Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Newcastle upon Tyne epitomises a bounded mono-centric compact city, with responsibility for urban design and regeneration lying with the local City Council. In the last few decades associated with gradual investment into vacant sites, and underused or undervalued buildings, change in the city centre has been incremental, a process now at odds with the pressures to be more transformative. Achieving this shift in the scale of change raises, however, new tensions, and typifies how adjustments have often to be cast within terms of “innovation”, transformation, or renaissance to be politically and financially attractive. Tensions lie between the desire to attract external capital investment, accompanied by organisations disconnected from the city, and the aim to be more inclusive in the design of the city centre to ensure it works for residents, citizens, and the urban region. In turn, this raises a fundamental question about for whom the city centre is being re-developed.