Only there are so many large proposals coming in thick and fast that it’s beyond the level that the people of our city can cope with in terms of detailed and considered responses.
Open Cambridge 2023 takes place between Friday 08 Sept to Sunday 17 Sept 2023
In 2022, Hilary Cox Condron ran an arts-based event for the Cambridge Festival encouraging people to imagine what the future of our city might be like (See my blogpost here). It was called the Imaginarium. Now that we have got a host of more detailed and sizeable proposals coming in from everywhere, would it be helpful if we could host a discussion and exhibition of all of the big proposals and ideas, and then have an open space where people could discuss them all and come up with suggestions on how they all might be co-ordinated rather than having each one fighting for itself?
I’m not pondering a huge event – I just want to test the concept of how the public would react if they saw display boards of:
- The Beehive Centre where RailPEN want to build a sci-tech park
- Mission Street’s proposals for Land South of Coldham’s Lane / Cherry Hinton Innovation / Project Newton / watch this space for future name changes
- The Longfellow Group’s emerging proposals for Fulbourn Hospital and Capital Park
- the Cambridge Biomedical Campus,
- Cambridge Technology Park on Fulbourn Road,
- Cambridge Science Park North (not in the local plan)
- The revamp of Westbrook off Milton Road near Mitcham’s Corner
- The Grafton Centre redevelopment (which would be within a 15 minute walk of a Beehive Centre light rail station *if* the necessary segregated active travelway / foot & cycle path was built.)
- Hobson Street Cinema
- The Lion Yard Hotel plans
How do all of these look alongside the proposals for:
- the current local plan
- The emerging local plan
- The Local Transport and Connectivity Plan
- Everything the Greater Cambridge Partnership is throwing at us
How do these look alongside alternatives worked up by:
Rail Future East’s proposals for regional rail links
Cambridge Connect’s Light Rail proposals
The smaller schemes from Smarter Cambridge Transport
How do these look when considering the shortfall of long-time-listed proposals such as
- A new stadium for Cambridge United Football Club (or massively-improved transport links for the Abbey Stadium)
- A new large swimming pool for North Cambridge
- A new large concert hall (not just my own suggestions but the historical ones such as Gordon Logie’s from the 1960s)
- A rowing lake
- Other city-wide and sub-region-wide facilities that we will need in the face of a growing population
I’m going to put a pitch in for something (this is what I wrote a few weeks ago), but if anyone would be willing to take part in a concept-testing event, please let me know in the comments box (which I’ve opened for this post)
I’m not looking for anything complicated. Just some display boards with some big posters and possibly some people who are either involved in, or know something about the plans to be there to explain things to the public – and then having some volunteer facilitators to bring people’s ideas together and provide participants with a card of contacts contacting locally-elected politicians, parties, and campaign groups for those that want to follow things up. See the gathering as a spark for future actions rather than the main event itself.
The Cambridge Town Owl 