And with Tony’s frontline experience in housing, regeneration and inclusion, this was the perfect way to bring Pattern 2023 to a close.
Introducing his second poem, Tony gave us a third definition of culture – the first two being arts and social behaviour – as something that grows (like the culture in a petri dish).
"Make It Here" was a powerful call to arms and a homage to Manchester as a home to different kinds of industry.
The Promise of the Unfinished
Places evolve and progress. We hope our Placemaking, Culture & Leadership festival has embodied this spirit of change.
Post Festival Chill: Courtesy of The Salutation Pub
Being unfinished isn’t a bad thing. It’s a strength rather than a weakness. It’s a promise of things to come. See you next year.
Our thanks to:
Rob Potts and all the team at SODA
John Schofield
Tony Walsh
The Pattern members.
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