The challenges of aligning the scales of urban climate science and climate policy in London and Manchester

Introduction

The matter and form of cities shape how climate is experienced, as does the intensity of human activity. Ensuring that our built environment is conducive towards safety and comfort in an era of inevitable climate change and increasingly variable weather is a natural concern for spatial planning and architecture, with climate change having risen considerably in municipal and national agendas over recent years (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2013). City authorities are seeking to collaborate with research institutes and other interested participants to support local policy formation in areas such as green infrastructure and low-carbon, thermally appropriate buildings.

Global and regional climate models are an important part of the human arsenal for detecting the direction of future climate, and at the city scale are being supported further by urban climatology. This discipline studies the areas of transition between the urban-dominated microclimate and the broader background mesoscale climate (Oke, 1987). Urban climate is particularly shaped by urban morphology and the choice of materials, as well as the generation of heat from people, traffic and buildings in the city (Flanner, 2009). Phenomena of interest to urban climatologists include the eddies created by obstacles, the wake of individual buildings, the effect of city parks on breezes, the urban–rural breeze system and the city plume itself carried off by the prevailing winds. Temporal scales range between milliseconds for small turbulent fluctuations through decades and centuries for studying the evolving relationship between city and climate (Oke, 2005: 180).

While urban climate exists across a continuum of spatial scales (Stewart, 2013: 101), there is nevertheless a general hierarchy of material scales at which urban climate is researched, typically classified as the settlement, neighbourhood and building scales (Mills, 2006: 71). When urban climate interventions are recommended (cf. Baumüller et al., 2012; Matzarakis et al., 2008), they seek to ensure that urban climate interventions at the local and microscale (individual buildings and groups of buildings) are made with consideration to a strategic city or settlement scale, itself shaped by a regional climate.

The application of urban climate science to city planning is now being extended and standardised (Ren et al., 2011; Stewart, 2011; Stewart and Oke, 2012), linked to increasing urbanisation and climate change, particularly in East Asian cities (Mills, 2015: 4). One part of its recent expansion has been the use of urban climate maps, having been used in Germany since the 1970s (Ren et al., 2011: 2214) where the integration of urban climate concerns into planning is relatively mature and standardised (Hebbert and Webb, 2011). These urban climate maps were developed to represent present-day climate, but methodologies have also been developed for producing maps relative to future decades by linking downscaled climate projections to empirical studies of urban climate (Flagg et al., 2011).

The question of how to ensure the utilisation of research has long been a concern of science–policy interface research and innovation studies (Hoppe, 2005; Wittrock, 1991). This research project took as case studies the English cities of London and Manchester in order to delineate the linkages between urban climate research and climate adaptation policy while also drawing out misalignments and resistances. Many of these misalignments and their potential causes have been studied, such as the disjunction between policy and research timescales (Wittrock, 1991), varying attitudes to risk (Kirchhoff et al., 2013: 401) and users’ perceptions of how well new knowledge fits (Lemos et al., 2012) into their highly contextualised practices (Wesselink and Hoppe, 2011).

Cash et al. (2006: 4) introduce the concept of a ‘scale challenge’ for situations in which particular combinations of interactions across multiple scales and levels may undermine the resilience of a human-environment system. The scales which reflect the ecosystem of phenomena concerned may not be understood or reflected in the scales at which an ecosystem is managed, through either mismatches or an overly reductive set of scales. While institutional interplay (Cash et al., 2006) and multi-level governance (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005) can potentially alleviate scalar misalignments, scalar reconfigurations may also create new asymmetries. This necessitates careful boundary management of the interaction between science and policy, and strengthens the role of co-production as a means of ensuring scientific outputs are credible, salient and legitimate (Buizer et al., 2011; Cash et al., 2003).

This research project considers the challenges of linking urban climate science to policy. It examines the agency of science-informed urban planning to mitigate the increased health risks posed by more frequent and severe heatwaves exacerbated by the urban heat island, the latter defined as where the city’s unique physical characteristics alter the local climate. It is contended that successful collaboration between urban climate research and policy is dependent upon a multi-scalar, strategic approach to urban climate across the city, neighbourhood and building scales. Following Mauser et al. (2013), it is considered that the impact of adaptation research is shaped, firstly, by the co-design of the research project, concerning its key questions, scale and structure, and secondly, the co-production of knowledge, concerning its integration of stakeholders during the research phase. The co-dissemination of research, as the third component raised by Mauser et al. (2013), is largely a product of co-design and co-production, with legacies dependent on how well findings from the shared dialogue between science and policy can be integrated and codified into procedures and knowledge infrastructures. The two case study cities highlight the importance of clearly designating desired policy outcomes and the supporting evidence and resources required, the role of city-scale climate adaptation bodies, and the importance of sustained government support for planning and building standards.

The next section explains in further detail the fieldwork informing this research. This is followed by three sections considering the city-region, neighbourhood and building scales respectively, with reference to research projects on urban climate and their capacity to influence policy at these spatial scales. ¹ The final two sections then expand a little further on the contingency of research-policy collaboration on support from central government for spatial planning and building standards, and on how co-production and dialogue between research and policy can help address scalar challenges.

Case study and methodology

The government’s response to climate adaptation is coordinated through the National Adaptation Programme for England (Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra), 2013), and supported by a series of risk assessment reports and funded research programmes largely utilising the 2009 UK Climate Projections (UKCP09), which provide probabilistic climate data for three emissions scenarios (Low, Medium, High) for the United Kingdom. These climate projections have been utilised by a network of research projects with an interest in the built environment called Adaptation and Resilience in a Changing Climate (ARCC), funded by the Earth and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The ARCC programme was funded under the understanding that it ‘will provide results and tools at local-to-regional-to-national and seasonal-to-decadal scales […] [, these being the] scales at which social and economic development take place’ (EPSRC Funding Call, 2008).

Central to the ARCC projects has been the notion that stakeholders should be involved in all stages of the project, ‘including defining the aims and outputs and with a discernible and appropriate route to sustainable exploitation and dissemination within and among the stakeholder community’ (EPSRC Funding Call, 2008). Five ARCC projects are referred to in this paper, as detailed below in Table 1 with research partners and stakeholders.

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Table 1.

Five ARCC projects and their research partners and stakeholders.

		Stakeholders
Project & duration	Research partners	Public sector, NGOs, and professional bodies	Private sector
ARCADIA 2009–2013	Newcastle University, University of East Anglia, Cambridge University, University College London, Oxford University, MOHC	GLA, CIBSE, DCLG, Royal Town Planning Institute, Town and Country Planning Association	London First, Arup
LUCID 2007–2010	University College London, University of Reading, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Brunel University, Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants, Energy Monitoring Company, Arup, MOHC	Environment Agency, Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) (now Design Council), CIBSE	London First, Max Fordham, Lancefield Consulting, Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios, Fulcrum
Prometheus 2008–2011	University of Exeter	MOHC, Royal Institute of British Architects, CIBSE, BRE, Dept. for Education	Jacobs Engineering UK, Integrated Environmental Solutions
SCORCHIO 2007–2010	University of Manchester, University of Sheffield, Newcastle University, University of East Anglia, MOHC	7 of 10 Greater Manchester councils (Bury, Manchester, Trafford, Stockport, Salford, Rochdale, Wigan), Sheffield City Council, Environment Agency, Manchester Knowledge Capital, Red Rose Forest	Arup, United Utilities, Aedas Architects, AECOM, Bruntwood, Acclimatise
SNACC 2009–2012	University of the West of England, Oxford Brookes University, Heriot Watt University	Bristol City Council, Oxford City Council, Stockport Borough Council	Arup, White Design

The fieldwork was stimulated by the ethnographic tradition in science and technology studies (Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Latour, 1987), particularly in its guise of actor-network theory (Callon et al., 1986; Latour, 2005). As a methodological approach, it seeks to build thick descriptions of an assemblage of actors, and informs a general commitment towards exploring the relationship between science and society. This approach has also been extended to architectural theory (Yaneva, 2009), planning (Cowell and Lennon, 2014; Rydin, 2012), and urban studies more generally (Blok, 2012; Guy, 2006). While stemming from this tradition, this paper seeks above all to provide practical information which may be of interest to a broad range of academics and practitioners with an interest in the relationship between climate research and the built environment (cf. Davoudi et al., 2009; Wilson and Piper, 2010).

The researcher was permitted to attend stakeholder meetings for Adaptation and Resilience in Cities: Analysis and Decision making using Integrated Assessment (ARCADIA) and Suburban Neighbourhood Adaptation for a Changing Climate: identifying effective, practical and acceptable means of suburban re-design (SNACC) (6 events) and two general ARCC stakeholder conferences in 2011 and 2012 with a broad participation from researchers and policy-makers. The Development of a Local Urban Climate Model and its Application to the Intelligent Design of Cities (LUCID) and Sustainable Cities: Options for Responding to Climate cHange Impacts and Outcomes (SCORCHIO) had concluded before fieldwork began in earnest, and semi-structured interviews were undertaken with researchers in both projects. The results from these projects also continued to be presented or quoted in later events, and would play an extended role by informing key policy documents. Semi-structured interviews (n = 31) were conducted with ARCC researchers (9), policy-makers, planners and environmental policy officers in Manchester (4) or London (5), and other climate adaptation knowledge providers including the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) (4).

The two case study cities present significant contrasts in terms of magnitude and wealth, with London being the third-largest metropolitan area in Europe and political centre of the United Kingdom. London, like Paris, has suffered significantly from heatwaves such as that experienced in 2003 (Kovats et al., 2006). Manchester, in contrast, is the economically strongest city in the North-West yet also presents facets of post-industrial cities with their associated problems of de-industrialisation, legacy of poor housing, relative poverty and social deprivation (Hebbert and Deas, 2002). It was in these two cities that several of the ARCC research projects were based, and consequently, it was easier to gain access to representatives from their respective authorities and attend related policy meetings. ²

City-scale planning for climate in London and Manchester

The primary difference between the cities at the time of research was the absence of a higher tier statutory planning authority in Greater Manchester, which has not existed since the Greater Manchester Council was dissolved in 1986. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) was established in 2011, and is transitioning towards a directly elected Mayor with further devolved powers. ³ Existing arrangements include a Planning and Housing Commission, which coordinates house building, infrastructure, and revitalisation of town centres. However, a Greater Manchester Spatial Framework is envisaged for 2018 which may address integration at the city region scale. Although a general climate change strategy has been in place since 2011, it is presently incumbent on each of the 10 local councils to create policies to act on the strategy, facilitated by the establishment of a Low Carbon Hub in 2012 as part of its Greater Manchester City Deal (GMCA, 2012).

In contrast, London has had a city region authority since 2004 with a statutory spatial planning role via the preparation and enforcement of the London Plan, as well as the planning decision veto given to the Mayor for strategic developments. The constituent 32 boroughs of Greater London have to be ‘in general conformity’ with the London Plan and avoid repetition of the regional guidance. The policies in the London Plan are powerful instruments, and prior to their inclusion, are subject to scrutiny from the London Assembly, from Central Government, and from examination in public (Rydin, 2010). The Greater London Authority (GLA) has further agency over the local boroughs by being able to provide and support standardised resources that boroughs can avail of when creating their own local policies and making decisions on development, considered as ‘really helpful […] for the boroughs’ (interview planner, Southwark Council, London, 2012). The GLA lead on research and strategy, and then individual boroughs ‘implement it at a local scale or feedback our work into their scale’, resulting in ‘quite a positive way of working in relation to datasets’ (interview planner, Camden Council, London, 2012).

This presence of a city region scale authority with resources that can be employed for the benefit of local authorities will be explored below in relation to the capacity of city authorities to shape research towards their own clearly and spatially articulated priorities. In the case of Manchester, the focus was on attaining a shared understanding of climate vulnerabilities, which may in turn help consolidate a city-wide set of context-sensitive resources and personnel for coordinated planning in the future. The case of London is informative, in this sense, as its dedicated climate change adaptation team makes informed questions about urban climate and can muster its own resources to commission specific research on local priorities.

Neighbourhood scale and the case of suburbs

SNACC was unique among ARCC contemporaries in happening to coincide with the government emphasis on empowering local communities. The project noted the pervasive attachment in England to suburbs, housing 85% of the population and in strong demand for the future (Williams et al., 2012). The project had five phases, the first three phases being concerned with establishing a range of mitigation and adaptation options for suburban dwellings, which were measured in terms of their effectiveness and cost, and in the case of adaptation measures, established with reference to projections of future climate. Among the six suburban case study neighbourhoods were two in Greater Manchester’s Stockport Borough Council.

A significantly novel use of communication at these events was the use of 2D and 3D maps of outdoor and indoor temperatures, as well as energy efficiency information for evaluating how much heat is lost through the walls, windows, and roofs. Stockport residents such as those in Bramhall did not consider many of the issues presented as climate impacts as particularly critical or worthy of investment, given that in some cases problems such as overheating were not perceived as being significant in their lifetimes (Williams et al., 2012). Not dissimilar from discussions in policy circles, people were naturally receptive to cost-saving measures presenting ‘secondary benefits’, such as reduced emissions and thermally comfortable houses.

A meeting in Stockport Town Hall was dedicated to exploring how stakeholders from public bodies, the construction industry and environmental organisations think about the barriers and opportunities for local actions on climate change. In attendance were a range of professionals, including a water resources specialist, an architect, a social housing and regeneration manager, and a council sustainability officer. Notable at this meeting were the limited levers available to stakeholders in terms of building regulations, national and local programmes or incentives, and local planning regulations. This historical contingency of suburbs and resident dwellings has a momentum that holds it in place, which policy-makers have trouble reconceiving or reconceptualising. ‘Realistically, the housing we've got is the housing we are going to keep’ (housing officer at stakeholder workshop, Stockport Town Hall, 2012), with wholesale redevelopment not considered realistic, and thus contrasting with Manchester and Salford city councils, which have led large-scale regeneration and re-housing projects on a model of urban renewal and densification.

Integrating future climate into building regulations and industry standards

Four ARCC research projects were commissioned in parallel for evaluating building performance in relation to future climate and the urban heat island. Each followed a moderately different methodology, which converted UKCP09 data from the weather generator into formats suitable for building modelling. A comparison of the projects was undertaken in order to integrate the findings into CIBSE standards (Mylona, 2012), and a competition called Design for Future Climate, organised by the Technology Strategy Board, trialled the use of weather files for a selection of specially commissioned architectural projects.

The Prometheus project was highlighted by researchers and policy-makers for having actively promoted their weather files to a broader public. In contrast, and in the context of the research policy forum, the presentation of multiple methodologies and associated results at an ARCC stakeholder conference in 2011 was at several degrees of complexity above the level of an audience not entirely specialised in building modelling. The continued research into uncertainties was described as a situation of ‘analysis paralysis’ in a discussion the following year, where the question was ‘how far does the inherent uncertainty in climate information actually impede decision-making?’ (presentation, Defra 1, ARCC stakeholder conference 2012).

The building regulations contain a set of guidelines for evaluating overheating, referencing present-day average summer day conditions rather than heatwaves in future climates. These are based on the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP), referred to in Part L of the Approved Documents for energy efficiency. It does not take into account future climate and relies on options such as leaving windows open at night, and is thus not considered satisfactory for overheating assessment by industry specialists (DCLG, 2012a: 10).

The Code for Sustainable Homes (or ‘the Code’) and BREEAM rating schemes were frequently cited as useful by council officers as important for ensuring high quality environmental design. BREEAM is an industry standard for non-domestic buildings and now provides credits for considering increased temperatures using a Test Reference Year for the UKCP09 2050s medium emissions scenario, or the 2030s equivalent for those with mechanical ventilation (Diamond et al., 2012: 31). The Code was a national standard for energy efficient and sustainable housing, later retracted by the Government in 2015 as part of a drive to ‘reduce burdens and help bring forward much needed new homes’ (DCLG and Pickles, 2015). Nevertheless, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) is in the process of advancing its ‘Home Quality Mark’ which also takes into account the risks of overheating that arise from tightly insulated homes. It requests that home developers use the weather files from Prometheus to attain a higher rating in their points-based rating system (BRE, 2015: 79).

The building regulations and industry design standards resemble a form of outsourced expertise in that they bring with them their own set of oversight mechanisms and technical expertise. Where planning illustrates an example of porous control, with broad scope but limited powers, the building regulations display the inverse by acting as powerful policy instruments with limited scope, given that they can only be applied to existing buildings when significant alterations are foreseen such as structural modifications or extensions. The building regulations have been identified as the main driver of change in energy performance and construction based on a study of 32 architectural design practices (Adeyeye et al., 2007). Similarly, while planners try to push developers into adopting higher than minimum standards using either industry standards or local planning policies, favourable building regulations naturally provide them with more power to change the built environment to match their ambitions. This can help avoid the protracted negotiation phase prior to planning permission being awarded, ‘because, simply because it is easier […] if you have got the building regs, you have actually got a standard that people can tie to’ (Interview health and environment advisor, Stockport Borough Council, 2012).

The potential for research to inform the building regulations and voluntary standards has been linked above to the resources and levers given to planners. In some cases, having less local levers for change, such as higher standards in the building regulations, means planners can concentrate their limited resources on the more strategic city and neighbourhood scales as befits their training, given that building engineering is not typically an integral part of planning qualifications in the UK. Nevertheless, a shift towards focussing on the neighbourhood and city scales is similarly constrained by the limited incentives and resources provided by central government.

State-support for climate change adaptation planning

During the lifetime of these projects and beyond, there has been a significant weakening of the capacity of local authorities to address concerns other than those related to essential core services. A study completed by Porter et al. (2015) showed that local authorities are under severe pressure due to sustained budget cuts, leading in some cases to a loss of dedicated climate personnel, thereby limiting engagement in research initiatives such as those described above. It had been clarified in the 2012 ARCC stakeholder conference that ‘we are in a deregulatory environment’ and that there was ‘not a big appetite for new regulations, for new enhanced building regulations and more stringent planning’ (Defra 1). An expert on the built environment noted that ‘planning in the UK, with the exception of [the GLA climate adaptation team], is at the bottom of its curve in terms of public perception’ (interview, UKCIP 1, 2012). Under these circumstances, remedial measures beyond voluntarism and the regulatory minimum that incur extra costs for development are difficult to support without a change of tact from the State.

The LUCID project highlighted the importance of addressing climate concerns at the building scale, where there is now considerable weight given to voluntary measures and light-touch regulation. A report from the Committee on Climate Change (2015: 108) notes that ‘there are no policies to reduce vulnerability through building design or to increase the amount of greenspace in urban areas’. The final report from SNACC noted that ‘for the majority of residents climate change is a non-issue’ and that there was ‘no clear process, or delivery mechanism, for adaptation and/or mitigation at the suburban neighbourhood scale’ (Williams et al., 2012: 35). At the building scale, the chairman of the Committee on Climate Change wrote directly to the Government to decry the abandonment of the 2016 zero carbon homes target, and the fact that the building regulations ‘do not contain any provisions to protect health by reducing overheating risks and as a result people will suffer’ (Krebs, 2015). Consequently, there is a risk that the poor design and construction practices of the past will continue into at least the near future, furthering the legacy of inefficient, low-density homes which perpetuate car-dependent neighbourhoods with the direct and indirect fossil fuel emissions they imply.

An issue with this present tendency for regulatory withdrawal and public funding cuts is that the first movers do not pull forward those at the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder. In contrast, a stronger regulatory minimum would drag even the slowest movers towards higher standards, but requires greater participation from government. While both cities have made progress in mapping and supporting green infrastructure, planning decisions that favour the provision of green space over hard surfaces and call for exceptional building design and emerging industry standards such as BRE’s Home Quality Mark require further support to ward off challenges.

Where city region authorities are empowered to coordinate and balance environmental objectives with house-building and office and industrial development requirements, there is potential for local, context-sensitive, policies to be put in place. The experience of London indicates the importance of having dedicated city region units that can liaise with researchers and make informed and realistic demands. The possibility of similar resources for city regions other than the capital is dependent upon central government devolving both power and financial resources to those such as Greater Manchester who are willing to step up to the plate. Once in place, local officers responsible for climate adaptation can be trained and resourced sufficiently to shape the outputs of research projects that seek both to push the frontiers of science and inform local policy-makers. City authorities may require simpler, demonstrable solutions to policy priorities within tighter timescales than those in which research projects typically operate. This may mean having a two-track policy with support for projects to coordinate research objectives with decision-making and shape outputs accordingly.

Conclusion

Planning for future urban climate involves complex probabilistic projections of future climate, the empirical analysis and modelling of both present-day and future vulnerabilities in our cities, and the formulation of new technical standards and methodologies for addressing these concerns. Therefore, planners and policy-makers are particularly reliant on research until these concerns become further encoded into standardised procedures and tools. Consequently, projects like ARCADIA and LUCID show the value of co-production as a means of creating scale and policy-relevant findings, based on a prolonged dialogue between research and policy which enables both parties to formulate questions on future urban climate that negotiate large ranges of uncertainty and probability. This dialogic space exists both within and alongside official stakeholder meetings, and evidences the two-track nature of research as open-ended knowledge creation, and bounded, policy-driven consultation relevant to the local context. Rather than being ‘science on tap’ or ‘science on top’ (Davoudi, 2006), the negotiation of these poles takes place in a temporary dialogic space where participants can navigate between these divergent axes of complex enlightenment-model science and locally-relevant knowledge.

Planning theory has long drawn on Foucault and Habermas in relation to how communication both embodies and reshapes power relations (Forester, 1982; Innes and Booher, 2016). It has considered the transformative potential of strategic spatial planning (Albrechts, 2010: 1116), aware of and responsive to its limitations, and defended the pragmatic benefits of coproduction (Albrechts, 2013) and reflexivity (Forester, 2013). The case studies explored here reinforce this appraisal of coproduction, yet also point towards the role of intermediaries and non-human actors such as maps and established metrics, which can similarly constrain and reshape planning practice across different scales, ranging from the human body to the city development plan. Wicked problems can be at least partially tamed through analysing and carefully intervening in these networks of human and non-human actors, in addition to or alongside the analysis of deeper structural factors related to capitalist modes of urban development.

Projects like LUCID and SCORCHIO highlight the hierarchical relationship between the material scales of urban climate through multi-scalar research, and in the latter case, through the production of prototypes which encode these scales into an idealised decision-making structure. While such tools may be more easily embedded within cities with strong urban design and spatial planning cultures such as in Germany (cf. Lorenz et al., 2017), the mediating and proceduralist form of planning that is practiced (Vigar, 2012) and taught in England resists the agency of research to influence planning through the production of technically complex decision tools:

Because one of the things that planning deals with all the time is the whole range of different competing interests. So we are not just looking at the climate change issue in isolation. We are also looking at the issue of needing to bring housing forward – often on sites that have got their own problems and constraints, and you know, now wanting to spend money on things they don't need to, and wanting to bring forward new employment. At the same time as wanting to have a green city and a city that is prepared in terms of climate change issues. But because you have quite a lot of different demands, and all of these tend to have a cost in development […]. So it ends up being, well we've only got this amount of money, what can we bring to the table? (Interview planner, GMCA, 2012)

The planner stands at the centre of the built environment in relation to various types of agency and expertise. Development pressures and housing targets dictate the tasks ahead, which are then reconciled against environmental concerns articulated locally and nationally. Therefore, the role of dedicated personnel acting as champions and policy entrepreneurs (Scholten et al., 2015: 1027) at the strategic city scale, who can longitudinally liaise with research in an analytical capacity, can be essential to the functioning of this dialogic space or science-policy forum. At the neighbourhood and building scales, a similar importance can be attributed to forms of externalised expertise such as the building regulations, and where opportunities arise, specialised standards with consideration for future climate.

The modelling projects discussed provided a learning role for cities and feed into evidence-based approaches to underwriting policies on green infrastructure and urban design. This learning role is more apparent in Greater Manchester, which lacking the power structures of London and its concentration of wealth (Massey, 2008), is building its capacity as a city-region while prolonging its flexible, yet executive-driven approach to planning (Hebbert, 2010). Manchester City Council plays a relatively large role in putting forward plans and scaling them up to the emerging statutory city region authority (Ward et al., 2015).

Knowledge claims (Buizer et al., 2011) can also be translated across inter-urban networks by research programmes like ARCC and its predecessors, such as the evidence on the cooling function of green infrastructure shorthanded into the ‘10% rule’. While both cities have tree-planting schemes, London’s city region authority translated this knowledge claim into more advanced research into the material and governance scales at which interventions would be most effective. This translates to trickle-down statutory policies and guidance from the city region authority, which local authorities can then use to support environmental demands on development. While the national government’s form of spatial liberalism (Clarke and Cochrane, 2013: 13) involves negotiating devolution while administering austerity, city regions like Manchester are placed to remediate austerity with new revenue streams (Haughton et al., 2016). These streams are dependent, however, on Manchester’s ability to draw investment to the city region. Their approaches to urban design are therefore particularly dependent on case-by-case negotiations and nudging (Jones et al., 2014) rather than city-led additional statutory policies on design.