T14 Liverpool lecture

Liverpool of the past trade and production is slowly disappearing before our eyes. In the past 3 decades in Liverpool Communities have been shifted from place to place and history of Liverpool keeps on being erased every decade or two! Liverpool relives continuous reusing projects and demolitions of older and newer city fabric. Terraced housing and tower block have been demolished and erected and demolished again recently leaving vast unoccupied spaces. It can happen here because Liverpool is almost empty. People have moved and those who stayed are rootless scared communities messed about with by the state. A city needs its history to have a future.

Here the whole process of planning in Liverpool has gone wrong. But why does it still continue to miss the point? Why does the past bureaucracy of Liverpool overrule needs of its people today? Why can’t a house be brought back to use at minimal cost, why isn’t the heritage of Liverpool protected, why aren’t its people asked?

If the city has made a man what kind of man lives in Liverpool? A man who hides behind fences of his house or boundaries of his estate. A man subservient to his fate, to the decisions of the state. A man who feels abandoned, misplaced and lonely in a ghost town with diminishing city centre, with few places to meet. This man asks himself: Who cares?, who will protect us?

In Liverpool artists do something architects haven’t done for a while in this part of the world: they criticize, and they work with people. They help name issues of communities that haven’t been defined yet. They help people cross the boundaries that they grew to accept. People find there can be a common ground. Numerous artistic and community initiatives have taken place in Liverpool in recent years. Boat parade in local canal helped citizens cross the walls of their plots and realize they can do something fun together. Another local group of people bored with the grimness of the vacated dwellings on their street painted the windows and walls of the empty houses, made it theirs made it pleasant. In the most severe of neighbourhoods the brave citizen will spot neon’s of and elephant or a camel shape as drawn by a hand of a child. Here and there a wall rotates in hole of an abandoned building or a house at an angle hangs between rows of detached housing. Initiatives of hope and reflection might cause a reaction or provoke a smile and a thought. When people gather they can make their own fate.