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| Cambridge Liberal Democrat Manifesto 1998The City Centre - A Place to Live |
The importance of the City Centre cannot be overestimated. In many towns and cities, the centre has been turned into a place dedicated solely to business and shopping, impersonal and crowded in the day, unfriendly, even threatening and crime ridden at night.
We believe that it is of vital importance that Cambridge avoids falling any further into this trap. And we believe that the only way to reverse the process of decline is to make sure that the city centre is a place in which people live. Students already inhabit the area, but they do so for only half the year. We want to see a growing all year round population in the city centre.
Making the city centre more inhabitable is not easy. Our offices-into-flats policy, for example, will only work given the right commercial conditions. But we are determined to do all we can to make sure that the city centre remains a viable community in its own right.
A number of other policy choices also flow from our commitment to making the city centre a place to live. We have successfully opposed projects that would have made the city centre more difficult to live in - for example the extravagant plans to turn the Market Square into a tourist attraction and the vast nightclub and hotel complex at Parkside. But a careful balance needs to be struck. Some city centre attractions, for example the Arts Theatre and Cinema, are not disruptive and indeed are just the sort of thing that people who want to live in a city centre expect and want. The present threat to the Arts Theatre and Cinema, the result of Labour hostility to the arts in general, is a disaster not just for the cultural life of Cambridge but also for the civilised development of the city centre.
Our attitude towards the city centre will also be a highly relevant consideration in other areas. For example, our attitude to edge of town shopping development will depend greatly on the predicted impact of such developments on the viability of city centre shops.
Tourism is also very important for city centre life. Tourism is of great economic value to the city, but its environmental effects have to be controlled, not least to maintain the very qualities that attract visitors in the first place, but also to protect the city centre as a place to live.
We opposed versions of "city centre management" that were based on the assumption that commercial interests were more important than the interests of residents. But we welcome the development of a style of city centre management that treats residents interests as a high priority and which concentrates on improvements in basic services such as street-sweeping. We will continue to argue for the interests of city centre residents and for the representation of residents within the structure of city centre management.