Bradford Case Study.

Bradford in West Yorkshire, England has a population of 500,000 people, its one of the 10 largest cities in the UK. Its growth is due to the textiles industry, mainly wool, but collapsed during the second half of the 20th century. This was because of the invention of synthetic fabrics. Faced with deindustrialisation, Bradford has been forced to do three things:

• Find a new range of economic activities to support the city.
• Find new uses for the land that was once occupied by the woollen industry.
• Shake off its old image of a rundown city of closed woollen mills - and create a new image of the city.

Bradford has done well in terms of rebuilding its economy, and has now developed chemical, ICT and engineering industries and also some leisure and tourism.

Many of the mills still stand and there exteriors have been converted and smartened into museums, craft centres, galleries, business unit and flats. Other old buildings which were from the woollen industry are also being used for new purposes. Some of the mills which were demolished turned into brownfield sites and new building such as shopping centres were build on the land.

Despite these improvements, the inner city still has improvements to come, these include the quality of life  and the harmony between the different ethnic groups. Bradford has one of the largest non-white populations of the UK.

Changing Fortunes of the Inner city.

The inner city was left to decay until the 1960's when redevelopment began to take place. Many of the old terraced houses were bulldozed and replaced by high-rise tower blocks, with people rehoused in flats. This was thought to be a low-cost, high-density solution to the challenge of providing decent housing for all. Within 20 years, however, it was recognised that the attempts to renew the inner city in this way had been a big mistake.

The experience of living in high rise flats;

• Walking up 15 floors when the lift is broken.
• Fear of long concrete balconies alone in the dark.
• worrying about the children playing 10 floors below.
• Using lifts which smell.
• No sense of community.
• Nearby shops closed down.

Some of the inner-city brownfield sites are being used for the construction of expensive housing (such as gated communities) for young upwardly mobile people. The inner city is now on the up and is a cool place to live and areas are rebranded and rebuilt.

Deprivation and poverty in HIC cities

The reality is that even within so-called wealthy countries theres poverty and that many HIC cities have their areas of poor housing, known as slums.

In HIC cities the word deprivation is widely used in connection with poverty. Deprivation is said to occur when a person well-being falls below a level which is generally thought of as an acceptable minimum. In the UK, a multiple deprivation index (MDI) has been developed to assess the level of deprivation across the whole country. It is based on seven different qualities of life indicators:

• Income
• Employment
• Health
• Education
• Access to housing and services
• Crime
• The living environment

The more central parts of the city - here deprivation coincides with areas of either old and substandard housing or high-rise apartment blocks that were built after the end of the second world war to house people displaced by the slum clearance schemes.

Towards the cities edge- here deprivation mainly occurs in the estates of social housing built by the city for rent to poorer households.

What are the symptoms of deprive

Changes at the edges of HIC cities
The areas where the green fields and open spaces of the countryside meet the built-up parts of the towns and cities is known as either the rural-urban fringe or the urban fringe. Here countryside is being lose by the outward growth of towns and cities, particularly their suburbs. The greenfield sites of the open land around the edge of a city are in great demand for housing, industry, shopping, recreation and the needs of the public utilities, such as reservoirs and sewerage works.

Housing is old, congested and relatively expensive.
There is a lot of pollution, including sound pollution
Shortage of land for industrial buildings, and when there is land it is costly.

These are push factors, there are also pull factors.

Land is cheaper, so houses are larger.
Factories can be bigger, and there is plenty of room to park cars.
With cars there still easy to get to.

Retail Parks
In HIC's there has been a large amount of Out-Of-Town retailing, with large 'Superstores', these are located just beyond the urban fringe. Often due to good roads, people from other towns will visit a store on another towns fringe, since its so easy to get there.

Industrial states
With purpose built roads and large amounts of land these are very useful for the industrial business.

Case Study: Southampton 

Southampton is a cite with almost 200,000 population, since the end of WW2 the growth of the built up area has been restrained by the green belt, a tract of land were development was prohibited. Due to the port the economic production prospered, attracting workers to the area, however due to the green belt there was no where to build houses for the incoming workers. Instead housing was built on the other side of the green belt in Totton.

Brown and green field sites.

Brownfield site:In the urban planning jargon of the United States, a brownfield site is land previously used for industrial purposes or some commercial uses. The land may be contaminated by low concentrations of hazardous waste or pollution, and has the potential to be reused once it is cleaned up.
Greenfield site: Greenfield land is undeveloped land in a city or rural area either used for agriculture, landscape design, or left to naturally evolve. These areas of land are usually agricultural or amenity properties being considered for urban development.