The Competitive City: A Case Study Of Manchester

Manchester is a city that lies in the second most popular urban area in the United Kingdom and the third-most populous metropolitan area, with a population of 3.3 million (‘Manchester’, 2019). The city has been seeking to improve its competitiveness by enhancing productivity and wage rate during the past hundreds of years. According to government’s report (HM Government, 2019), greater Manchester’s ambitious Local Industrial Strategy is designed to deliver an economy fit for the future, with prosperous communities across the city-region and radically increased productivity and earning power. They also claimed that It has been developed from the ground up with local and national stakeholders, including business and social enterprises, trade unions, universities and colleges, and community and voluntary organisations. This essay is going to discuss how the way people in Manchester live is conditioned by the construction of the city, and how residents’ standard of living can be influenced by the attempt to improve the competitiveness of the city, including economic agglomeration, culture creation and city branding.

Agglomeration is considered as one of the ways to promote economic development. A recent study (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2017, p.41.) showed that Manchester has the second most digital-health clusters, finance clusters and processing industrial clusters in England, just behind London. It also stated that out linking is gradually becoming a new form of clustering, where the outlinks can redirect users to the websites of certain financial companies from the original website that the internet users were accessing. Most financial company out linking in Manchester are by company clusters, followed by government clusters and organization clusters; None by university clusters. According to statistics, those clusters did help with the economy of Manchester. The Greater Manchester economy generates £56 billion of gross value added (GVA) on an annual basis (e.g. £56 billion of real value produced in the economy, like national GDP), higher than the GVA of the North East (£45 billion), West Yorkshire (£46 billion), Merseyside (£27 billion), and accounting for nearly 40% of GVA in the North West (New Economy Manchester, 2016). Many urbanists believe that agglomeration saves cost from transportation between firms so that the productivity and the wage rate of that area can be increased, thereby improve the productivity and competitiveness. However, whilst the decision-makers are putting their attentions to economic development, the possible social and environmental problems are likely to be ignored.

The industrial revolution was a historical example of industrial agglomeration, with large amount of manufacturing clusters built within the UK, and obviously within Manchester, as Manchester was one of the major city that drove the industrial revolution. During the industrial revolution, big businesses was risen. Business owners began acquiring massive amounts of wealth by taking risky investments. This certainly brought economic opportunities to Manchester. Also, a new class structure was formed. The Upper class benefited the most from industrialisation whereas the bottom class contributed the most but benefited the least. They were living in the overcrowded industrial areas, sanitary and building safety was not secured. Furthermore, the pollution created by the emission of chemicals from the factories exacerbated people’s health problems even more. Diseases such as cholera, smallpox and typhus killed thousands of people each year during that time period. Factories regulations act were not implemented until 1833. Before then, the government hasn’t taken any actions to guarantee the labours’ safety and compensation for their working accidents (Christine Golden, 2014). The negative impacts that the industrial revolution brought was pretty much a reflection of all the critical outcomes of agglomeration in practice. Nevertheless, urbanization improved transportation. Roads, railways and canals were built. It also encouraged the invention of various skills and machines such as steam engines. Those inventions accelerated human civilization.

Ancoats is one of the biggest industrial heritage site in Manchester. This area has gone through the industrial revolution, the rapid growth of industries in Ancoats from the 1780s made it a magnet for those seeking jobs both in construction and manufacturing (Rose, et al., 2011). As a result, Ancoats soon became an important industrial centre and also a densely populated area, where a lot of Italians immigrated to Ancoats for a more secured life. However, the post-war decline and dereliction issues in Ancoats adjusted the overspill itself. Many new houses and flats were built in Ancoats by the local council. Inevitably, the local area’s population was lower by 1970 than it had been a decade earlier, as the new housing developments were more spaced out, and some former residential areas had been redeveloped for commercial and industrial use (‘Ancoats’, 2019). In 1989, a conservation-led regeneration started in Ancoats. People’s life qualities gradually went up again since then. The old mills and other buildings in this area, such as Beehive Mill, Murray’s Mill and Royal Mill have remained as Ancoats’s landmarks, which constituted the culture of Ancoats. This interesting history of Ancoats led us to another topic——How does the construction and the culture of a city or a region affect the way that the residents live?

When talking about Manchester, the first thing that people came up with might be the Manchester United Football Club. To date, the football club have won 20 League Titles, 12 FA Cup Titles, 5 League Cups, 21 Community Shields, 3 European Cups, one UEFA Cup Winner’s Cup, one UEFA Super Cup, one Intercontinental Cup and one FIFA Club World Cup. Alongside these victories, many of them records, Manchester United are also the highest-earning football club in the entire world and are widely regarded as having the most supporters across the world, more than any other football team (Lavelle, 2017). The football culture in Manchester brought in many advantages. Residents are encouraged to spend their leisure time by watching football matches, which advocates a healthy lifestyle where people are inspired to do more sports, preventing citizens’ health issues such as obesity to a certain extend while increasing life satisfaction. More importantly, football culture has become part of Manchester’s city branding.

City branding is definitely a way of bringing in economic opportunities to a city, and therefore improve the competitiveness since more tourist will be attracted to the city. Tourist are attracted to Manchester because of this ambience of football and the football matches that went on. Manchester’ city branding is also built on its arts, architectures, theatres and music. The many art galleries and museums all are tourist attractions, and good places for local residents to spend time in. These spots, including the buskers on streets have altered the city’s atmosphere and citizens’ lifestyle from busy to relatively relaxing. That is possibly the reason why Manchester has been named the third happiest city in the world, according to a recent survey by Time Out (Hinde, 2019).

Manchester has a very high gay index (relative concentration of a gay population). and a relatively high bohemian index (the relative concentration of artists, writers, musicians and other artistic professionals). Those two indexes are two of the main factor that made up the creativity index of a city. Some people have argued that high tech cities score highly on the gay index, while there is a strong and direct correlation between a city’s success in economic development and the size and vibrancy of its cultural scene according to the statistics (Connelly, 2019). The success of Manchester is inseparable with the diversity and creativity of the people in the city.

The lifestyle of people in a city is directed by the city itself, and the way the city is constructed conditions peoples life qualities, regardless of whether it is agglomeration, cultural creation or city branding. Agglomeration is an idealistic way to improve competitiveness, however the negative social and environmental impact it brings can sometimes overcome its advantages. The industrial revolution was a great example——The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. The creation of cultures can revive a dead city, and change the city ambience completely. City branding brings in economy from tourists, thereby increases local residents’ wealth. Overall, the attempt of improving a cities competitiveness can bring an enhancement for citizens lifestyle, but the decision-makers have to be careful not to lose attention on the possible unfortunate outcomes.