This is in today’s Times:
Joy unconfined around the nation as we hear that our Mancunian
compatriots have been granted the right to operate the second-greatest
tax on stupidity in the country (the first, for those who do not
understand gambling odds, being the National Lottery). Yes, the
supercasino will be located in Beswick. Bad luck for Blackpool and
Greenwich, of course, but then you place your bets and the chips fall
as they may, as these Vegas-style gamblers like to tell us.
The one thing that slightly worried me about the decision was the
description of Beswick as one of the most deprived areas in the
country: wasn’t there another attempt at urban regeneration there
recently? The casino is to be built next door to the City of Manchester
Stadium, where in 2002 we spent £339 million on having the Commonwealth
Games. Those games, budgeted originally at £78 million, were justified
on the basis that they would help to rejuvenate, and prompt the
sustainable development of, one of the country’s most deprived areas.
Could it be that inviting around some thousands of buff Lycra-clad
athletes to strut their stuff for a couple of weeks is not in fact the
way in which a vibrant and thriving city is built? The writer Jane
Jacobs may well have been right, in fact, that the urban landscape is
something organic that develops, not something that can be planned.
There may be a lesson in there for us to consider. If we do
want (for whatever strange reason we might want to do so) to regenerate
the Lea Valley and Stratford area in East London, we might start by
simply deciding to and then getting on with it, rather than grasping at
some sporting excuse.
We could also remind ourselves about how those pesky budgets
can get so out of control. In the case of the Olympics the original
appears to have left out the VAT, the cost of cleaning up the land, the
security, even, in some areas, the cost of purchasing the land. Current
informed estimates are that the costs are somewhere north of £8
billion, a fourfold increase on what we were originally told.
Manchester, remember, managed that overrun by the time their Games
closed: London still has five years to go and some of us would not be
surprised to see a tenfold increase by the time of the closing
ceremony. Is it too late to call Paris and ask if they’re available in
2012? Yet carping at managerial competence and its prevalence in the
public sector aside, we do seem to have a case study showing that
sporting events do not regenerate a deprived urban area: a casino is
required for that.
Lesson learnt, we have of course decided to host a sporting
event to regenerate a deprived urban area. Who do I apply to for the
licence on that Stratford Supercasino coming in, oooh, 2017?
Alert readers will note that this remarkably similar in its basic idea to something I did for the ASI yesterday. Indeed, that was the point, that was spotted and I was asked to rework the idea for a wider audience. Happy, happy, for the freelancer who gets to sell the same idea twice to different audiences.
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