By Kate Rogers

Before the emergence of the coronavirus in the UK, high streets ups and down the country were already feeling the strain of the continued expansion of online shopping, as well as rising business rates. The traditional high street had already, long ago, morphed into shopping districts of big chain brands, often with multiple franchises replicated on the same street. But those big brands have been critically hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, with many filing for administration in the face of lost revenue during lockdown. In the short-term, the countless jobs lost is the most important issue to tackle. Longer-term, though, could these shifts mean that a more independent high street might return in our recovery?

Across the country, footfall on major high streets dramatically decreased after non-essential shops were forced to close back in March – some believe by over 80%. This has clearly taken its toll: as of early June, UK high street brands Oasis, Warehouse, Debenhams, Cath Kidston and Laura Ashley had filed for administration. Although non-essential shops are slowly reopening, any recovery or return to ‘a new normal’ will be slow considering social distancing measures are needed for the foreseeable future. 

At first glance in Liverpool, the telling signs of the pandemic are clear to see. Some areas of the city that are usually busy with shoppers – such as Church Street – stand deserted, with shuttered shops and barely anyone to be seen.

But this isn’t the full story. Liverpool’s independent business scene has soared in the last decade, with many choosing to dine, shop, or drink locally and independently – and an influx of new independent businesses have established themselves in the city.

At the heart of this resurgence has been the platform Independent Liverpool. Established in 2013 by David Williams and Oliver Press as a blog encouraging people to support local independents, the initiative soon grew and rolled out a discount card to use in independent businesses across the city. They have since gone on to release an app which lists and maps over 100 independent shops and eateries across the city, promoting their use. 

Williams and Press also went on to found indoor street food hub Baltic Market. Since its launch in 2017, it has enjoyed enormous success, allowing small independent food businesses to use the space to help them grow effectively as well as help promote the thriving independent scene. Many vendors who were established here have gone on to open their own restaurants – further expanding the independent community into other areas of the city.

Liverpool’s rise in independents highlights a changing relationship on the high street. Increasingly, people tend to be drawn to the independent sector, which often coincides with hyperlocal high streets, as it offers something unique which a lot of chain-brand major high streets cannot give. People grow more intimate, loyal relationships with such independent businesses, and this has played a role in why many communities have continued to support independents during this lockdown period in any way they can. And independent businesses have adapted and responded with innovative offerings and survival strategies such as new online shops, free local delivery, gift vouchers and more.

The pandemic period has magnified this change to support independents. Whilst the streets of Liverpool may be quiet, Independent Liverpool has continued to advocate the importance of supporting local independent businesses across the city. “In true independent and scouse fashion, the independent scene has blown people away,” says Williams. “Places have adapted, repurposed, reopened in extremely safe ways and the support they’ve seen has been quite emotional. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a Disney book, so the happily-ever-after you’re looking for won’t be applicable to many. But one thing you can guarantee is our city’s indies won’t go down without a fight.”

Casa Italia is a well-known and loved family-run restaurant in the city centre. “We have pivoted our restaurant to a delivery business entirely and we did this overnight one week before lockdown,” says owner Arran Bordi. “Our customers have been excellent and supported us by ordering takeaways and being very understanding when things go wrong.”

Although closed, not-for-profit community bookshop News From Nowhere has been delivering local orders by bike, helping people browse bookshelves via social media, organising a supporters’ credit account and offering lucky dip book parcels; due to massive local support it has ‘seen an unprecedented amount of orders lately’. Community-owned bakery Homebaked, shuttered in lockdown, launched a temporary frozen pie delivery service called ‘Awaybaked’.

These independent businesses have been able to survive this unprecedented time due to their appeal to the local audience which they have established. The loyalty of their customers, coupled with the adaptation of their businesses by harnessing the use of the internet has proved to be integral to their survival.

There is certainly a change ahead for the UK’s high streets. The real impacts will only become clear after all businesses are back up and running. But what this period of crisis has shown is that independent businesses have gathered large amounts of support and people’s loyalty has proved to be invaluable, sparking real hope for a resurgence of the independent high street. 

Kate Rogers is a university student and Liverpool-based writer

As part of our interview series with people working to support inclusive cities, we talk to Cecilia Vaca Jones and Patrin Watanatada of the Urban95 initiative

Based in the Dutch city of The Hague, Cecilia Vaca Jones is programme director and Patrin Watanatada is knowledge for policy director at the Bernard van Leer Foundation, an independent foundation that works internationally to improve the health and wellbeing of babies, toddlers and the people who care for them. The foundation’s Urban95 initiative is dedicated to reimagining cities from the height of an average three-year-old (95cm), and working with urban planners, designers and policy-makers to integrate early years thinking into improving city environments. 

Why did you decide to focus on making cities better for babies and toddlers? What was the spark that started it?

Cecilia: Four or five years ago, we realised that urbanisation is happening so rapidly that cities represent a unique opportunity to support babies and their families to thrive. How can we ensure that cities scale the opportunities of safe, healthy and stimulating places – with opportunities to learn, create, imagine, play and grow – across all neighbourhoods to reach as many families as possible? 

Patrin: The early years are when the brain is developing most rapidly – babies and toddlers are forming neural connections at the rate of 1 million per second! The way these connections form sets the foundation for good health and learning in later childhood and adulthood. This is partly genetic and partly shaped by what a child experiences. And a lot of it happens by the time a child turns two. For optimal brain development, young children need healthy food, protection from harm, and – crucially – plenty of opportunities to play and be loved. 

We think cities have a big role to play in ensuring babies get these things. Traditionally, governments have focused on the role of social services, health and education departments in supporting healthy child development. Urban95 works with city leaders, planners, designers, advocates, communities and anyone else who influences city life to look at the way that the entire city – including, for example, public spaces and transportation – affects the way that families with young children live, work, play and move through cities, and what that means for healthy child development. 

How does Urban95 work to understand and respond to the needs of young children in cities around the world?

Cecilia: We know that small children learn through positive interactions, play and new experiences. So we support our partners to identify and scale solutions that promote healthy child development through the built environment or by addressing things that affect their lives in the public realm – like air quality, heat, or street violence. Every city is unique, but many solutions can work in different contexts. For example, public spaces in any city can be turned into places for young children to play safely while exploring nature. Here’s a wonderful guide for play spaces for 0–3-year-olds by our partner Superpool, an Istanbul-based design studio.

Patrin: Everything starts with empathy and data. One of the first challenges is that urban planners and designers don’t necessarily see or think about the particular needs of young children and their caregivers in their work. Public spaces and playgrounds are often set up for older kids or adults. Transportation tends to be planned for the needs of peak-hour commuters travelling straightforwardly from home to work to home, versus the needs of caregivers who might be going from home to childcare to grocery store to job and back at odd times.

So developing empathy for this demographic group is an important first step. We’ll take people on walks through the city holding metre sticks with a mask at the 95cm mark they can look through, or carrying 10kg bags of rice to simulate carrying a toddler. Or we’ll ask them to draw their childhood journey to school and a recent journey as a caregiver. We’ve asked people to try breathing at 4x the speed of a normal adult – the pace at which a newborn baby breathes, which means they take in 4x as much air and all its pollution per gram of body weight as you or I. We’ve supported the development of short films, called Young Explorers, that document the urban journeys of a small child and their caregiver in Pune in India and Recife in Brazil as well as another film series in Dakar, Senegal. We’ve also partnered with Arup to develop an Urban95 virtual reality simulation.

We also support cities to gather data on where families with young children live, where they go, how they’re doing and what they need. If city planners know where and when babies and toddlers spend the most time, they can target general interventions and services like clean air zones or pocket parks or health clinics or safer streets to them. For example, we funded a research institution in Istanbul to develop an innovative way to map families in need and overlay this with a map of municipal services (more here). The municipalities have begun to use this to locate services more effectively.

Another example is our work with Gehl to develop a tool to observe and measure the way babies, toddlers and their caregivers move through the public realm. We also partnered with the Open Data Institute to develop guidance for city governments who want to develop early childhood data dashboards. And we supported Canada-based organisation 8 80 Cities to develop guidance on engaging families with young children to gain insights into their needs.

What would you say are the biggest issues that our cities need to overcome to be more healthy, safe and supportive of babies and toddlers?

Patrin: First, congestion and transportation challenges. Not having access to safe, comfortable, affordable transportation makes life generally stressful, and can stop caregivers travelling to access healthcare. Road safety remains a big public health issue in cities worldwide. And the more I learn about the lifelong health effects of air pollution – particularly on babies and toddlers, whose lungs, hearts and brains are still developing – the more I’d like to see vehicle exhaust and other sources of air pollution become an unacceptable part of urban life. That’s why we’re working with the Clean Air Fund to tackle air pollution worldwide and the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy to develop transit guidelines for families with young children.

Second, lack of nature. There’s more and more evidence to show that being around nature – especially trees and water – is important for mental and physical health at all ages. This is hard to come by in many cities today. And finally, the general stresses of urban living: lack of space, time and social ties. These make it harder for parents and other caregivers to give their children the love and attention they need to flourish; and they are particularly challenging for those living in poverty, insecure situations and informal settlements.

Cecilia: One powerful way to address all of the above is to look closely at the street. On average, streets represent 70% of the public realm in a city – so why not use this space to promote play and other loving interactions between babies, toddlers and the people who care for them, better air quality, and better mental health through natural elements? Alongside Bloomberg Philanthropies, FIA Foundation and Botnar Foundation, we are partnering with the National Association for City Transportation Officials’ Global Designing Cities Initiative to develop Streets for Kids design guidelines to make streets safer, more comfortable and more joyful spaces for people of all ages.

Closing streets at regular intervals gives people of all ages a safe public space in which to play, meet, be active and breathe cleaner air. We frequently see that temporary closures are an effective step towards more permanent solutions. Building citizen support to transform street use is fundamental.  Citizens need to be motivated and to understand the benefits of reclaiming their public space.

What sort of impacts have you seen from your work on Urban95 so far? And what have you learned personally?

Cecilia: We’ve seen tremendous interest and enthusiasm for understanding how the lives and the development of young children and their families are affected by urban design, mobility and the environment. I’ve learned that:

First, municipalities are interested in cost-effective solutions that can be implemented fast as they represent a political win in every society. Helping them to generate quick wins is crucial. So is showing them live examples of what’s working in other cities. We’ve taken cities on study tours to London and to Copenhagen to see great examples of family-friendly spaces and mobility.

Second, municipalities tend to have poor data related to pregnant women, children under 5 and their caregivers. Helping municipalities to gather reliable data on this that can be used to generate practical maps layered over data on public space, services and so forth, is the best way to help these authorities make decisions that support healthy child development.

Finally, I think the most important learning is that there is a huge opportunity to promote urban transformation when you can relate to real people. Having good stories about how urban design affects the real lives of babies and toddlers generates social awareness that leads to political will for change. If we can build a successful city for young children, we will have a successful city for all people.

Patrin: For me, the three most striking learnings have been: First, planning and designing for babies and toddlers means planning and designing for the people who are taking care of them. You don’t see babies and toddlers wandering through cities by themselves – it’s those looking after them who decide where they go and how long they stay. So they need to feel safe and comfortable – whether from good lighting or buffers between sidewalk and road, well-placed amenities like benches, or easy-to-board, convenient buses. 

Second, proximity really matters. Anyone who’s tried to go anywhere with a curious, energetic two-year-old, or a surprisingly heavy baby in arms, can attest to this! Good public transportation is very important, but if you’re with a little kid the best option is probably just to walk safely, comfortably and quickly to where you need to go. So we’ve developed the concept of a 15-minute neighbourhood where families with young children can get to the services they need most within a 15-minute walk. And we’re seeing some of the cities we work with start to co-locate services based on where these families live.

Probably the biggest thing we’ve learned is that babies and toddlers are actually really compelling to urbanists as a target or frame for interventions. When we first started doing this work, we downplayed the benefits for child development and talked more about the benefits for everyone else. But we found that people wanted to learn more about brain development and found thinking about babies an easy-to-grasp way to think about universal design principles. So now we talk about babies a lot. From a design perspective, their extreme vulnerability and dependency, and strong drive to explore and play, means that if a space is safe, clean and interesting enough for them, it’s likely to work for everyone. And politically, they are a unifying cause: no one’s against babies, everyone’s been one, and many people have had the experience of caring for one.

Which cities in the world do you think are most nurturing towards and inclusive of babies and young children?

Cecilia: Boa Vista wants to become the first early childhood capital in Brazil. Boa Vista’s holistic way of delivering services from pregnancy to five, the integration of pertinent urban design across the city to meet the needs of babies and caregivers, their social awareness to promote nurturing care in all public space, their political will to prioritise investment to ensure a good start for all children, and their openness to integrating Venezuelan migrant children to their welfare system all add up to what we think is a unique example of a nurturing city for babies and toddlers.  

Patrin: Among our Urban95 partner cities, Tel Aviv, Recife and Tirana in particular are implementing city-wide initiatives, with a person responsible for driving and coordinating initiatives to serve young children. In the case of Tel Aviv, there’s even a newly appointed deputy mayor for early childhood. But, in short, there are many cities are doing interesting and groundbreaking things! We have been tremendously inspired and impressed by the work that our partner cities and organisations – and our colleagues – have done so far and are looking forward to more to come.

In the first of our series of interviews with people around the world working to support inclusive cities , we talk to Wanona Satcher of Mākhers Studio in Atlanta

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Wanona Satcher is founder and CEO of Mākhers Studio, a social enterprise design-build company which aims to deliver quality affordable housing, workspace and community facilities for underserved communities, supporting more equitable neighbourhoods. Satcher also set up ReJuve, a non-profit urban design lab dedicated to developing ‘prosilient’ (rather than simply ‘resilient’) communities. Thinking City talked to her to find out more.

What sparked your interest in working with urban communities trying to effect positive change?

I’m from Atlanta, GA, which is a very interesting urban community. Its rich history has a long legacy of civil rights, segregation, de-segregation and major shifts in wealth for communities of colour. It is this rich history that sparked my work today.  

How would you define ‘prosilient communities’ and why are they so important in cities? 

I coined this term to describe proactive approaches to urban development and policy.  For years the notion of resilience has been used to support sustainable efforts in redevelopment; however these efforts are typically reactive and take place after displacement, natural disasters and those economic shifts that negatively impact low-wealth communities. On average, cities change every 20 years and with both historical data and future projections we should now know enough to proactively plan equity into every housing, transit and economic policy, land-use regulation and design standard.

Mākhers Studio focuses on shipping container spaces specifically – what are the benefits? 

Used shipping containers are in abundance, easy to acquire, strong, stackable, and are highly adaptable to small urban lots – lots that often become the anchor to community blight and code enforcement violations.

To larger real estate developers these lots are often not seen as financial generators. We can design, build and deploy affordable housing as well as entrepreneurial spaces in half the time and for half the cost of traditional construction, while raising the value of these spaces. Utilising modular techniques allows for better quality control, efficiency, and a smaller carbon footprint. We love the re-use opportunity with shipping containers.  

Also, we’re excited that our shipping container work provides an amazing platform to hire local tradesmen and tradeswomen. We’re helping under-represented communities build the change they want to see. In fact we prioritise hiring women, minority-owned subcontractors, LGBTQ and refugees to help build our Pods.

What sort of impacts have you seen from your work so far? 

As a startup we’re finally gaining traction. We’ve had discussions with local city and county officials around the use of our containers as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), while many residents and stakeholders have told us that we’re helping them see and reimagine urban spaces differently. Also we’re not only educating the general public on modular container construction, but also architects and general contractors; many aren’t use to designing smaller spaces with smaller budgets that still produce a fair return.

How do you think local and national authorities can support greater community equality in cities like Atlanta?

By approving equitable land-use policies at the local county and city level; by redefining and increasing state and federal tax credit opportunities for affordable housing incentives in wealthy communities; by rethinking local building permit processes and fees, so that we in the private industry can continue to answer the call to produce more affordable options. Affordability isn’t just about the cost to the end user, it’s also about land costs and the cost to build; as well as the time to deploy. 

What would your ideal Atlanta look like? 

I often say that we at Mākhers Studio want to take over every 8ft around the globe in every major city. Shipping containers are 8ft wide. Imagine how many surface parking lots, strip malls, alleys, land adjacent to old rail lines are vacant; all spaces that we can make invaluable if we just think and build differently. We can do that.

I want to see quality, affordable rental container housing in wealthy Atlanta, as well as quality, affordable single-family container housing in lower-income neighbourhoods in Atlanta where under-represented families can build equity and continue to diversify the city without being displaced; where seniors can safely age in place. I also want to see more youth have access to affordable commercial container spaces so they can become Atlanta’s future entrepreneurs.