What makes a great town?

Posted By: Wera Hobhouse
Date Posted: 02/10/2009

Just a few hours before it is announced which world city will host the Olympic Games 2016 I want to put down some thoughts about what makes a place a great experience. I just listened to President Obama supporting Chicago, his political home town, to be awarded the Olympic bid. He said: ‘We look like the world’. ' A great meeting place of our diverse cultures'. 

In the last few years particularly while responsible for ‘Strategic Planning’ as part of my portfolio I had many discussions about the issue of ‘place’.

I also happened to just have been to Chicago with my family as part of our great US summer holiday trip. We covered many of the big American cities from North to South, and West to East; Chicago was unanimously our favourite. Why?

First of all it is unashamedly modern, it is wonderfully diverse and it is friendly. Chicago’s architecture is breathtaking, one exciting visual experience after the other.

But what really ‘makes’ the city is the fantastic Millennium Park and the many and varied Open Spaces. You weave in and out of high rise architecture and find yourself in some refreshing breathing space: a plaza with a water feature, a small park or just a widening of the street to break up the wall of buildings. The Open Spaces are as important as the buildings themselves; they bring the whole city together and they provide brilliant opportunities for entertainment and leisure. People don’t just walk through, they stop, they meet, they relax. More than anything they bring people together.

Closer to home in Rochdale, where we are planning to regenerate the town centre, we should very carefully consider not just which buildings should go where and how big they are and what they look like, but how the various new developments will be brought together by the Open Spaces we create around them. The relationship between the buildings, inside and the outside, whether the outside space invites you to stop and spend time rather than just rush through, to create meeting places, which are fun and enjoyable, all these are just as important considerations for a successful town centre regeneration than the actual buildings.

I invite anybody, who reads, this to open their eyes and become more aware of our Open Spaces. Even when the weather is lousy they can provide the most profound sense of wellbeing when they are well designed, meaningful; not just an afterthought but an essential part of the whole.