RIVER CITY REBORN A SOON-TO-BE-ANNOUNCED PLAN PROMISES TO GIVE

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Feb 8, 2009 | by STEVEN VASS, DEPUTY BUSINESS EDITOR

THESE are tense times at Tayside House, the unloved concrete tower block that is headquarters to Dundee City Council. Council leaders are waiting to hear whether Scottish Enterprise will commit the GBP30 million-plus to the city's waterfront regeneration project that will allow the vital next phase of work to go ahead.

Confirmation is taking longer than expected, and although nothing suggests funding is in doubt, Dundee is a place where recessions conjure particularly nasty memories. From jute mills to manufacturers such as Timex to NCR, the locals know that bad things happen when economies turn down.

With the project at the centre of the city's plans for its future and Scottish Enterprise's salary freezes well known, no-one is likely to feel comfortable until they see signatures on cheques.

There might be many cities redeveloping their waterfronts around the UK, including Edinburgh and Glasgow, but few aim to transform their city centres as dramatically as Dundee. The city has made economic strides forward in recent years in areas such as bioscience and computer gaming, but there is nothing in the urban landscape immediately outside the railway station that expresses to the visitor - or to Dundonians - how dramatically the city has escaped its grim modern history.

In the shadow of the Tay Road Bridge there is an ugly gap of more than 100 metres between the waterfront and the city centre proper, filled only with 1970s monoliths like Tayside House and the Hilton hotel, plus wasteland and a tangle of busy roads. HMS Discovery and its popular tourist centre, the only visible attraction, stand several intimidating traffic lanes away. Those with better things to do would be forgiven for catching the next train south and never seeing the beautiful old streets and Victorian relics of the city's past commercial greatness only a 10-minute walk away.

Councillor Jim Barrie, a member of the SNP opposition, says: "Things started to go down from the 1960s, when they knocked down a lot of the old buildings. In the dock area, we had the Royal Arch, which was the gateway into the area, and removing it [in 1964] took away the focal point. When they built the road bridge [in 1966], they fi lled in a lot of the docks and people stopped coming down."

The council has been plotting a radical redesign for the past 10 years that will see almost the entire area bulldozed to allow the city centre to be stretched into the gap. When the project fully completes in about 30 years, or possibly much sooner, the council wants shining new buildings, hopefully including a Victoria & Albert museum, pedestrian-friendly boulevards and a properly integrated central square, all inspired by the transformations of the likes of Barcelona and Lisbon.

"Scottish Enterprise permitting, the project will attract a total of GBP70m in public money and considerably more once private developers have paid for the buildings. As Mike Galloway, head of planning at the council and overseer of the masterplan, makes clear, it is about far more than just aesthetics.

"We are not doing it just to make an area pretty. This is at the very core of our economic strategy for continuing the process of restructuring our local economy, " he says.

The waterfront project, coupled with a boom in private development, has created a sense that the city has started reviving since the long stagnation following the end of the jute and jam days 50 years ago.

Dithering Labour councils in the 1970s, when George Galloway was a rising political star in the city, saw Dundee lose the chance to be the country's oil capital to Aberdeen. Successive manufacturers came and went and the city became a byword for post-industrial misery. Scarred by brutal post-war town planning, high unemployment and deprivation, there were times when Dundee United's golden era of the early 1980s must have seemed the only consolation.

By the end of that decade, council leaders decided that enough was enough. They accepted that the manufacturing heyday would never return and they stopped subsidising unproductive factories on the edges of the city. Instead they decided to develop a knowledge economy, using grants and subsidies to develop strengths in research and intellectual property, including heavy emphasis on spin-outs from Dundee and Abertay universities and partnerships with Ninewells hospital. Twenty years later, the results have been moderately impressive. According to a recent study by Experian, the city's annual economic growth rate since 1999 has been 2.1per cent, in line with the Scottish average.

Through the likes of medical testing specialist Axis-Shield, drug developer CXR Bioscience and the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Research Centre, the Dundee area now employs more than 4000 people in bioscience, amounting to around 2per cent of jobs and around 15per cent of those in the sector across Scotland. In digital media, where Grand Theft Auto creator Realtime Worlds leads a sector of around 350 local companies, the 3300 jobs represent 1per cent of the city total. These might still be relatively small employers, but they have helped create knock-on prosperity that has pushed the median gross weekly wage to GBP465.60, which is GBP5.50 higher than the Scottish average.