3S RECIPE – Smart Shrinkage Solutions: Stoke-on-Trent (UK) Policy Brief #4. Liveability

This policy brief showcases a successful initiative to improve urban liveability in a shrinking city through repurposing its historical heritage. It shows how old industrial buildings could be used to accommodate new creative arts entrepreneurs and host high profile cultural events. The brief focusses on Spode Works, a 10-acre bone china pottery and homewares production site located in Stoke-on-Trent – a medium-size polycentric industrial city in central England, coping with population loss. Building on local knowledge and stakeholders’ experiences of using the Spode site after the factory’s closure in 2009, this brief demonstrates how a shrinking city can challenge a negative stereotype, raise its profile, and improve attractiveness by generating new creative arts and culture dynamics from within the effectively repurposed old industrial assets. The key lesson learnt is that to enhance liveability one should not drive it down to specific concerns like housing, jobs, or leisure. Urban liveability is about the dynamism and wider significance of a place. These qualities can be improved by a visionary local authority, enthusiastic civil society, and risk-taking private sector partners, all committed to urban regeneration and raising the city profile through the development of local creative capacity for impactful events and knowledge exchange.