Re-porting or De-porting

This text was commissioned for brochure copy for activities planned for architecture week in Liverpool in 2001.
The copy was not used.

The towns and cities that most of us inhabit are increasingly portrayed as the tangible topography of an increasingly abandoned infrastructure. Roads and railways, high streets and factories, are all apparently the overweight and decaying corpus that is being invisibly and rapidly bypassed by the new wired world. But like all future fantasies this vision is a little too simple, a little too imbued with a sense of the over-clean and the under-rationalised. While we may be increasingly reliant upon the digital architectures of finance, entertainment and social exchange, it also seems inevitable that, like with all new technological developments, we will humanise the digital and make grubby the sterile silicon that mediates our meanings.

Like many cities across the globe, Liverpool has attempted to re-cast itself in the light of this bright new future. It has discovered a catch-phrase and is investing in trying to fuel the fantasy that informs this catch-phrase. 'From sea-port to e-port' is a neat mantra for the believers in this vision, but it benignly ignores the physical, the human and - most worryingly for Liverpool - the culture that is the identity of a place. The e-port is no respecter of location, no friend of anyone but the provider of its next data fix. The architecture of the e-port is mutable and mobile and bears little resemblance to notions of base, passage and hinterland that define the physical port.

The adoption of these electronic goals is seldom informed by a real sense of how existing physical, social and cultural legacies can be made to work within these utopian visions. This hi-tech optimism is often underpinned by little more than a sense of economic opportunism. In a study of the Santa Clara technopolis (the original Silicon Valley) by Manuel Castells and Peter Hall, a clear-headed assessment of the phenomenon led them to conclude that it was an environment of aggressive competition characterised by 'loose moral standards in professional relationships'. The extreme individualism, a culture of stress and 'compensatory consumption' they describe would hardly seem to be descriptions of an advanced society. But most worrying was their perception of, "an inability to pay attention to, or even understand, those left out of the affluent group, reinforcing individualism, and digging deeper into the trenches of urban segregation".

Projects such as the Superchannel, attempt to address this seeming quandary. The Superchannels are online broadcasting services programmed by artists across the globe. In Liverpool this has been used by FACT in collaboration with residents of Liverpool Housing Action Trust tower blocks. Through the Superchannel, the local residents and the places they inhabit become a context for a culture they provide, a culture that is then fluidly accessible via technology worldwide.

Unlike the tower blocks of Merseyside, there is an architectural certainty in the massive physical presence that led to the creation of Liverpool - that of the River Mersey itself. We can only hope to tinker at the edges of this landscape in order to exploit the opportunities it represents. Massive civil engineering projects like the channel tunnel or the Liverpool docks are tiny marks on the map and are there because of slender physical opportunities being exploited to meet economic prerogatives. The subsequent congregation of human opportunities around these physical manifestations cannot be re-mapped onto the new digital topography. The city is, in most senses, irrelevant to the new digital economy. Economic proximity is now a virtual quality and the trading zone is something that we carry around with us in our portable communication devices. If we are to protect the tradition that the city represents - the radical, the collective and the chaotic - then we need to assert an architecture that allows for the e-port to be a space that is about creation and creativity as well as transit. To learn how cities like Liverpool have the greatest stock in their people and their self-belief and in their virtues of civic responsibility.

A very real challenge for cities like Liverpool is to create culture and to protect the local while being active within an environment that is driven by the greatest tool for global capitalism we have ever seen. If our cities are to thrive then they will need to be driven by more than ill-informed platitudes about new economic futures. They will need to understand how to redesign the physical environment in response to the increasing irrelevance of the collective physical economic space. They will also need to understand the significant human need to exist in spaces that reflect our social and cultural identities. In Liverpool this is a debate that has informed the development of projects such as the FACT Centre and is continuing through events such as those being programmed by FACT for Architecture Week.