Playing to her strengths

Planning, 29 August 2008

When in Manchester, don't whatever you do suggest that Manchester cannot do something. Not that I did - I wasn't given the chance. When I arrived there to talk with Jackie Potter, the chief executive of the newly formed Manchester City South Partnership (MCSP), I was met straight off the train, bundled into a car and taken on a whistle-stop tour of the city.

My guide was New East Manchester (NEM)'s Sean McGonigle, a man who has spent ten years of his life helping to rejuvenate the eastern areas of the city. He whisked me around the City of Manchester Stadium, the funky millennium community of New Islington and the fast modernising areas of Ancoats, Beswick and Miles Platting.

Held up as an example of how urban regeneration companies can promote success, NEM is regarded as a blueprint for what can be achieved with driven leadership and the can-do Mancunian attitude. Although Manchester may no longer be getting the proposed super casino, the city at least won the battle to have it. And they said they wouldn't be able to pull it off.

Eventually - and somewhat breathlessly - I arrive to meet Potter under the majestic arch that forms the entrance to the city's original university. Potter is leading the MCSP, the latest regeneration weapon wielded by the relentlessly ambitious Manchester City Council. I tell her how impressed I am with the new look east of the city. "Manchester has always been where new and original things have happened," she maintains. "People are not afraid to challenge things. In fact, they're fearless about it."

Potter explains how her task differs from that confronting McGonigle. While east Manchester was made up of hundreds of vacant plots of land, she is launching a strategic development framework covering the research-driven Manchester Children's University Hospitals Trust and the campuses of the city's two universities, Manchester Metropolitan and the largest non-collegiate university in the UK, the University of Manchester.

The framework is more about place-making than it is about house building. Currently out for consultation, it intends to get the city's big spenders working together to bring forward a designated area of 241ha. However, as is the way in this city, its promoter wants more.

"The three institutions have been spending a lot of money on research and innovation," Potter points out. "We asked how all that spending could achieve more together than it could individually."

The softly spoken Potter also aims to open up the university-dominated public realm and draw in residents from nearby Ardwick, Hulme and Moss Side to work and pass through her patch. "The communities that live round here should feel part of it," Potter insists. "It has sometimes seemed as though there is a fence around the area - not a physical one, although it has felt that way."

As a former executive director of tourism and regeneration at Blackpool Council, Potter is no stranger to this sort of thing. Part of her previous position "up the road" involved defining exactly what the coastal resort town meant to people in the 21st century and then realigning its planning effort accordingly.

"My job has been to translate the very professional, technical side of the industry into something that people can understand," she explains. "It's about showing investors and business people that planning is something that can work with them rather than against them."

Then there is the period of more than two decades she spent surveying the minutiae of the property industry with the Valuation Office Agency, which means that she carries some weight with the private sector. Time as the director of spatial development for the Government Office for the North West (GONW) has also schooled her in getting local development frameworks to integrate with regional strategies.

While at the GONW, Potter argued for a closer alignment of spatial and economic strategy. "The regional spatial strategy is about the region's future, but if it is done purely as a planning process then it is planners alone who are ultimately deciding its future," Potter argues. "An integrated regional strategy is a step in the right direction."

Potter's success, it seems, has always been about quietly encouraging people with strong agendas of their own to work together. Involvement with the Planning Inspectorate, the DfT and the North West's local authorities, as well as her experience at the GONW, will doubtlessly mean that she is able to hold her own in fearless Manchester.

She maintains that her strength lies in this ability to think strategically and get people talking. This is likely to be the measure of her progress in a city that is led by the council's talismanic chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein.

Manchester must be rubbing off on her. She talks about her vision for the MCSP with the gusto that she will need in this self-confident city. "It's a place to do business. That has to be part of Manchester City South. It has to reflect the Mancunian way - which is that we get on and we do stuff." Just don't ever suggest to them that they can't.

CV
Age: 55
Family: Married with two grown-up children
Education: Degree in social science, University of York
Interests: Yoga, family, keeping fit and films
2008: Chief executive, Manchester City South Partnership
2005: Deputy chief executive and executive director, tourism and
regeneration, Blackpool Council
2004: Director of spatial development, Government Office for the North
West
2003: Field director, Valuation Office Agency