Greeny News

For all their bright colours and cladding, the new urban regeneration schemes of the last property boom represent a new kind of bleak. By Owen Hatherley

A man-made stretch of water â€" a dock or an industrial canal, is traversed by a steel bridge painted white, forming a distinctive, thin arch. A small but heavily landscaped piazza sits between some vaguely symbolic public art and some new, but already worn-looking buildings. One of them is a museum of some description, clad in shiny metal; but what really dominates the view is the apartment blocks. They're dressed in various materials â€" glass, often green, a pale red brick, with efflorescence dripping from the mortar, anodised aluminium, brightly coloured render, pink stone, and most of all, various clipped-on pieces of wood and steel. Next to them, similar new towers are emerging, their bare concrete frames strikingly minimal compared with the bet-hedging display around.

A few other people are sitting near me, sipping coffee in the branch of Costa Coffee next to the gift shop. It makes little difference where I am â€" at Clarence Dock in Leeds, or Liverpool One, or Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, the Tyne Quayside, Glasgow Harbour, Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, Greenwich Millennium Village in London. But why am I here?

The short explanation is that I have become intrigued by the fate of "urban regeneration" in the light of the financial crisis; what the speculative redevelopments of inner cities look like after the debts have been called in. They have become the new ruins of Great Britain. These places have ruination in abundance: partly because of the way they were invariably surrounded by the derelict and un-regenerated, whether rotting industrial remnants or the giant retail and entertainment sheds of the 80s and 90s; partly because they were often so badly built, with pieces of render and wood frequently flaking off within less than a year of completion; but partly because they were so often empty, in every sense. Empty of architectural inspiration, empty of social hope or idealism, and often empty of people, Clarence Dock and Glasgow Harbour had a hard time filling their minimalist microflats with either buyers or buy-to-let investors.

The Cardiff Bays and Clarence Docks weren't postmodernist, not in the old sense of jokey historical references and Las Vegas borrowings, and they weren't suburban, low-rise and car-centred like the developments that proliferated after Nicholas Ridley tore up the urban planning laws. This was modernism, of a sort.

But while the modernism of council estates, comprehensive schools, "plate glass universities", co-operatives and libraries was driven to a large degree by socialist commitments and egalitarian politics, these entertainment centres, luxury flats, city academies and idea stores were driven by exclusivity, tourism and the politics of "aspiration".

In stylistic terms, the differences were even more marked. The blocks of flats clad themselves so as not to look like the repetitive concrete-framed tower blocks they actually were; the office blocks did the same via the "barcode façade", a ubiquitous method of making a glass box look vaguely irregular. Meanwhile, the "showpiece" buildings, such as Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, Michael Wilford's Lowry, Capita Percy Thomas's Cardiff Millennium Centre, Norman Foster's Sage Gateshead or Hamilton Architects' atrocious Liverpool Pier Head Terminal, appear to have been designed from the outside in, shapes and logos waiting around for appropriate functions to be conjured out of them. If form once claimed to follow function, then here form was the function â€" to be eyecatching, to attract tourists, to get the cameras snapping. If Modernism was about revealing structure, showing the workings, and attempting to transcend the divide between architect and engineer, now the architect draws a shape and asks the engineer to make it stand up.

It's possible to argue over the appropriate terminology for this stuff. Some have floated Iconism, Neo-Modernism, Bilbaoism. I prefer to call it Pseudomodernism, a modernism of concealment, a stylistic shell left after all the original social and moral ideas have been stripped out. The most droll prospective term came from Rory Olcayto of the Architects Journal, who calls it Cabeism, after the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the aesthetics quango that was, appropriately enough, headed at its inception by a property developer, Stuart Lipton. Cabe's stock recommendations for mixed use, mixed materials and mixed heights may have created a whole new architectural aesthetic by itself (Olcayto meant it as a compliment, but it could just as easily have been a denunciation). What was especially striking was how quickly these places changed, once you left the icons and looked around a little â€" in short, how little of them ever actually featured in the pictures published in architecture magazines. For instance, photographs of Gateshead's Baltic, a generous and well-designed arts centre, almost invariably crop out the Baltic Quays flats, designed in a vague approximation of the Baltic's colour scheme.

There is little point in patronising these places. Over the last 15 years there have been countless articles in which London-based architecture critics descend on some benighted northern city and crow with triumph that "culture" has been brought to the proles via amorphous centres for this and that. As much as these new spaces were a means of ensuring that unproductive spaces â€" empty docks, industrial sites, former cotton mills â€" could be put back into profitable service, this was also a serious attempt to claw back some sort of civic pride after the disastrous results of Thatcherism across the inner cities of urban Britain. Great cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Cardiff and Glasgow were keen to proclaim their greatness once again, after decades during which they had been deliberately depopulated, with even their inner cities suburbanised â€" by both left and rightwing local and central governments.

The lack of confidence behind this apparent resurgence becomes obvious when you look at the results. The European equivalents of these schemes â€" the Céramique in Maastricht, say, or HafenCity in Hamburg â€" serve the same pecuniary interests and display a similar pseudomodernist aesthetic, but are scrupulously put together, expensively detailed, with a great deal of money and thought put into the design of the public space.

Here in the UK, with a tiny handful of exceptions, we've been keen to parcel off these spaces to the cheapest available firms, and to let the property developers lead the way on what was, for the most part, publicly owned land, out of the fear that they and their money might disappear if they were in any way challenged. In Leeds, especially, the result is astoundingly cheap-looking architecture, with the developers assuming we wouldn't notice the meanness and cheapness if they put a wavy roof on top and plenty of contrasting materials on the façade; the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment found that in many cases the "luxury flats" in these "stunning developments" were well below the Parker Morris minimum standards established for council housing in the early 60s.

The architects hired veered from local developers' favourites â€" Benoy, Carey Jones, Capita, Aedas and a variety of other faceless megafirms â€" to the occasional famous name hired from outside, usually Norman Foster.

The city architects who could once have stemmed the tide of dross have long been sacked. The last major city architect was, ironically, employed by Leeds, whose new towers, such as the 37-storey halls of residence Sky Plaza, designed by Carey Jones, are perhaps the tackiest of them all. The municipal architect John Thorp retires this month, and the council does not plan to replace him. What we've lost is clear. Leslie Morrison, president of the Society of Chief Architects of Local Authorities, puts it pithily: "Things get approved for political reasons if you don't have a design architect at the top to say 'That's rubbish; go back to the drawing board.'" Since few of the architects have much local knowledge, each "unique", "visionary" and "stunning" scheme appears strangely similar. This homogeneity, ignoring the particularities of these very different cities, is reflected even in the modishly chic one-word names â€" there are several Pinnacles, a fair few Icons, even a couple of towers called Strata â€" one in Cardiff, the other in the Elephant & Castle.

There is a windswept bleakness about many of the new enclaves, but it's a curious new kind of bleak. While the ruins of the postwar settlement's architecture â€" the under-maintained estates, the yawningly wide plazas, the vertiginous new spaces of towers and walkways â€" elicited aesthetic responses in post-punk and electronic music that matched the starkness, power and modernity of their setting, how do you respond critically to something that is trying so desperately not to offend?

One feature I noticed almost everywhere was the fences. Around the sites of Sheffield's "New Retail Quarter", the "Heart of East Greenwich" and practically the entirety of central Bradford, we found brightly coloured fences covering up uncompleted schemes, the wasteland behind carefully screened off; various means were employed to distract attention from the collapse. In Greenwich, a regeneration hole was hidden by subsidised graffiti, dramatising the area's putative transformation from chemical works to the home of the Millennium Dome.

The hole in Bradford concealed the foundations of a shopping mall, part of a Will Alsop masterplan that intended to flood a city centre lacking in picturesque water features. The fence was emblazoned with all the propaganda of regeneration â€" "Café Culture", "Urban Energy". When I was there, somebody had scrawled the message "BEST AMONG RUINS". The planned shopping district has been indefinitely shelved, turned into a municipal park, albeit a temporary and slightly shabby one. It would be very tempting to claim this as a small victory, an example of failure transformed into something worthwhile. Yet its first appearance in the national press occurred when the English Defence League staged a "static demonstration" there in August â€" a first sign of the horrible weeds that might be growing out of the ruins.