Originally Posted by
Waterways
You must work for Peel having such contempt for the city's heritage.
I have neither contempt for the city's heritage nor do I work for Peel. Do you really think one of their employees would want or be commissioned to come here just to argue with you? Get over yourself.
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As I said there is much of the past that we should keep. We should keep both the best of the past as a reminder, testament and encouragement of the spirit of the best of our predecessors that achieved so much and we should keep the most useful in today's context.
Both times change and buildings become redundant and redundant buildings have had their day - by definition.
If a building (or a dock) can no longer provide what it provided then or more importantly, what we need now, it’s continued existence is questionable. We need to make value judgements. No, I’m not talking about money - we must ask if we keep this thing, how will it help us, ‘spiritually’ and materially?
Truthfully, an 18th century Duke’s dock or dock buildings around it (even as loft apartments for several hundred) really cannot do the job of a 21st century assembly building to the benefit of tens of thousands.
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Your allusions to Amsterdam harks back to both another time AND another place.
The reasons-to-be that made Amsterdam what it was and is just didn’t happen here. We would need to create it. A false copy. A theme park. A Disneyland version. A sham, that would destroy what we set out to preserve.
We can neither replicate old Amsterdam (the cute canals) without filling in docks to canal widths and depths (against a self-imposed constraint) and without reducing development to uneconomic levels nor does the very different New Amsterdam of full width and depth docks actually provide an environment that is economically deliverable or even a desirable place to live.
Take a serious look at New Amsterdam (the big docks). It’s like a council estate on ice.
I'm seriously concerned about the northern end of Peel's proposals. They have been compromised to such an extent, it is starting to look like New Amsterdam.
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We need both understanding and imagination. If the limit of our ambition is to stupidly ape the past or make a dull copy without question, we are in trouble. If we want to ape
someone else’s past, we are in serious trouble indeed.
---------- Post added at 11:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:20 AM ----------
Originally Posted by
buggedboy
I'm a big supporter of this scheme but I do not think we will see any building at Liverpool Waters until at least late 2013.
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All too true. The earliest possible time for starting is 2014 (Lindsey Ashworth, Peel 2010) and that is entirely dependent on the economic situation.
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