In Liverpool work is currently underway to spend over £40m of public money to regenerate Liverpool's Duke Street/Bold Street area. An area of rich diversity, of creative energy and artistic endeavour. A place of bands and poets, cyberkids and fine-artists, restaurants and piss artists.

It is being re-imagined as a 'creative quarter', aiming to regenerate the area whilst preserving its integrity and the conditions which spawned its residual economic activity. Struggling against the inadequacies of Liverpool's bureaucratic iron cage (in 9 months they still haven't secured a Chief Executive for the area partnership) regeneration of the area is about to begin but are the creative resources of the area being used or abused?

This space is too small to explore this fully but it is clear that cities produce cultures and cultures produce cities. The two are inseparable. So in some ways it is refreshing to see both planners and developers, government and the market recognising this and utilising urban culture in an effort to stem the areas slow decline. They have been doing it abroad (as we so quaintly put it) for ages. On continental Europe cultural policy - whether derived form grass roots political movements or handed down from the more 'enlightened' political leaders - has become central to the re-creation of many a traumatised regional city. From Montpellier to Milan, Rotterdam to Helsinki, Barcelona to Hamburg, an understanding of the centrality of culture to cities has helped those cities become what they are today; what we idealise into some sort of mythical 'European City' - all Cappuccinos and promenades, cafÚs, cobbled and car-less streets, old men (nutbrown) sagely watching the world go by. Compared to our over-planned and under-used cities these places seem like paradise; a planner's dream and impossible to recreate.

Every city worth its salt has a place that has escaped the planner's eye, a dangerous, liminal space where nothing is given or taken for granted. A place for alternatives and experimentation which doesn't replicate or succumb to the desires of an international business elite but remains fluid, ephemeral and unpredictable. A 'city fringe' which acts as a door to the city centre, for ideas and personnel, dreams and aspirations, successes and failures. A gateway without a gatekeeper.

These areas are crucial to the economy of the city - they are areas of seedbed industries, of dense social, cultural and economic networks. They trade on the cusp of the formal and informal economies. They are workspaces without walls. They tend to be innovative and creative and thrive on the localised accumulation of knowledge, skills and ideas that are transmitted by the dense networks of the area. It is these clusters of activity in the city fringe that are becoming known as creative quarters (some things never change). This is not a cultural quarter - commonly understood as an area concerned with the local provision of (usually publicly funded) cultural products and services. Nor does it mean that other areas of the city are, in some way, uncreative. It refers to the function of this fringe area as a 'zone of innovation'.

London has its fringe zone stretching from Whitechapel, Hackney to Camden Town. In Paris it stretches from Bastille eastwards towards the 11th, 19th, 20th Around �issements. In New York it lies in SoHo, Tribeca, NoHo, the lower East side and parts of Queens. In Barcelona it can be found around Gracia and Parc Guell. In Berlin it used to be Kreuzberg, now it has moved to the other side of Alexanderplatz. In Milan the area behind the Castle. These are the older cities. In areas such as California it was the new age cafÚs and restaurants of the San Francisco area that saw the emergence of the computing revolution of Silicon valley. Manchester has the Northern Quarter, Whitworth Corridor, Knott Mill and Castlefeild. All are different places but all act in a similar way.
Liverpool has the area around Duke Street/Bold Street, now unfortunately re-named Liverpool Ropeworks (an unfortunate reminder of the Slave Trade).

City fringes are crucial components of the ability of cities to regenerate themselves, to use networks and an economy of knowledge to respond to change and to harness that creativity to economic activity i.e. to innovate. Liverpool Ropeworks, as creative quarter, should be seen as such a fringe, a 'zone of innovation' and the creative energies incorporated into the regeneration process.

Yet is the flip side of regeneration always to be gentrification and rent hikes? This is not the first time 'cultural' producers have been used to great effect by the dark forces of capitalism. Sharon Zukin has shown us all the dangers of the market using culture - whether the poor unfortunate loft-bound artist of SoHo and Greenwich Village or the 'everyone's favourite' restaurant on the corner of East 19th. Rents fall: 'get the artists in'. Area becomes cool and trendy: Rents rise: Artists out. And such is the standard model of city centre gentrification . Manchester's Northern Quarter is experiencing rent rises of up to 300% as a reaction to Urban Splash's Smithfield development.

This will happen in Liverpool and is happening as we speak. The difference could be that the artists and creative industries have a stake in the area. Arenas Studios and the Bluecoat is run for and by artists. The Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) plans to take space in the an old Tea Factory converted to workspace, once again by Urban Splash. Manchester's IDEA are in negotiations to take space in the area and deliver it to 'new start' businesses in a 'not for profit' arrangement. Getting a stake in the area is the only way to control the market in your interests. If it succeeds in Liverpool, against a backdrop of in-built nostalgia and a bureaucratic quagmire, it can work anywhere. If they get it right, Liverpool may at last be able to stop looking over its shoulder to both a long-remembered past and, more importantly, to Manchester.

Andy Lovatt [a.lovatt@mmu.ac.uk]