Richdale, Globalisation and Uneven Development.

 

Unhappy Valley

Rochdale, Globalisation and uneven development (Part 1)

By: Andrew Wallace.

Globalisation has become an indispensable concept for contemporary understandings and exploration of our habitat and its relationship to our ideological worldviews in respect of politics, economics and culture. It seems difficult to provide a satisfactory definition whilst the term remains highly contested. Arguably some generalities have been conceded regarding the ongoing process of interdependence and connectivity of the geographical world with its consequent blurring of national boundaries and the increasingly international flows of labour, goods and services beyond the discretionary management of the nation state. Its current prescriptive form is often labelled neoliberalism whereby private enterprise is empowered to traverse the globe in search of compliant and abundant cheap labour and light regulation (Harvey, 2005).

Rochdale Town Centre has had several cycles of redevelopment over the last few decades. Just like adjoining former mill towns in the North West of England, Rochdale suffered a precipitous economic decline in its core industries, this was apparent from the 1950s onwards (Toms, 1998, pp. 35-55). A new retail centre was built in the early 1990s (The Wheatsheaf) and flourished for a time. A number of notable flagship stores went into liquidation throughout the 2010s. A new phase of globalisation was being driven courtesy of the internet and the online retail revolution. Just as a previous era of industrial globalisation allowed for the strategic offshoring of plant infrastructure, the internet provided for a dramatic restructuring of retail and services, much of this directed by the corporate behemoths and leading to a culling of traditional high street outlets. These trends were also drastically exacerbated by the Covid-19 global pandemic which made flesh the remorseless biological realities of globalisation (Blakeley, 2020). Picture 1 provides a useful map provided courtesy of the town planners and it provides a neat distillation of the current wave of ‘reinvention’ for the Town Centre by way of its new flagship Riverside retail and leisure complex. This is marked by a curious bifurcation of the town centre through a fusion of post-modern architectures and the traditional whilst attempting to circumnavigate dilapidated areas of post-industrial neglect. As all that is solid melts into PR (Fisher), Rochdale promotes itself as a historically vibrant locality with attractively revamped public spaces, historic monuments and culturally aspirational education quarters.

Arguably something of a cliché but the trolley in the River Roch (Picture 2) is a defining symbol of the omnipresent challenge of anti-social behaviour and the struggle to protect public spaces. It will likely suggest a backstory of juvenile hijinks. If Rochdale has to contend with the gales of creative destruction thrown up by the unpredictable currents of globalisation, then it also struggles to forge its sense of place within the newer complexities of liquid modernity. Public space management (Carmona and De Magalhaes, 2006) remains key for local authorities and wannabe gentrifiers who are anxious to provide an attractive profile for their domains in order to compete for funding. Public space management must face against anomic behaviours from urban malcontents whose primary motivations seem to be a nihilistic recourse to spoilage and explicit attacks on the idea of civic pride. The ironic backstory to such vandalism likely involves a performative act of some physical effort, appropriating supermarket trolley and scaling the railing barrier of the Roch bridge to deliver the coup de grace. Not so much an acte gratuit, more of a poundland anarchism statement minus the sophistry of Debord’s (1967, cited in Self, 2013) situationism. The trolley is an apposite signifier of consumerism, a proxy of the corporate behemoths, now inverted and weaponised in the war against the idea of civic harmony that offer “visitors a stunning historical attraction and an attractive place to sit and watch the world go by” (original text from picture 1 – map of Rochdale: Historic Bridge). Arguably a symbolic and psychic desecration, an explicit rebuke to ideas of communal repose, a strategically visible ‘hate’ crime of environmental spoilage although arguably rendered itself as rank amateurism as measured against the massive environmental harms of the powerful multinationals (Tombs, 2024). The latter largely remain concealed from the public domain, obfuscated by impenetrable firewalls of corporate public relations and their impressive armoury of experts, legal and otherwise who are able to wrong-foot their critics at every turn. Meanwhile the Rochdale vandals likely employ their low-tech sorties via hoodies and the cover of dark to avoid CCTV.

Spatial divisions are held to be fundamental in characterising the UK's internal geography. These divides speak to class, regional identities and ethnicities. Geographical uneven development is observed at different scales, from the macro regional (within continents, between distinctive regions, intra-regional) to the micro level e.g. city, town, district, ward (Massey, 2004). Rochdale's recent Riverside development can be seen on this micro level as an attempt to cultivate a respectable, attractive and affluent zone that will flatter the middle-class proclivities of consumers conspicuous by their absence in recent years. For all the analysis of Rochdale as a down at heel bastion of working class declinism, there remains a substantial middle-class population, albeit located on the outer periphery of the town. It seems many of these affluent residents preferred to shop out of town. Manchester, Bury and the Trafford Centre seem to have proved superior attractions, whereas Rochdale's ageing Exchange and Yorkshire Street retail concentrated on a 'no frills' plethora of pound and charity shops. The Riverside redevelopment attempted to provide a leisure complex, replete with cinema, restaurants, cafe bars as well as middle brow clothing outlets. The push for a more discerning middle-class presence is also marked by a more visible and active private security team who check potential anti-social intruders and prohibit panhandling. This picture speaks to the intermeshing of post-modernist copper plated geometries within the visage of old boarded up warehouse Rochdale, the juxtaposition of the aspirational and bourgeois alongside the conspicuous symbols of declinism. The spoilage in this instance speaks to the relative failures of urban development. 

References:

Blakeley, G (2020) The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism. London. Verso

Carmona, M. and De Magalhaes, C. (2006) ‘Public Space Management: Present and Potential’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 49(1), pp. 75–99. Available at: https://www-tandf onlinecom.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1080/09640560500373162?needAccess=true& (Accessed: 06 March 2024)

Fisher, M (2009) Capitalist Realism. Zero Books

Harvey, D (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, Oxford University Press

Massey, D (2004) ‘The Responsibilities of Place’ Local Economy, 19(2), pp. 97–101

Self, W (2013) ‘Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle’, The Guardian, 14 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/14/guy-debord-society-spectacle-will-self (Accessed 06 March 2024)

Tombs, S. (2024) ‘1 The emergence of crimes of the powerful’. DD804-23J, Crimes of the powerful: corporate crime and harm. Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2147113&section=3

(Accessed 06 March 2024)

Toms, J. S. (1998) ‘Growth, Profits and Technological Choice: The Case of the Lancashire Cotton Textile Industry’, Journal of Industrial History, 1(1) (1998) pp. 35-5