Towards a new social and cultural geography of Newport

 


 

  

 

See inset notes:


1) Location of the new Newport City Footbridge
2) John Frost Square and Newport Museum and Art Gallery
3) Site of former Newport Technical Institute and Newport School of Art, Clarence Place
4) Caerleon campus of the Newport School of Art
5) Pproposed site for the new campus of the University of Wales and the Newport School of Art


Re-casting the city space: From the Industrial to the Entrepreneurial City

  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  •  "The city is a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of unorganized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in those customs and are transmitted with this tradition" | Rober Ezra Park [The City (1925); cited in H.J.Dyos (ed.), The Study of Urban History(1968)]
  •  "Under capitalism there is (...) a perpetual struggle in which capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own conditions at a particular point in time (...) only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time" | David Harvey
  • "The modern economy is likely to go on growing, though probably in new directions (...). The process of modernisation, even as it exploits and torments us, brings our imaginations and energies to life, drives us to graps and confront the world that modernisation makes, and strive to make it our own. I believe that we and those that come after us will go on fighting to make ourselves at home in this world, even as the homes we have made, the modern street, the modern spirit, go on melting into air. " | Marshall Berman (All That Is Solid Melts Into Air) 

  

The Newport city centre landscape is undergoing major changes at present  and the coming twelvemonth will see dramatic changes in the built environment.

 

  •  "The city is undergoing a major regeneration programme": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport (accessed March - Aug 2007) 


The city centre of Newport is currently undergoing a major regeneration project. See the Newport Unlimited Urban Regeneration website. The above aerial view of Newport from Google Earth is already visibly outdated. The new Newport City Footbridge, opened September 2006, is conspicuous by its absence in this view (- see inset notes).

 

Conversely, if we navigate Google Earth a little to the east, then we still find a full satellite aerial view of Llanwern steelworks even though the site has been largely cleared to make way for redevelopment following the Corus steel closures of 2001 (- see here, here and here). We experience a shock of scale when we realize that the footprint of Llanwern is equivalent to that of the greater part of the city of Newport. 

 

 

  

A similar shock of scale when we navigate to the obsolete LG plant to the west of the city (- see here ,  here  and here)- the LG Lucky Goldstar electronics company of Seoul, Korea - which was Europe's single largest inward investment project at the time in 1996 and now stands as a landmark to the revolutionary pace and disruptive flows of technology, capital and global markets.

 

 

 

 

Thus we may grasp the scale of current spatial transformations and the changing landscape of power. The changing ecology of land, labour and capital. In these visible spatial overlays and shifting temporal instances of presence-absence and future-becoming, we glimpse something of the process of the city-in-evolution. The Faustian challenge of modernity in the passage from the Industrial to the "Post-industrial" city, from the post-'45 Fordist City of mass production- consumption to today's Entrepreneurial City landscape based upon  flexible new forms of investment and capital accumulation. The passage from that  "hard" modernity summoned up by the sight of docks and steelworks to today's "liquid" modernity of constant movement in the "space of flows" of the new city and surrounding spaces. A fugitive reality underpinned by the invisible communications revolution - fibre optics and IP - and the emergence of the networked economy and society.

 

 

A new cultural geography: Towards a new "space of place"?

 

See inset notes:

1) Newport Museum and Art Gallery
2) Newport Civic Centre and Clock Tower
3) Riverfront Arts Centre (millennium project)
4) The new Newport City Footbridge (under construction)
5) Proposed site of the new University of Wales campus, including the Newport School of Art (west bank of river Usk)
6) Former Newport Technical Institute and School of Art, Clarence Place (east bank of river Usk).

 

A new social and cultural geography of Newport is in the making, a new landscape of power of the new Entrepreneurial City. 

 

The current dramatic changes in the built environment of Newport represent today's response to modernity's latest phase of challenge and opportunity. The new Newport City Footbridge spearheads today's large-scale city centre regeneration and echoes the Newport Transporter Bridge a century before as a monumental assertion of faith in the future prospects of Newport. With large-scale redevelopment moving apace on the ground, the City of Newport is rebranding itself as a vibrant entrepreneurial city as the horizon of 2010 approaches when Newport will host the Ryder Cup and occupy a world stage.

 

As the new entrepreneurial city of Newport follows its redevelopment plans to produce a new spatial order in the city centre and alongside the River Usk, we see that the planner's blueprint includes a new campus on the west bank of the Usk for the University of Wales and the the re-location of the Newport School of Art, Media and Design. One is reminded of the municipality's building of the model Newport Technical Institute at Clarence Place in the early part of the twentieth century. Will the new physical proximity of cultural institutions within the re-cast city space help to re-establish the spirit of shared creative endeavour and solidarity of place of previous generations? The new social and cultural geography of the city may enable a newly charged "space of place", a new constellation of cultural relationships, affinities and affiliations? It remains to be seen how far a re-location from Caerleon to the "downtown", west bank of the River Usk may restore a new sense of urbanity back into the culture of art education.

 

And so we arrive at today's crossroads in the fortunes of the City of Newport, with the horizon of 2010 set for completion of the major city centre regeneration project. Is it too utopian a hope to look forward to a renewed relationship of the art world and the public sphere, as both the Newport Museum and Art Gallery and the Newport School of Art orientate themselves to new directions in the new city that is in the making?


 

 

Postscript, June 2008 | Culture in the city-region


 

The Newport School of Art's new city-centre and riverside locus (- see£35m campus building work begins, 30 June 2008; and here -) may provide new opportunities for exploring the role of the modern art college in today's emergent economic and cultural orders of the city-region? ( - see for example City aims to be cultural capital, 26 June 2008). 

 

  New Uskside campus: image source here

 

A new cultural geography of the City of Newport is now, visibly, in the making at the new Usk-side locus; according to the dynamic of city-status and regeneration: 

Thus Newport engages a "post-industrial" strategy in the passage from the "hard modernity" of coal and steel to today's "liquid modernity" of the entrepreneurial "city of re-invention", as the new city seeks to balance the logics of capital and territory, the challenge of competing for regional-global investments and creating a vital local "space of place". ( X ) 

A new spatial axis that is defined more in terms of it's departure from any preceding civic cultural formations. One that we may already see vividly inscribed in the new cultural landscapes and geographies of the "post-industrial" city-region of the North East of England: Tyne-, Wear- and Tees- side, such as Sunderland's new campus and National Glass Museum, and Middlesbrough's MIMA and new campus developments ( - and just compare the earlier phase of civic developments; for example the Newport and Sunderland Technical Institute buildings). The new forms of cultural capital, enacting the "territorial logic" of a succeeding phase of "liquid modernity", as the "post-industrial" city-region competes for investment and status. 

 

The South Wales coalfield and the burgeoning capital city of Cardiff figured prominently in Patrick Geddes' theorisation of the city-region in the opening years of the Twentieth Century; to throw into relief the landscapes of power of the epoch of coal and steam power as the driver of technology and production. Whilst today's world of modernity is more invisible, fluid and fugitive in its revolutionizing developments and displacements, we may nevertheless grasp in this enactment of new landscapes a parallel pattern of post-industrial re-adjustments in the opening years of the Twenty First Century; in the new maritime landscapes of the North East of England and South Wales, of a world beyond the coalfields.


"I've always been interested in these geographical processes whereby capital is creating landscapes, sometimes knocking down landscapes and building new landscapes (...) | I look at this not simply at the nation state level, but at the area of, say, a mayor of a city like Baltimore. Deindustrialization is going on. Capital is moving out. So what does the mayor do in charge of this territory? "Okay, that's okay"? Or do they say, "We have to find new ways to bring new capital in"? | The territorial logic is about trying to maintain the health and well-being of a particular space in the face of this capillary movement of capital moving left, right, and center, and everywhere. | If the steel industry is collapsing and the shipbuilding is collapsing, what does somebody who is in charge of the territorial logic do? You say, "Well, maybe it's convention centers and the convention business. Maybe it's museums. Maybe it's tourism, or something of that kind (...)." | David Harvey.


John Wilson