Modelling urban futures

Abstract

Architectural models are representational forms that can be used in such a way as to make visions of capitalist futures more meaningful. This paper explores the additional resonance afforded by the deployment of digital architectural models to the Liverpool Waters project, a planned £5.5 billion development of that city's waterfront. Analysing the models of Liverpool Waters as interpretive representations whose practical use generates context and rationale for the project, the argument is that models allow for: (i) visual connections to be forged between Liverpool and waterfront ‘global cities’ elsewhere; (ii) a foregrounding of the dramatic scale and character of the transformation proposed by the project (including via a problematisation of the site's present uses); and (iii) a basis for other sets of claims concerning Liverpool Waters to cohere, as illustrated by the public consultation exercises in which models became presentational devices allowing for the visualisation of social claims concerning the development. Accordingly, architectural models here become consequential in effect, with the display and presentation of models allowing for the coordination and integration of other, otherwise disparate, claims and data. Precisely due to the other types of mobilisations that such modelling makes possible, critical research must engage with the interpretative frames that architectural models seek to establish and exploit.

Key words:

• architecture
• modelling
• capitalism
• urban development
• Liverpool

Introduction

This paper focuses on architectural models of Liverpool Waters, a mixed-use, high-rise scheme that its developer Peel Holdings suggests will be the UK's largest ever regeneration project (Liverpool Waters, n.d.). Granted planning permission by Liverpool City Council in March 2012, and with an estimated opening in 2040, Peel claim that the project will attract a new elite business–residential class to the city centre, create circa 25,000 job opportunities and generally transform the city's economic fortunes (Liverpool Waters, n.d.; Peel Holdings 2007, 2010a). Against the backdrop of discussion about the scale and scope of Peel's influence in Liverpool (Democratic Audit 2011; ExUrbe 2013; Harrison 2013; Dembski 2015), the Liverpool Waters scheme includes high-rise development of large swathes of the city's central dockland World Heritage Site, which UNESCO have placed on their ‘endangered list’ as a direct consequence of outline planning permission being granted to the project (Liverpool Echo 2014). It was this context that saw the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government consider ‘calling in’ the planning permission for public review, and Peel threaten to pull out of the scheme altogether should that happen (Liverpool Echo 2012). It didn't. The decision in March 2013 to not ‘call in’ the project saw the original outline planning permission ratified, and Liverpool Waters effectively given the go-ahead.

This paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which knowledge claims are both generated by and centre on architectural models of this yet-to-be-realised urban development. In three main parts, the first section of the paper assesses the affordances of architectural models in general. Approaching models as always-and-everywhere designed with particular purposes—and audiences—in mind, this section draws particularly on contributions addressing the mobilisation of different types of models in the context of urban capitalist projects (Gieryn 2006; Lefebvre 1991; McCann 2003; Scott 1998). Secondly, the paper gives a brief description of Liverpool Waters and its developer Peel Holdings, positioning both against the backdrop of recent entrepreneurial regeneration strategies in the city. The remainder of the paper analyses the ways in which the Liverpool Waters models can be understood as contributing credibility to the developer's visions for this waterfront site. Drawing on critical visual analysis (Jones 2013; Rose 2012, 2014), discussion of what these digital architectural representations can be made to ‘do’ (Gieryn 2002) in articulating the project vision to key audiences centres on three lines of inquiry: (i) the ways in which the models reflect attempts to create visual connections between Liverpool and elsewhere; (ii) modelled attempts to emphasise the transformatory intervention implied by the project; and (iii) the practical role played by models vis-à-vis project consultation activities.

The general aim is to interrogate the ways in which specific interpretive frameworks visible in architectural imaginings help make this urban development legible to a variety of publics. Suggesting that models are one site in which the accumulative practices underpinning the Liverpool Waters scheme are given spatial and temporal form, stabilising and adding resonance to the developer's claims-making, it is argued that digital models are a constitutive part of the process of making this urban development meaningful to different publics, in different places, at the same time.

Modelling and making worlds

Architecture is a site on which social claims centre, with the production of the built environment one way in which ‘to map the world [ … ] to intervene, to signify’ (Dutton and Mann 2000, 117). Certainly, the built environment has been mobilised in a variety of ways as part of a repertoire of cultural forms and discourses mobilised in the embedding and socialising of capitalism (Dutton and Mann 2000; Kaika 2010; Jones 2009, 2011; MacFarlane 2011; Sklair 2005).

Models are a principle way that architects articulate and disseminate the form of such buildings and spaces ahead of their realisation in urban space. It is models’ utility as a ‘basic mechanism used to understand, explore and conceptualise [ … ] future buildings and [social] issues’ (Smith 2004, vii) that makes them a fundamental ‘object language’ (Cross 2006) of architectural practice (Yaneva 2009). The definition of modelling developed by Phil Ayres (2007, 1226) foregrounds this representational quality whilst highlighting the necessarily reductive character of the model, which affords the communication of technical–spatial information to non-expert publics (Harvey 2009). Crucially, this affordance exists over and above the particular form that models take; regardless of their specific manifestation as drawings, cardboard constructions, computer-generated digital models, 3D prints, etc., it is the putative, but partial, ‘correspondence’ of the model to a world—proposed or existing—that gives it ‘applicability’: ‘whether hand-drawn, digitally encoded, physically constructed, sketched, collaged, appropriated or scaled, if the designer (/observer) attributes the artefact under consideration the status of being representational, it acts as a model' (Ayres 2007, 1226). In other words ‘like the pencil [a model] is a tool for achieving architectural form’ (Janke 1978, 18) and has a recognisably representational character.¹

Despite their key status in the process by which architect-designed spaces are conceptualised and realised, architectural models are by-and-large under-theorised, having seldom been the subject of critical interrogation. Technical accounts of modelling predominate (e.g. Busch 1991; Jacobs 1958; Shane 2005), and tend to be predicated on an assumption that models function solely to articulate as accurately as possible the architect's otherwise abstract concept vision. These accounts overlook the wide range of political moves that the deployment of models makes more possible. More critical social scientific analyses of modelling (Kanai and Kutz 2013; Moon 2003; Scott 1998; Yaneva 2009) have sought to engage this starting point by framing modelling as a somewhat ‘deceptive craft’ (Janke 1978, 52) that—no matter how technically sophisticated, detailed or fine-grained—always requires foregrounding some aspects of the world and the backgrounding of others.

Therefore, while digital technologies have added much to the ‘plausibility’ of models in respect of purporting to map the world ‘as is’, all architectural models are best understood as constitutive of the ways some come to think about the world. It is through their potential ‘efficiency’ (Neocleous 2003) in helping communicate visions of the world—either future-oriented or pre-existing ones—that models can be made consequential in effect. As a representation around which other sorts of claims can coalesce or gain additional force, architectural models have a ‘double ontological status’ (Gieryn 2006, 10) as a simultaneous representation of the world and a constitutive intervention in it (Hacking 1983). Against this backdrop, models are used to ‘do’ different things at different times in different places (Gieryn 2000). Illustrating something of this point, the digital model of Manchester city centre developed by engineering and master-planning firm ARUP, which is now being used to inform planning decisions, shows how such modelled representations ‘both describe and precede the lived world, creating plausible worlds that overlap, that overstate, illuminate and obscure’ (Harvey 2009, 270; emphasis added).

Here as elsewhere, models are made/scaled for presentation purposes (Janke 1978; Moon 2003; Yaneva 2009), with their capacity to simplify and communicate vastly more complex social and spatial relations always key; a modelled ‘world in miniature’ is all-the-more easily ‘manoeuvred and manipulated’ (Busch 1991, 11). These scaled, portable representations afford a number of practical communicational potentials relative to a variety of publics across time and space, and models are a definitive component of events such as business fairs, EXPOs and other ‘mega-events’ (Roche 2000). The increasingly non-material character of digital models (Harvey 2009; Shane 2005) has both added verisimilitude and made models more adept to ‘travel’ instantaneously into geographically and socially distant sites.

By definition, modelling entails a simplification of the world, and accordingly one of the crucial consequences of such is to reduce the complexity of the phenomena under consideration, which opens up questions concerning the model and social ordering. The synthesis of otherwise diffuse characteristics produces a kind of ‘distillation’ whereby the features the modeller considers most salient are made more evident. The dual representative and constitutive function afforded by models has proved particularly attractive to states and corporations in the course of their summarising, spatialising and ordering populations (Massumi 1998; Scott 1998). Indeed, the world of the model has become the site for the projection of all sorts of political strategies and imaginings. Discussing mapping and modelling as part of his wider analysis of how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, James C. Scott (1998, 87) positions models as ‘instrument[s] designed for a purpose … simplification and rationalisation'. Foregrounding the role of modelling in rationalised state projects, Scott (1998, 257–261) positions such technologies as involving the ‘miniaturization of perfection and control … the creation of a self-contained and regulated space where aspirations can be realised and played out'.

Despite the fact that their production is not a statutory requirement of the UK planning process, the envisaging affordances of the model have also been utilised by capitalist developers in the course of attempts to ‘represent [their] projects in their idealized state, often in a manipulated context or out of context altogether’ (Lebensohn, cited in Busch 1991, 27). As models are designed to mark generalities rather than specificities, they act as device to communicate legibly to planners, investors and other publics whose capacity to interpret technical–spatial plans may be limited (Harvey 2009). In the context of capitalist developments, architectural models are a ‘representation of space’ in Henri Lefebvre's (1991, 40–44) terms, inasmuch as they are a constituent part of the conceptualisation of urban space that underpins its commodification.

Before analysing some of the models representing the scheme, the paper now provides a capsule summary of the Liverpool Waters project, its developers and their place in the version of urban regeneration that has gained traction in Liverpool in recent times.

On the waterfront: the backdrop to Liverpool Waters

Over the last 30 years, Liverpool has served as a testing ground for a range of entrepreneurial urban policies (Biddulph 2011; Couch 2003; Dembski 2015; Harrison 2013; Jones 2011; Williams 2004). One of the cumulative effects of these variegated strategies has seen major capital investment on the city's waterfront, a site that accordingly reflects the waxing and waning of historic, recent and projected accumulation strategies. Indeed, it was the collapse of previous modes of economic activity—centred on the docks and associated mercantile trade (Wilks-Heeg 2003)—that has created the context for recent and planned investments.²

Liverpool Waters is an urban development on a scale hitherto unrealised in recent decades in either the city or elsewhere in the UK. A £5.5 billion scheme covering a 60-hectare waterfront site to the north of the city centre, whose developer, Peel Holdings, has extensive commercial interests in the UK, including a number of second-tier airports in the north of England, and major commercial developments—such as the Trafford Centre (149,000 m²) and the Glasgow Harbour development on the river Clyde—and Salford Media City, the 200-acre site to which parts of the BBC have relocated (Peel Holdings 2010c). While Peel's portfolio of assets owned and managed is international—and amounts to circa £6 billion (www.liverpoolwaters.co.uk)—their interest is primarily focused in the north-west of the UK. They acquired the tract of land on which Liverpool Waters is to be built as part of their purchase of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company in 2005 (Harrison 2013).

The winding up of the North West Development Agency (NWDA), until 2010 the political actor chiefly responsible for ensuring statutory compliance/strategic direction of major capital investments—combined with Peel's extensive commercial interests in the region—has seen the company coming to occupy a powerful strategic position in regional development (Harrison 2013).³ Due in part to the political leverage associated with their extensive holdings in the city-region (Dembski 2015; Harrison 2013), Peel frequently ‘speak for’ Liverpool, in the process claiming responsibility for the city's economic future. The pre-development phase of Liverpool Waters has seen a characteristic (Jones and Wilks-Heeg 2004; MacLeod and Johnstone 2012) elision of the developer's interests and of those of the city of Liverpool (Liverpool Waters, n.d.; WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 2010b). Peel's press release in support of their planning application identified ‘a fantastic opportunity for Liverpool and the City Region [ … ] Peel believes that Liverpool can be a greater City and that Liverpool Waters will be a major part of its future’ (Peel Group 2010). It is not just Peel that has been vocal in support of their vision, with the Liverpool Waters plans receiving fulsome support from local political institutions and elected officials. The city's urban regeneration company has suggested ‘Peel and Liverpool City Council [are] united behind a shared vision and ambition for the City’ (Peel Group 2010), whereas the CEO of Professional Liverpool, in a revealing formulation, affirmed his organisation ‘have been a strong supporter of Peel's overall vision for Liverpool for some time [and] fully support the Liverpool Waters project to help all our common goals’ (Peel Group 2010). During the planning process, the then Leader (now Mayor) of Liverpool City Council noted ‘the scale of the project [as] breath-taking … a hugely ambitious and exciting scheme’ (Joe Anderson, Peel Holdings 2010b). This represents a locally now-familiar kind of reversal, whereby the private sector—rather than being the object of regional development strategies and entrepreneurial local governance agencies’ ‘place marketing’ initiatives (Harvey 1989)—are now themselves driving such activities (Harrison 2013; Jones and Wilks-Heeg 2004; McCann 2003). Reflecting something of the city's status as a site of urban policy experimentation, Liverpool was home to the first of the UK's urban development companies in the 1980s and in 1997 also saw the launch of the first Urban Regeneration Company under New Labour (Couch 2003; Jones 2011, 134). The cumulative effect of these changes has been to position Liverpool as a paradigmatic model of a particular type of entrepreneurial urban governance (Harvey 1989).

At this stage, the project models are still ‘concept visions’, that is, indicative/schematic representations illustrating buildings’ locations, elevations, massings and footprints (Ayres 2007; Cross 2006; Janke 1978; Moon 2003). There is no requirement for close correspondence between these models and what is actually built, so what are their functions in securing and adding momentum to elements of Peel's vision? How can models help make contestable claims more legible and authoritative (Scott 1998)? What is being framed by the ‘unique window on the universe’ (Gieryn 2006, 6) constituted by the architectural models of the Liverpool Waters project?

The analysis that follows is of six of the publically available models of Liverpool Waters (at www.LiverpoolWaters.com), and their mobilisation at two public consultations that I attended in Liverpool city centre (in 2011–12). The project website is a rich resource, containing models, photographs and other images, as well as the technical and master-planning documents submitted in support of the planning application; the dynamic nature of the site means that the images I originally analysed are no longer all prominent on the site, which had at the original time of writing (late 2013/early 2014) also contained film and survey data from a consultation event. At the time of writing there were 24 models on the website and the 6 that I analyse below were selected for their exemplary character, inasmuch as they reflected the clearest articulation of the interpretative frames common across the set of models. Now on the site there are far more extensive images, with a section of 11 (http://www.liverpoolwaters.com/media/images) supplemented by a digital e-book (http://www.liverpoolwaters.com/ebook/LW-C-C/); it remains the case that the visual tropes interrogated are typical.

My approach to analysing these models has drawn much from the work of Gillian Rose (2012, 2014); grounding interpretations in the social contexts from which they emerge is thus key (Rose 2012, xviii). However, this approach leaves open the danger of flattening out the particularities of the models under consideration—and things they are used to do—via a transposing of political–economic context onto representation (in effect a form of over-reading). A related pratfall lies in positing a coherence on the ‘audiences’, ‘publics’ or ‘communities’ that are the intended recipients of the communicative interpretation of the modelling; not all ‘investors’ will think the same or arrive at the same meanings any more than we could arrive at an essentialised definitive interpretation. Informed by a concern to reveal the additional resonance lent to capitalist relations by their embedding in cultural form (Jessop 2004), my approach attempts critical ‘visual scrutiny’ (Rose 2012), so attempting to reveal the ways in which the interpretations of capitalist development rest on and exploit visual materials. This has meant following a theoretical and empirical orientation I have pursued elsewhere with respect to architecture (Jones 2009, 2011), regeneration policy (Jones and Wilks-Heeg 2004) and photography (Jones 2013). This paper now turns to three prominent visual devices that are in evidence in the models.

Connecting here to there

Models always make requirements of the observer; a hallmark of successful modelling lies in the extent to which it chimes with existing aesthetic preferences of the intended audience, so communicating visions in terms that they can/already understand. One prominent way in which developers of major projects seek to generate symbolic and material capital for their schemes is by forging connections with other places (Cook and Ward 2012; Jones 2009; Kanai and Kutz 2013); models are one device amongst others utilised in the service of making ‘near and far … coexist as simultaneous registers of epistemic legitimacy’ (Gieryn 2006, 21). The firm responsible for modelling Liverpool Waters so as to suggest connections with elsewhere are Chapman-Taylor, whose recent modelling and master-planning work includes St Pancras Station (London) and Portsmouth Harbour in the UK, and projects in Jordan, Baku, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Panama City, Accra and Singapore (Chapman Taylor, n.d.).

At Liverpool Waters, Chapman-Taylor's models must be sufficiently resonant with international financiers and future residents geographically distant from Liverpool so as to motivate their investment. Models need not be consecrated by the architectural field to achieve this end (for assessment of the symbolic–aesthetic hierarchies at play therein, see Jones 2009), but must be sufficiently legible from the perspective of non-architectural publics to help garner various types of support for the scheme. In other words, Chapman-Taylor's ‘house style’ must help communicate opportunities associated with proposed schemes in forms sufficiently resonant with investors. The extensive nature of their digital urban modelling portfolio suggests expertise relative to this requirement with the ‘globalized’ architectural aesthetic (Jones 2009, 2011; Sklair 2005, 2006) evident in these architectural models designed to ‘travel’ more readily in this respect.⁴

In seeking to make legible Liverpool Waters to geographically distant audiences, the modellers drew ‘heavily on the form and visual similarities to other global waterside cities including Vancouver, Dubai, Shanghai, Hamburg and Manhattan’ (WYG Planning and Design 2010b, 8). Liverpool's similarity to such cities is perhaps not immediately self-evident, but models allow for claims for partial similarities to become more plausible by abstraction; if connections between very different cities are to be made and sustained, models must be sufficiently ‘outlined’ so as to not provide a proximity that would be disruptive to this projection. Therefore, despite the fact that the perspective on the development in Figure 1 will be enjoyed by very few outside of the model, this ‘bird's-eye’ view allows for superficial similarities between Liverpool and the aforementioned waterfront cities to remain, ‘for present purposes’ at least.⁵

Figure 1 Liverpool Waters aerial view I

The strategy to connect Liverpool with cities enjoying the status favourable for profitable investment is further evident in attempts to forge and exploit linkages with Shanghai in particular, which is presented as a site of opportunities ‘be they education, business or tourism’ (Peel Group 2010). The naming of Liverpool Waters’ centrepiece high-rise building—a 55-storey, residential, retail, office and hotel development (Figure 3)—as The Shanghai Tower is a non-too-subtle attempt to capitalise upon ‘flows, relations and connections’ (Massey 2005, 98) between the two cities.

As with other visual representations (Jones 2013; Rose 2012, 2014), models do not speak for themselves but do become objects of narration and exhibition (Roche 2000) that can be used to help connect contexts. Against this backdrop, it is significant to note that Peel were lead sponsors, along with the University of Liverpool, of the ‘Liverpool Pavilion’ at the 2010 World EXPO, sending a delegation to Shanghai to coincide with the EXPO's ‘Liverpool Day’ later that year (16 October 2010).⁶ Models of the scheme featured prominently at the EXPO, as did a merged photographic representation of Liverpool and Shanghai's waterfronts, architecturally similar in some respects, which provided the backdrop to the pavilion (Jones 2013, 5–7).

Visualising transformation

Architectural models articulate temporalities, allowing a visual ‘bridge’ between existing realities and proposed futures (even if such futures will never exist outside of the model) (Ayres 2007; Scott 1998). The problematisation of existing urban space often accompanies plans for the transformation of cities, and a process of breaching with what has gone before often implicates modelling. At Liverpool Waters the sheer scale of the development and the transformation are reflected in interesting ways in the models. It is an understatement to suggest that the Liverpool Waters plan ‘introduces the possibility of a significant high-rise urban environment’ (Chapman Taylor, n.d.). The project is ordered around 42 tall buildings that represent a major shift in architectural scale in Liverpool, a city that—despite the recent addition of some tall structures on the waterfront (Biddulph 2011; Jones 2011)—historically has been ‘low-rise’. The aforementioned Shanghai Tower will be the UK's tallest building outside of London and will dwarf existing buildings on Liverpool's skyline (including the iconic Edwardian ‘Three Graces’ (which are just visible to the right-hand side of Figure 2 and flanked by two towers in Figure 3). The monumental proportions of this building are accentuated in Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2 Emphasising scale I

Figure 3 Emphasising scale II

Human scale, so often important to models (Janke 1978, 52–54), is here secondary to emphasis of the buildings’ massings, with representations emphasising the ‘heroic’ scale of the development (Figures 1Figure 2Figure 3–4 and 6). It is significant to note that the city's UNESCO World Heritage Site status has been threatened in large part due to planning permission granted to Peel's dramatic proposals. Given such a highly sensitive planning context, why would developers seek to commission and disseminate models whose perspectives exacerbate Liverpool Waters’ out-of-keeping scale (see Figures 2 and 3)? Attempts to dominate both landscape and public imagination are characteristic of ‘iconic’ architecture (Jones 2009, 2011; Kaika 2010; Kaika and Thielen 2006; Sklair 2005), and crucially tall buildings facilitate space for the generation of surplus value. Still, emphasising the scale of an already huge development on a sensitive site represents a bold move on the part of Peel, which can be understood as a way of foregrounding the dramatic nature of the breach represented by the scheme.

The development of significant high-rise architecture is key to Peel's Liverpool Waters business model. The major component of the scheme is the creation of 9152 residential units (WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 42); in light of current over-supply of residential apartment space in the city centre, Peel's assertion that the residential component of Liverpool Waters will provide ‘high-quality homes for existing Liverpool residents and a new population’ (WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 25) warrants unpacking. Existing under-occupancy is explained in the planning application as primarily being due to the insufficient quality of existing developments (WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 27) making the question of aesthetics and design quality come to the fore (on a comparable case in London, see Charney 2007). Again at this point, the recognisably ‘glossy’, flawless digital models (e.g. Figures 3 and 4) are designed to ‘stand in’ in the absence of the ‘real’ architect-realised spaces to follow.

However, the Liverpool Waters digital architectural models do not solely control the messiness of the social world, they also help create the conditions for its partial reintroduction. Drawing on the putative ‘realism’ of photographs of the existing site to represent ‘as is’ alongside the glossy models of the new land use ‘could be’ has the rhetorical effect of emphasising the disinvestment characteristic of the site, which is problematised in service of Peel's vision of the future. By using the same perspective on the same site, ‘realistic’ photography is contrasted with the digital models (Figures 6 and 7), so inviting invidious comparison with photographs of ‘signals of disorder’ (Innes 2004) (see Figures 4 and 5). Sustaining a ‘before and after’ visual–rhetorical strategy allows for a favourable contrast to be drawn between the site's projected and current uses, with the latter represented as derelict, under-used and vacant (a common device in regeneration photography [Jones 2013]).

Figure 4 Problematising the present: ‘signals of disorder’

Figure 5 Problematising the present: ‘realism’ as rhetoric

A reminder of the inherently partial nature of both the photograph (Jones 2013; Rose 2012, 2014) and the model alike, and the related need to retain a sense of the politics of the visual, these representations overlook the many types of enterprises—the markets, the small and medium-sized businesses (e.g. pubs, shops, transport hire, scrap merchants, warehousing, etc.), whose activities currently animate parts of the site and its neighbouring spaces. Similarly, iconic elements of this place, a term used purposefully,⁷ such as the ‘Docker's Clock’ (see Figure 5, backgrounded)—a named element of the city's now-threatened World Heritage Site status—are represented in detail only when rendered digitally transformed and sitting harmoniously alongside other types of projected social/consumption activity (as per Figures 6 and 7).

Figure 6 Compare and contrast: imaging a future

Figure 7 The site as could be: aestheticising a future.

Socialising models: mobilising people and place

For Liverpool to become a legitimate site for such major intervention, Peel must authorise their vision via connections to local populations (MacLeod and Johnstone 2012). This process sees the abstracted and ‘frictionless’ (Gieryn 2006) accounts of models supplemented with other types of claims-making, and local publics constructed as both a symbolic resource and a mandate for action. The discourse-consensual promise of models to create a ‘visual realism which allows people to engage directly with the visions and ideas presented, without the need for [ … ] technical understanding’ (Harvey 2009, 260) is militated by public consultancy exercises framed in such a way as to do nothing to express the contested character of urban capitalist projects. Therefore, although models may harbour the affordance of being ‘less ambiguous than drawings’ (Smith 2004, 17), such potential needs to be understood relative to the practical uses to which models are put and the ways in which claims are generated and mobilised in and around such representations.

Unsurprisingly, given they were organised by developers seeking to garner support for their project, the Liverpool Waters consultancy events saw models deployed to add force to some visions, at the same time limiting the capacity for alternatives to be explored. Discourses of place can be mobilised to embed accumulative economic strategies (Jessop 2004; Jones 2009; Massey 2005), and local publics are often used as part of this authorising resource (MacLeod and Johnstone 2012). The use of public opinion in regeneration discourse often sees the tension between reaching out to distant publics—such as potential international investors and future residents—and ‘engaging’ local publics laid bare (Jones and Wilks-Heeg 2004; MacLeod and Johnstone 2012; Richter 2010).

Peel's attempts to strike this balance warrants analysis, and is reflective of a policy context requiring major capital projects to evidence consultation processes and to articulate social and economic benefits of schemes to local communities.⁸ Local people certainly feature prominently in Peel's projections, but in partial and ambiguous ways; master-planning documents (especially WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 2010b) contain frequent references to the population of North Liverpool, proximate to the Liverpool Waters site and where a number of wards are ranked amongst the most multiply deprived in the UK (Jones and Wilks-Heeg 2004). Paradoxically, the proximity of Liverpool Waters to areas of economic deprivation actually sees poor areas drawn into an authorising trope. Due to a combination of their geographic proximity to the Liverpool Waters site and their economic distance from the site's future residents, local publics have come to be positioned by the developers as a ‘target’ for a variety of interventions and transformations. Residents of these areas proximate to the Liverpool Waters site can neither be readily integrated into the frictionless, abstracted account of the future emerging from the models, nor ignored altogether. Liverpool Waters development is presented as ‘a major opportunity to provide substantial economic and employment benefits to the deprived communities of North Liverpool in close proximity to the development’ (WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 36).

Throughout the planning application, projected employment opportunities are connected to the local population—albeit with some key caveats (see below)—with the claim that by 2041, the equivalent of 14,800 full-time jobs will have been created by the scheme (WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 37). This discourse sees the developers in effect constituting a local public whose fortunes can be transformed by the development:

‘The scale of investment means that there will be major new employment opportunities for local people. The major challenge is to get the long term unemployed and those with no qualifications or experience into work. Peel is working with the City Council and local skills, training and education agencies to make sure that the local population provides as many workers as possible for Liverpool Waters, both during construction and once built.’ (Peel Holdings 2010d)

The ‘major challenge’ of ‘cultivating’ local people as a (potential) workforce is here presented as being taken on in part by Liverpool Waters who even implicate themselves in ‘education’. Crucially, this local subject is represented as being in deficit and as requiring such intervention, a normative construction of a public assumes ‘certain behaviour patterns and dispositions are expected from people in part because of where they happen to be’ (Gieryn 2006, 21). Interestingly it is not only those out of work that are subjectified and responsibilised (MacLeod and Johnstone 2012) in this discourse: Liverpool Waters becomes an opportunity to ‘help tackle Liverpool's enterprise deficit [sic] … inspiring and motivating young people and those already in the labour market’ (WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 38; emphasis added).

The construction of the local public as characterised by deficit is in contrast to the recognisably classed version of sociality that characterises many of the models (Figures 6 and 7). In the case of the Liverpool Waters consultation, architectural models provide a ‘hub’ for the generation and crystallisation of disparate social claims made for the project. For example, the aim to change ‘the way [local] people (especially the young) feel about their neighbourhoods, their future prospects and attitudes towards education and training’ (WYG Planning and Design 2010a, 43) is presumptuous, not least because Liverpool Waters is unlikely to be ‘their’ neighbourhood in any meaningful sense of the term: the high-rise development will dominate the area, but the public access to the residential site enjoyed by non-residents remains to be seen.

The scheme also illustrates the tendency for impoverished processes of ‘consultation’ in major capital-led regeneration schemes (Jones 2011, 123–140; Macleod and Johnstone 2012; Richter 2010). Data gathered from questionnaires administered at consultation events in 2010–12 become resources drawn upon in the planning application (e.g. WYG Planning and Design 2010a), despite survey questions having been posed in such a heavily loaded way as to leave one intrigued by the small number of local people—defined as those at the events declaring an ‘L’ postcode—who actually voted counter to Peel's proposals (see Table 1).

Table 1 Questioning consultation

Question	%
	Yes	No	Blank
Do you support the proposals to increase public access along the waterfront?	92	2	6
Are you in favour of the proposal providing a range of new jobs and training for local people?	92	2	7
Are you in favour of the proposal offering a wider choice of new homes?	83	10	8
Do you support the proposals to attract new businesses to Liverpool and indeed the north-west?	91	2	7
Do you support the proposals for new and improved pedestrian and cycle routes?	91	1	8
Are you in favour of the creation of public open spaces within the scheme?	93	2	5
Are you in favour of promoting Liverpool as an exciting cruise destination whilst attracting tourism and investment?	92	2	5
Do you support the proposal to improve public transport?	93	1	6

Note: n = 286.

The prominent use of the digital models at the consultation events at which these questionnaires were administered underlines their key role in the communication of the wider project vision and in the gathering and subsequent marshalling of data. The non-technical, schematic character of the model that allows a ‘way of making the spatial facts of architecture more accessible to those outside of the profession’ (Busch 1991, 13) also affords a basis some claims to be foregrounded and given impetus. Despite their discourse-consensual potential as a ‘practical way to explore the potential consequences of projected interventions in the urban fabric’ (Harvey 2009, 260), models can also be used to help obfuscate the contested nature of urban development and the differing sets of interests therein.

In the context of the Liverpool Waters consultations, architectural models do not sit there as backdrops to the action, but rather become the ‘object[s] of (re)interpretation, narration and representation’ (Gieryn 2002, 35), becoming key ‘props’ in support of the ‘performances’ of Peel employees’ presentations, giving structure and visual interest to and helping construct the ‘staging’ of the events (Goffman [1959] 1979). An extended analysis of the ‘interactions between human and nonhuman components’ (McFarlane 2011, 207) at these community-focused presentations—two of which I attended as a participant-researcher—would doubtless be extremely illuminating, but the limits of space here preclude my undertaking a more extensive analysis of such. Suffice it to say the rhetorical use of models at these events chimes with Albena Yaneva's (2009) architectural ethnography of how models become devices utilised to facilitate dialogue and provide a mechanism for ‘framing’ social interactions, in this case allowing impetus to be added to some interpretations and not others. In short, I argue that the prominent display of models at the consultation events at which I was present ran counter to the potential for opening up and exploring alternatives outside of the model (Harvey 2009); the models added force to some visions and made more difficult the generation of alternative claims.

Conclusion

A crucial affordance of the architectural model lies in the establishment of interpretive frames within which various types of claims can crystallise. In the case of Liverpool Waters, the deployment of digital architectural models has added verisimilitude to the developer's contentions concerning the project, with those speaking for the development drawing much from the partial ‘realisation’ of the project offered by models. In short, without models the claims made for Liverpool Waters as ‘a new international business destination that will attract investment from around the world’ (Peel Group 2010) would be left the more fragile and contestable. In general, it is by visualising claims that architectural models allow for the project to ‘gain believability and persuasiveness’ (Gieryn 2006, 6).

The modelling of Liverpool Waters has been accompanied by the association of the development to other places. The attempted creation of visual connections between cities is by now a familiar strategy in the context of urban development (Cook and Ward 2012; Kanai and Kutz 2013); in this case a desire to forge such connections has led to the construction and dissemination of models that abstract and unify the city (Lefebvre 1991), rendering more plausible the fleeting visual similarities between Liverpool and other ‘global waterfront cities’. Other spatial tropes are also deployed to emphasise transformation; given the controversies centring on the city's threatened World Heritage Site status, foregrounding the out-of-keeping high-rise massings of the tall buildings may seem counter-intuitive, but from my analysis Peel—emboldened in the planning process due to their extensive regional landholdings and strategic vision for capitalising thereon (Dembski 2015; Harrison 2013)—have emphasised a ‘tall building aesthetic’ that increases transnational resonance (Grubbauer 2013; Jones 2009; Sklair 2005, 2006) and gives a mandate for a dramatic, thoroughgoing development (investment pending).⁹

Digital architectural modelling can provide a basis for other ‘moves’ to take place, as was evident in the consultation events articulating Peel's connecting the interests of local people to what is to all intents and purposes an internationally oriented, elite residential development. The prominent role of models in the project's public consultation echoes some of the findings of Albena Yaneva's (2009) ethnography of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, wherein the use of models assisted in the coordination and integration of otherwise disparate claims. We are left to reflect on the ways that, through the models and the other data that is assembled around them, the developers have sought to generate context, rationale and a reality for the project. A necessary task for critical research in this context is to situate architectural modelling relative to its specific mobilisations in a number of different directions at the same time.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to Michelle Bastian, Claes Belfrage, Juliet Davis, Bethan Evans, Rob Imrie, Andrew Kirton and Alan Southern, all of whom read and made perceptive and helpful comments on earlier iterations of this paper, as did anonymous City reviewers. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Jones

Paul Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool.

Notes

1 I am very grateful to Mark Dorrian and an anonymous City reviewer for raising a far-reaching question concerning the ontology of the model. Of course, there are many ‘models’ which are not exclusively visual in character—such as those made to travel in the context of ‘mobile’ urban policy (Cook and Ward 2012)—and the models that are being assessed here are in fact images drawn from a single digital model of the Liverpool Waters development. Due to the format of academic papers, these are here removed from their context on websites, in print media or on digital display in consultation exercises or in EXPOs.

2 In the mid-1980s Liverpool hosted an International Garden Festival on reclaimed industrial land near the waterfront, while the contemporaneously redeveloped Albert Docks saw the Grade II listed dock buildings renovated to incorporate a mix of commercial and residential space (Williams 2004, 108–127). More recent developments—associated with, but not reducible to, the city's status as European Capital of Culture 2008 (Biddulph 2011; Jones and Wilks-Heeg 2004; Richter 2010)—have also centred on the waterfront. The site of the aborted Fourth Grace project, designed to supplement the existing late-Victorian and Edwardian ‘Three Graces’ (Jones 2011, 123–140), is now occupied by the recently opened Museum of Liverpool and Mann Island commercial complex, while the Liverpool One retail and residential development—owned and controlled by developer Grosvenor on a 250-year lease—occupies a 42-acre site near the waterfront.

3 The Regional Spatial Strategy developed by NWDA was revoked in 2010 with an older Urban Development Plan now again the north-west's de facto strategic policy document.

4 At this stage of the Liverpool Waters project, this resource is not so drawn from a single ‘starchitect’ (for critiques, see Jones 2009, 2011; Sklair 2005) adding their force to the debate, but rather a firm with a reputation for this type of master-planning (Rust Design, a small Manchester-based company also contributed some 360° panoramas and fly-overs for the project, for example, at: http://vimeo.com/37353418 and http://www.rustdesign.co.uk).

5 Le Corbusier, as did many modernists, frequently drew upon the supposed clarity, order and rationality lent by a ‘bird's eye’—or perhaps God's eye?—view of a city (Scott 1998, 381).

6 Peel's Chairman ‘was invited by Prime Minster David Cameron to attend the UK Government Trade Mission to Beijing'. He participated ‘in bilateral trade talks with the Chinese Government … Peel have welcomed three different Chinese delegations to the Northwest, to view investment possibilities in the Wirral and Liverpool Waters site’ (Peel Shanghai EXPO, n.d.).

7 As does the influential conceptualisations of place developed by Doreen Massey (2005), Thomas Gieryn (2000, 464–465) suggests a combination of three elements as definitive: (i) ‘geographic location … a place is a unique spot in the universe’; (ii) ‘material form … place has physicality’; and (iii) somewhere invested with ‘meaning and value … they are interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood and imagined’.

8 This approach is guided by Europe 2020 (a range of European Commission initiatives) and Liverpool City Council's ‘Statement of Community Involvement’, requiring major capital developments to evidence community consultation, and the UK government's similar requirements under the Statement of Community Involvement.

9 A key issue here concerns researcher access to the discussions concerning funding. It is my presumption that models play some kind of role in such dialogues, but the ‘backstage’ discussions between the developers and potential investors are not open to scrutiny in the same way that a public consultation necessarily is. I am grateful to both Monika Grubbauer and one of the anonymous City reviewers for their observations concerning this ‘black-boxing’.