Traditionally, Living Over the Shop (LOTS) was the obvious thing to do. Before the era of mass pubic transport, commuting was limited. What could be easier than rolling out of bed, downstairs and into your work area? Students of the history of architecture will no doubt have records of several types of housing that allowed workers, their families and employees to live and work together.
Living Over the Shop in Sheffield Town Centre
Speaking of students of architecture, I met some this week on Fargate in central Sheffield. They were displaying some of their work on uses for empty buildings in the city centre. They have a Facebook page, Fargate Co-Studio 2016. (I don’t know how long this page will be live, so if you are a historian of twenty-first century local economy bloggers, please don’t be disappointed if you don’t find it!) If it is there, scroll down to see some of the students’ work.
Their work is most welcome. We need a new generation of people able to re-purpose our city centres and indeed all the neighbourhood centres in our cities. We don’t appreciate how much unused space is above the shops we use. Look carefully at the shops in the photos on the Facebook page, find Paperchase and four or five stories above it are empty. Julian Dobson covers this issue in his book “How to Save Our Town Centres“. (This link is to one of three posts, go to Book Reviews and scroll down to find the others.)
Consulting with the Public and Communities
The students were asking for comments. It is really hard to take in complex ideas on the fly. You can see the level of detail in the students’ plans on the Facebook page. To be asked to take this in and then respond constructively was a challenge.
Furthermore, when I got home and read their leaflets I discovered similar displays and activities were live on that one day in four other areas! If I had known I would have followed their route and had a look at all their displays. I still might not have had much to say, I like to have some time to ponder stuff before commenting.
So, simpler summary displays and more time would be really helpful and is likely to result in more constructive responses from the public. The originals could still be available for inspection – they were beautiful to look at but hard to digest!
I don’t know the detail of the consultation that went on before the public displays this week. However, yesterday I attended a conference about Co-Production, put on by the University of Sheffield’s Social Sciences Department. This included some exciting models for participatory work between academics and communities, many of them in Sheffield. It would be good to see some collaboration between these departments (or even better to find out it is already happening). I shall blog about the co-production conference some time soon.
In summary, I liked what I saw and believe with good relationships with local groups, some ideas might get off the page and become reality. The challenge is to move from an academic exercise to something that makes a real difference.
Inter-Disciplinary Solutions
Picking up my comment about co-production, let’s take it further. Julian Dobson describes the need to integrate several factors to regenerate urban centres. You will see some of them if you follow the above link to my review of his book. If we are going to regenerate our city and neighbourhood centres, we need plans that support all aspects of the local economy.
Certainly way back in the fifties and sixties, small retailers would live over the shop. It was the natural thing to do. I suspect it was the new supermarkets that reduced the numbers of traders living over their shops. Maybe the increasing mobility of populations and aspirations to live in leafy suburbia also led to its decline.
Even earlier, “over the shop” meant “over the workshop”. Goods would be manufactured, perhaps to order, in the same buildings where they retailed. In some times and places, the master (or mistress) would own a whole block. Family and employees would live together and share communal facilities. Clusters of such “shops” would form the agora, the marketplace where the public gathered for business and just about every other activity.
My father’s grandmother owned a hotel (technical name for a doss house apparently) and a nearby row of terrace houses. They are now beneath University of Sheffield buildings, having been bombed during the war. My father remembered as a child carrying buckets of water up the stairs in the hotel. The family business is not such an ancient practice!
New Models for LOTS
What I am driving at is the need to build new models that allow for complexity of human interactions. You will note I’ve introduced Living Over the Shop under my general heading of “Resources for the Local Economy”. My aim is to build a database of ideas that will help regenerate local economies. It is unlikely any of these approaches will suffice alone.
The architects must design spaces that accommodate both contemporary and future developments in the local economy. Communities are not just spaces but essentially the relationships within them. Financial arrangements between people form these relationships, as much as the nature of the spaces they occupy.
This is why as living over the shop opens up new spaces, we also need to see new financial arrangements that allow money to flow in new ways around our towns.
How can Universities work with local people to support and develop local economies?