IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

In 1999, the Urban Task Force, led by the architect Richard Rogers, published Towards an Urban Renaissance. Celebrated by the architectural press and the New Labour government that commissioned it as a landmark publication, this wide-ranging report reinforced an emergent sense that design-led developments could meaningfully contribute to the quality of people’s lives and stimulate the regeneration of urban areas. Whilst a relatively large body of scholarship has coalesced around Towards an Urban Renaissance, studies have primarily focused on unpicking the impact that the report had on British towns and cities in the early twenty-first century. Instead of looking forward in time from the report’s publication, this paper looks backwards, examining the pre-history of the urban renaissance in the 1980s and early 1990s. It does so through the study of the career of Richard Rogers. As John Prescott acknowledged in the preface of Towards an Urban Renaissance, Rogers was ‘not only an architect of global reputation, but an evangelist of urban renaissance’. Tracing Rogers’s interconnected activities as a practising architect, media figure, public intellectual, and political operator, this paper demonstrates that Rogers had laid the groundwork for the emergence of the idea of the urban renaissance before New Labour were swept to power in the 1997 General Election. As a result, it also argues that Towards an Urban Renaissance should be seen as part of a long-term shift in the relationship between architecture and politics in Britain.