I have been walking around the city centre a bit lately for various reasons.

It strikes me more and more that this city just does not do style or creativity as well as it should.

We have the people and shops on the ground, but these are being let down terribly by poor architecture and a lack of joined up thinking.

To be honest, I struggle to think of many new supposedly centre piece buildings in the city which seem to look complete. They all seem to have one really nice angle, then as you walk around the building, such as the Cube, Bournville College, Selfridges, Orion etc, they morph into something quite ugly and it's disheartening, it really is.

I don't understand the logic.

Also, I'm alarmed at the a,mount of really low grade properties now going up en mass. It's starting to show more and more and creating a truly ugly cityscape. Recently I ventured down Eastside and Aston Uni, the new buildings down there with exception of a couple are bloody awful substandard. It feels really oppressive and for a major city like Brum I just do not see how these are allowed to go up when other cities seem to fare much better. Our developers use low grade, featureless kits which are painted in bland lifeless colours without even a hint of style.

And the new designs going forward look to be no better. I'm really worried for the city and how it will be perceived in the future. We should have had a design team to be addressing this, to encourage creative businesses to set up here, but who in their right mind would want to send their kids to be educated at an Eeastside college? It is actually intimidating in parts with gangs of youths smoking amid a backdrop of grey concrete clad/corrugated prison blocks.

I'm dumbfounded, just don't understand how we've reached this point... and no I'm not depressed, well, I wasn't until I took a few walks around some of these new build areas.

No creativity, low aspirations, lack of self esteem. This is what I see when I walked around Eastside. I guarantee that this park will be barely "a park" at all.

The sad thing is that any good buildings are completely cancelled out by the overwhelming bland greyness which is now being constructed.

Is there one person responsible for city centre planning?

this is not Sick Building Syndrome :-s

and to answer you one individual question, i believe there is a city centre team but all developments follow many council policy areas created by many different teams, like planing strategy who do the core strategy, city centre development team who did the BCP, urban design who do other bits like design briefs etc.

this is not Sick Building Syndrome :-s

and to answer you one individual question, i believe there is a city centre team but all developments follow many council policy areas created by many different teams, like planing strategy who do the core strategy, city centre development team who did the BCP, urban design who do other bits like design briefs etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome

Ah yes thanks, sorry I needed to be more original.

Five Ways Tower suffers from sick building syndrome, why it has been abandoned for many years.

skip to the end.. Charlemont Farm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzrFT4yGnvs