LIVERPOOL @ SHANGHAI, The waterfront as a brandscape in Liverpool Waters case study

Abstract

Liverpool was an important maritime since the 18^th century. In the 20^th century this economic model declined and the waterfront started shrinking, eroding the core centre of the city. Since then Liverpool administration started stimulating new investments: the symbolic marine backgrounds, central places for the city of production, were turned into city of consumption benchmarks. 

Transforming into a brandscape the old waterscape perspective, Liverpool creates a twin-city relationship with Shanghai (China), trying to attract new investors from China to accelerate the regeneration. With the "One city, Nine towns" plan (2001), Shanghai provided itself of a branding strategy and of an efficacious urban planning perspective all at one time, using well-known European styles to realize its expansion areas along the waterfront.

Working on this model, Liverpool Waters proposal re-designs the waterfront skyline in a Shanghai style, with disproportionate towers, refusing the city waterscape heritage, listed as World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The main landmark of the area, a skyscraper called Shanghai Tower, is not an attempt to embody Shanghai culture or urban environment, but rather to line up to its lifestyle and social-economic conditions, to put the city onto the global market with a positive etiquette.

The overall proposal establishes a generic relation with water, neglecting Liverpool marine heritage, moving the attention from the old waterscape (with its core in the historic Pier Head) to a new town brandscape. The entire city dematerializes itself on the back of the proposed new picture.

The paper tries to evaluate the parallelism in this approach to branding strategies and related regeneration actions, according also to an analytical verification through a project: the proposal for a new tower in Shanghai waterfront to create a balance between the proposition of a successful, vibrant brandscape and the respect of geographical and historical factors.