The bold city
Those that survive will be bold and imaginative
I spent almost 6 years of my 20’s living in the city of Brighton and Hove. This Guardian article about the new Landmark i360 tower caught my attention late last year – Brighton reaches for the sky in bid to reverse its ‘lost decade’ of neglect.
The article quotes Historian Sir Anthony Seldon from 2002. He talks about how Brighton and Hove is like no other city or seaside town in Britain or northern Europe. It’s unique in that it has evolved through eight eras of history.
Sheldon gives his opinion of how it has succeeded though those eight eras:
“When it has been bold and imaginative it has been successful. When it has been safe and inward looking it has failed.”
He goes on to explain:
“Brighton and Hove must now move into a ninth era and become an international city or it will slip back again into the mediocrity that characterised so much of the postwar era.”
This resonated with me. Not just because I lived in Brighton. As an aside, the time I lived in Brighton is now seen partly as a lost decade. Just look at the collapse of the Frank Ghery designs for the King Alfred site in 2008 as an example of the planning issues and arguments that have held the city back.
It’s interesting to now see the latest proposals for the King Alfred site still have local councillors talking about Ghery’s proposal when making the point that the new designs lack ambition.
The bold institution
When it comes to ambition, I feel the same way about how we work. How we organise our institutions, operate our businesses, and design our organisations.
The cities we want to live in are bold and imaginative. They have to evolve and reinvent themselves. We spend most of our lives at work so why should these places be any different?
If we are bold and imaginative we have a chance of succeeding. If we are safe and inward looking we are guaranteed to fail.
We have our own cities. Institutions survive, but many don’t. We talk about transformation for the long term future of large corporations.
Those that survive will be bold and imaginative. They will invent themselves again and again. Those that choose to be safe and inward looking will be forgotten to history.
Footnote. I always hoped that they would build Frank Ghery’s proposed designs in Brighton. The new proposal looks like any other modern development you will find in a major European city. I dare say, the development will improve the area in the short term but will then be forgotten as generic architecture by the time Brighten reaches it’s next major era.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.