Dr. John Belcham

Dr. John Belcham, a Liverpool historian and pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool, shared his views on his city—recently coined the 2008 European Capital of Culture—and on urban regeneration during a Walden University residency on June 12.

The speech, delivered in Liverpool, was part of the “Perspectives on the World” series, which brings diverse global views to the Walden University community via the school’s academic residency program. Past speakers include 2008 Winter Session speaker David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, and the April session’s Jeffrey Goldberg, noted author of Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. The next speaker in the series is National Public Radio President Kevin Klose.

Belcham is the editor of Liverpool 800, a definitive biography of his city’s world standing and historical hallmarks written in anticipation of its 800th anniversary in 2007. Belcham asks whether Liverpool, with its latest renaissance and the charged transformation of its city center, is being “mindful enough of discontinuity and change in using history and heritage as a means of regeneration.”

He cites Liverpool’s “remarkable and distinctive culture, character and history” and asserts that Liverpool’s sense of uniqueness from the rest of its country gives the city its edge. Cosmopolitan for centuries, it has overcome isolation, geographic challenges and economic failures, and it has predominantly kept its back turned to Britain and boasted the closest relationship with the United States of any British city.

Belcham carried the residency audience on a detailed journey of what happened in the “boring” first 500 years, then in 1907 (commercial glory) and in the 1950s (a flagging economy rooted in commerce, a depression, war bombings and then industrial diversification).

He rounded out the talk by adding context to the recent energy that’s infusing Liverpool’s revitalization. That effort includes new magnification of its culture and emphasis on the brightened core of the city, in hopes of recasting it as a world-renowned urban “mega-draw.”

“Liverpool was, in (poet Allen) Ginsberg’s words, the center of the creative universe,” Belcham said regarding the city’s beat group years of music and poetry.

“We now seem to be on the cusp of moving into a great period of cultural and creative industries around our 800th anniversary, and being [the] European capital of culture,” he said, a tongue pausing momentarily in cheek.

He cautioned against moving too fast, too naively.

On Liverpool, the historian offered a textured snapshot of time-tested urban regeneration, facing era after era of adversity, error after error that led to declines, and circumstance after circumstance that reshaped the city’s heritage.

His portrait stirred the question: How can a city with Liverpool’s rich history now, during a pulsating 21st century time of reinvigoration, retain a creative, edge city excitement?

Culture and Commerce
In the 1930s, a time in which Liverpool was a municipality that promulgated “culture, commerce and civilization,” but not industry and manufacturing, the city found itself “disabled by the way of its own rhetoric.”

It was a turning point on which Belcham cautions today’s changemakers: So proud of its commercial rather than industrial flair at the time, Liverpool became ineligible for government boosts (from New Deal–type legislation) during the economic depression. The local unemployment rate soared; the city was dominated by a flagging port-based economy. Efforts to restore Britain as the heart of the world’s commercial system now became based in the more manufacturing-friendly London.

During World War II, things improved little. Bombing took a toll as did desperation, with the majority of Liverpool “beginning to feed and clothe itself on the black market,” Belcham said.

By 1957, times grew quite different. Liverpool struck a more modern and progressive note, Belcham said. Confronted by peculiar structural problems in the interwar years, Liverpool made two new impressions, “which,” he said, “tell us a lot, I think, about contemporary culture and character as history.”

It marked the beginning of “Liverpoolers’ self-pity city” and established the scene as one for “irrepressible humor.”

Culture as an Economic Driver?
“In the current exercise in urban renaissance … we’re seeing something very different from what has been tried earlier on. Earlier on, culture had simply been the magnet trying to attract what really mattered to industrial investment, proper jobs. Now culture itself is hailed as the economic driver, as the best means of enhancing graduate retention,” Belcham said, “the best means of reversing the talent and brain drain away from Liverpool.

“And there are tremendous optimistic predictions of what might happen … now that we are Capital of Culture.”

“But,” Belcham added, “I wonder [whether] we really have found a sustainable way forward for Liverpool by putting all the eggs in the cultural and creative industries.

“The current cultural rebranding seems, to me, to be reinforcing, perhaps rather too dramatically, the city center focus of the regeneration agenda, and that’s markedly different from what we were talking about … in the 1950s.” The attempt then, he said, was “at redefining and reviving, rebranding Liverpool … from a policy of outlying industrial diversification.”

Yet, “designer chic now prevails in a city propelled by culturally creative industries, tourism, consumption and city center living,” Belcham said. “Sociologists are already warning of potential culture wars.

“We’re going to end up with a rapidly regenerating and gentrifying urban core surrounded by a ring of intensely disadvantaged residential areas.

“One wonders [whether] this cosmetic makeover of the city center is at the cost of its distinct identity, that ‘otherness’ about Liverpool [that] has been so cherished in the past.”

More Information

• Learn more about residencies by watching “Academic Residencies for Doctoral Students.”
• Read about other “Perspectives on the World” speakers.

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