The imaginary of the city versus messy realities

• Date: 01 August 2020
• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Hua Wei,Karel Williams,Pamela Stapleton,Anne Stafford
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12227

Received: 2 November2018 Revised: 25 June 2019 Accepted:28 November 2019

DOI: 10.1111/faam.12227

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The imaginary of the city versus messy realities

Anne Stafford Pamela Stapleton Hua Wei

Karel Williams

Alliance Manchester Business School, University

of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Correspondence

AnneStafford, AllianceManchester Business

School,University of Manchester, M44 Crawford

House,Booth Street East, Manchester M13 9SS,

UK.

Email:Anne.stafford@manchester.ac.uk

Thedata that support the findings of this study

areavailable from the corresponding author upon

reasonablerequest.

Abstract

Accounting research on transporthas been narrowly focused on cost

recovery and the consequences of privatization and restructuring.

Accounting researchers have not engaged with the now dominant

orthodoxy about cities as agglomeration argued by urbanists like

Glaeser or championed earlier critical understandings of the limits

of urban planning argued by Jane Jacobs. Working within that criti-

cal tradition, this paper innovates by presenting an exploratoryand

interdisciplinary case study of public transport in the city of Greater

Manchester, which draws on accounting and other evidence. Pol-

icy makers have represented the construction of Manchester’s new

tram system as a major success but we argue that the system repre-

sents an ill-judged investment priority,which had unintended conse-

quences for the whole public transport system. Part of the problem

is classic top down failure to engage local specifics because the tram

network has added a radial system to a city with untidy orbital move-

ment patterns and diverse mobility requirements. This awkward gap

between the imaginary of the policy makers and messy realities has

financialconsequences because the capital costs of tram increasingly

squeeze the ability of the public transport authority to subsidize the

bus services, which carry 10 times as many passengers as tram. The

political question is whether and how this kind of argument and evi-

dence can inform popular politics and shift what is taken for granted

by expertsand the political classes in Manchester.

KEYWORDS

agglomeration, Greater Manchester, trams, transport accounting,

urban studies

1INTRODUCTION

“Developing Greater Manchester’s rapid transitnetwork will be essential to keeping the city-region moving and

the economy growing. The Metrolink tram system is one of Greater Manchester’s major rapid transit success

244 c

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STAFFORDET AL.245

stories. Fromhumble beginnings, Metrolink has expanded to become the largest light rail network in the UK. Ser-

vicesn ow run on sevenlines to 93 stops covering nearly 60 miles. We continue to explore new ways to expand the

Metrolink network and developnew rapid transit schemes as part of the Greater Manchester Transport Strategy

2040 (2016). In the medium-term (to 2030) new Metrolink lines are being considered,along with potential for

‘tram-train’ services. Longer-term options being exploredinclude tunnelled ‘metro-style’ services under the city

centre.”1

Pictures of bright yellowtrams feature in all the photo montages of a new Manchester whose centre has been trans-

formedby the property-led regeneration that began in the 1990s. The Metrolink, inaugurated with one line in 1992 and

subsequently extended, is in these pictures the showpiece investment, which represents the role that publicly funded

infrastructure can play in facilitating that regeneration. The opening quotation is taken from the website of the local

public transport authority.It shows how policy makers represent the story of the tram so far as one of “major success,”

which justifies substantial further investment in new lines and more tramswhich will increase the benefits for Greater

Manchester (GM), a conurbation of 10 boroughs with a population of nearly 3 million.

This paper challenges these assumptions and claims in an article about cities, which is written from a long-

established critical point of view represented by Jane Jacobs and James C. Scott. More than 50 years ago, Jane Jacobs

organized Greenwich Village resistance to the efforts of the New York city planner, Robert Moses, clearing the way

for urban motorways and public housing developmentsat the expense of a “dense, intricate and close grained diversity

of uses.” In her classic book, Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs (1961) argued that such top down planning

was bound to fail because it did not engage the “organizedcomplexity” of cities where the value of lively and interesting

streetsc omes from mixedeconomic uses and social diversity. Jacob’s line of criticism was developed and generalized by

Scott (1998) in his book Seeing like a State about well-intentioned development disasters and misfires, including Soviet

agriculturalcollectivization and planned capital cities like Brasilia. These are attributed to the limited “synoptic view” of

top down knowledge at a distance that operates through thin simplifications and produces unintended consequences

because it never engages with the local specifics of how things work.

At the same time, we should recognize that city planners and urban planning theories are everywhere no longer the

force that they were in the 1950s and 1960s. It is inconceivable that they would now produce something like the 300

page Manchester City Plan of 1945, which aimed to enable “everyinhabitant of this city to enjoy real health of body and

mind” in a city where the Council was to be an active provider of social housing and of much new social infrastructure

like parks while adapting the city to the motor car (Nicholas, 1945). Since the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, and even

more so with the austerity state since 2010, local government in the UK and other high-income countries no longer

has the financial resources, self-confidence, and organizational capability for this kind of ambition. The comparable

city planning document in our own time is the Greater Manchester Strategic Framework of 2016. Here, the Combined

Authority of the 10 boroughs does no more than provide an outline of its zoning decisions by designating the areas

where private developers over the next 20 years can go beyondcity center infill and obtain planning permission for

large-scale edge city developments of houses and warehouses around thec ity’sorbital motorway.

But, in GM, as elsewhere, the building of transport infrastructure and the operating of public transport systems

is the one area where city wide planning, public investment and often subsidized operation, remains important. The

public sector pays for infrastructure and often subvents operationbecause private property developers are reluctant

to invest in public infrastructure despite benefitting from it. Such private investmentwould at best offer low returns,

while any contribution to operating costs would reduce their profits. But transport is not straightforwardlyan area of

local autonomy and initiative, because city authorities are in the UK more constrained in two respectsthan they were

in the 1960s.

First, practically,many city governments have less political freedom of action by the 2010s because they now oper-

ate in multi level systems of governance where, as in the centralized UK, top down control often takes the form of

1https://tfgm.com/future-travel/tram