A new paper from The Work Foundation says that in ‘distinctiveness’ — the discovery of specialisms and characteristics that help cities build and sustain a cohesive identity — an alternative strategy to the apparent homogenisation of Britain’s towns and high streets is opening up.

Neil Lee, a researcher at The Work Foundation and the report’s author, thinks that the devolution of powers to local cities and regions has been marked by too many copy-cat development strategies, resulting in charges of clone town Britain with uniform cul-de-sacs and chain store-dominated streets. He has found that the most economically and socially successful cities artfully use their distinctiveness to craft a compelling offer to people and companies. Distinctiveness becomes a conscious, explicit strategy of redevelopment.

Plagiarised 

"It may seem a statement of the obvious to say that place-making relies on using points of difference to competitive advantage, but until recently cities have not always had the time or money to establish original strategies which reflect the characteristics of their towns and places."

"And ironically, even local differentiation tends to be plagiarised rather than learnt from: the Angel of the North makes public art flavour of the month one minute; Manchester’s Canal Street spurs a rash of gay-friendly developments; the high-end shops of Leeds make other cities believe lots of boutiques selling candles are the only answer to attracting wealthy, middle class consumers."

Lee says that distinctiveness has maintained - or even increased - its importance in the knowledge economy. Affluence means that people will place more emphasis on consumption, for which they have more time, and on factors beyond purely functional consumption. 

Proximity and face-to-face contact is also the most efficient means of transmission of knowledge. Finally, there is some evidence that these 'knowledge workers' have increased choice of where to work, and so increased mobility.

"While hype around 'flexible working' and labour mobility is overstated, and even knowledge workers cannot locate anywhere, there is some evidence that they are more likely to be part of a global or national labour market," Lee says. "They are more likely to have a range of job offers in a variety of places."

"For the individual city, this makes their distinctiveness more important both from a perspective of advertising to these workers, to entice them to live there, and also for those businesses which are mobile and from a perspective of retention."

Grab the potential 

Distinctiveness works best when the unique history of a location is used to build a compelling proposition. Local authorities need to have both the capacity and the power to grab the potential of distinctiveness and turn it to their advantage.

The idea behind building on what is there is that local economies are - to a considerable degree - path dependent, with the economic history of a city having a profound influence on its future. This happens in variety of ways, including the skills base in the city, the transport links or the reputation. For cities now, the report argues, this means that understanding their history and working with it, rather than continually trying to reinvent their economic base, allows cities to perform. 

The paper argues there are three main types of distinctiveness:

• Functional distinctiveness: this relates to forming a distinct functional niche within an urban or economic system. Successful cities have an economic specialism — Cambridge’s high tech sector or Edinburgh’s financial services industries, for example — that enable ‘knowledge spill-overs’ between clusters of firms in the same or related fields. But they are not wholly dependent on one industry, jeopardising the sustainability of a city. Furthermore, the paper argues cities should not be conceived of as independent entities, but instead thought of in terms of how they relate to other towns and cities within the broader spatial economy.
   
  
• Physical distinctiveness: this relates to the mix of iconic structures, the unique history and the quality of the built environment. To some extent, cities are dependent on their history and location — they are ‘path dependent’. Yet improving the quality of the built environment, mixing attractive buildings and imaginative use of public space, can help make the most of what heritage does exist. Too often, one ‘iconic’ piece of public art is teamed with large amounts of low quality housing, leading to cynicism.
   
  
• Intangible distinctiveness: this refers to the image-making activities of cities as they try and foster an identity. There are three key ways of doing this — signature events and sport — such as Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium; image marketing and branding; and using the creative and cultural sector to raise a city’s profile and suggest a high quality of life (Hay-On-Wye’s literary festival is one example). The paper argues that the best pieces of town hall-derived brand-building, which foster a sense of civic pride and identity, are not merely empty rhetoric, but point to an underlying reality. Glasgow’s ‘(S)miles Better’ campaign redeemed an off-putting slogan with a sustained drive to clean up stained city buildings and a determined effort at regeneration.

Neil Lee says that, like all strategies, distinctiveness needs careful handling. It is easy for distinctiveness to fall victim to gimmicks or to unrealistic thinking. Yet when it is used as a catalyst for regeneration, and used to fit into wider economic strategies, he believes that distinctiveness has the capacity to transform the success of a city.

"The example of Bilbao is one indication of what is possible. Bilbao built the Guggenheim, but it was successful because it was accompanied by the redevelopment of the airport and the building of a new metro system. Place-marketing always works best when it points to an underlying, concrete reality of difference."

Related links

• The Work Foundation
• Distinctiveness and Cities - Beyond 'Find and Replace' Economic Development