Café Économique Talk: ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Economic Regeneration in Leeds’ by Simon Jose, a social entrepreneur. This talk will be online.

Leeds looks booming, cranes at work, new plans for a major city centre park part of an even bigger South Bank Development. However, Leeds City Councils growth strategy is based on the “trickle down geography” theory, where you pump investment into the city centre and that pulls in new jobs, shiny cafes, bars, hotels and in turn we get growth and equity, prosperity and sustainability, competitiveness and emancipation. However, there is scant evidence this works at all and in reality it abandons the suburbs; places like Gipton and Bramley fare less well. Simon Jose will discuss how we need affordable homes, community centres and a workable industrial strategy, not boutique hotels and private student accommodation. Furthermore a growth strategy based on the white-elephant, money burning HS2 project is looking more and more like waiting for Godot. Reducing poverty and inequality should be at the heart of council policy not growth for growths sake, driven by vanity projects and big events. The pandemic has polarised how dangerous an economy based on cafes and consumerism is. There are alternatives, which address all of these issues, which are rarely considered or even discussed.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to Covid 19, the talk will be online using zoom. If you want to join the event,  please email cafe.economique.leeds@gmail.com

A zoom link and password will be sent to the email list  close to the date of the talk.