Breaking Down the Barriers to Growth : Economic Development, Culture, and Old Industrial Regions

While explosive industrial growth in the nineteenth century placed Manchester as the manufacturing centre of the British Empire, and Liverpool as the distributive hub to the colonial trading world, both cities experienced remarkable socioeconomic decline in the post-war period resulting from their institutional ‘lock in’ to outdated industrial infrastructures. Today, however, both cities are experiencing a strong renaissance that bears has a great deal to do with the dynamic properties of culture. In the first instance, the paper highlights the important role that culture played, alongside political restructuring in the 1980s, to enable Manchester to break free from its institutional ‘lock in’ and to gain competitive advantage in the post-industrial global marketplace. Contrasting this, the paper then goes on to argue that while culture enabled Manchester to break-free from its own institutional ‘lock in’, Liverpool in the 1980s remained ‘locked in’ to its outdated institutional arrangements because the cities culture actively prevented change. What becomes interesting from the tales of these two cities is that in the last ten years Liverpool has opened up to the potential of building up its cultural capital. Indeed, where Manchester’s renaissance was highlighted through the 2002 Commonwealth Games, Liverpool’s remarkable economic upturn has led to its status as European Capital of Culture for 2008. As such, this paper argues that there are important lessons to be learnt from these two contrasting tales of renaissance in England’s Northwest region