Urbis: How Manchester dropped the ball

Hemingway rues that uniquely British trait of not recognising a good thing till it’s gone: “The reason a lot of these places die is because we take them for granted and don’t use them as much as we probably could. If we all popped into the café to get our coffees rather than going to Starbucks… if businesses used the facilities for mini conferences rather than somewhere else… if people thought these places need money to survive rather than just assume that they’re going to survive… then maybe they would survive. We’re all to blame.”

Already online campaign groups have sprung up in a last ditch attempt to fight the move, which was approved without public consultation. Speaking on The Drum’s Facebook discussion page Catherine Naylor, design student and founder of “Save the Urbis 2010”, voiced concern that Manchester has scored an own goal: “There is still great potential in the Urbis as a creative building, and as the football museum already has a home, the creative side will be pushed out – but where to?

“Manchester needs to stop getting bogged down by it’s attachment to football, and realise its other potentials again – which it has built and readied, yet seems to want to push out in this instance. Why take away a creative use of a building for something that I could only envisage as static, repetitive and over baked?”

A Manchester City Council spokesman said: “A unique take on popular culture will remain at the heart of the new museum. This imaginative approach will be applied to the many social aspects of football as it relates to trends in fashion, music, politics and all aspects of popular culture. The core creative team from Urbis, working alongside the National Football Museum team, will ensure this continuity.

“There will inevitably be a small number of specific events that Urbis will no longer be able to accommodate but the Urbis team is actively exploring other cultural outlets in the city where this work will still be able to be seen. Far from disappearing Urbis has a vibrant and sustainable future in its new guise and Manchester City Council will continue to fully support it.”

Breaking his silence since being made redundant from the Lighthouse, Nick Barley, erstwhile director of Scotland’s ill fated design and architecture centre, was quick to empathise with his Mancunian colleagues: “The need for Urbis hasn’t gone away, it’s stating the obvious that with the world’s population swiftly migrating towards the cities there is a more and more urgent need for us to keep talking about how we make our cities and how we ensure that cities are right for the people who live in them.

“The demand for exhibition space has not gone away either. Clearly it has proven difficult for organisations such as Urbis to be sustainable and difficult for government and the public sector to support them but you should separate the mechanics of running a big building from the need for debate and we should acknowledge that there is still a need for debate.”

Glasgow’s own architecture and design centre fell victim to well publicised travails and currently languishes in limbo. Barley, like everyone else, remains in the dark: “I’ve got no idea what the future holds for the Lighthouse. All I know is that people are trying to find a way to keep something going.”

But how can that debate be carried if our institutions are no longer there? How can the competing forces of culture and economics be made to fruitfully coexist? Barley contends: “What we should acknowledge is that magazines are also suffering. The professional debate is becoming more and more difficult through traditional mediums, so there is a wider shift beyond Urbis.

“Online has to be one way of doing that but there is also more pressure being placed on academic organisations, councils and governments to try to find ways of keeping the debate going. Social networking on its own is not going to be enough and I think that’s why government and Glasgow City Council are fighting to keep things going at the Lighthouse despite being difficult to sustain.

“What we need is intelligent, lateral thinking about how we can keep the discussion going. Maybe it’s true that buildings with big overheads and infrastructure costs are not the best way in the current economic climate to get across these messages. But if they can’t operate in big buildings then how can they operate? We shouldn’t glibly say they failed, throw them out and do nothing instead.”

Loss of such institutions bodes ill for the continued outreach of a privileged professional class to the sceptical masses, causing Barley to fear a return to the bad old days of entrenched disconnect: “We only have to think back to how things felt before these organisations existed to realise that there was a very big gulf between the public and architecture and design professions. It’s inevitable that we risk falling back into those types of situations where public and professions aren’t communicating with each other.”

Some commentators had argued for a form of mobile exhibition space but Barley was wary of such notions: “The thing about static centres is that they build a loyal audience and the marketing costs go down over time. If you had a flat pack space you’d have to do a huge marketing push every time the thing arrived in town. There are lots of hidden costs in that idea.”

Perhaps though we are becoming too distracted by the bigger picture. Speaking of a Future Scotland debate held at the Lighthouse in July last year Hemingway revealed: “I never received my travel expenses back from that. I flew up specially and you couldn’t even get a dicky bird out of them on why they weren’t paying. At the end of the day, you’ve got to run an institution that has morals and can make itself pay. In that prime position in the heart of Glasgow if you can’t make it pay then you probably are doing something wrong.” • A retrospective, Urbis has Left the Building: Six Years of the Best Exhibitions in Pop Culture is the centre’s parting exhibition. It looks back over the past six years, celebrating and commemorating the highlights of Urbis’ diverse programming.