I, for one, am confused.

Sheffield is a city with loads of amazing, old, empty spaces. 

It’s also a city with loads of uninspiring, new, empty spaces. Not content with a mass of unused old buildings, Sheffield has taken upon itself to actively manufacture empty space on a huge scale. Empty office space is the new abandoned factory.

In many cities, the confirmation of post-industrial status is the reclamation of the spaces of defunct heavy production. It’s a symbolic thing - the language reflects as much of a mindset as the buildings themselves. Think of warehouse raves, various “culture breweries” around the world, even Warhol’s New York ‘factory.’ In the mythology of urban development these places are fun palaces, full of artists, creatives, liberal drug use and, eventually, high property values. It’s the signifier of a city’s shifting economic focus from manufacturing to other, less tangible bases. This isn’t a universal truth, but it is logical process - post-industrial cities are not invented overnight. 

Across the city centre you can see a series of new offices awaiting tenants. The city has gone into suspended animation, unsure of its own purpose. Generic office space, inoffensively designed, sits uncomfortably in a city like Sheffield which has no great density. These buildings’ blank presence look like a pretend city which might as well be just facades.

There is something that proves this isn’t the case however. Look inside any new building. The hard-to-let ground floor retail unit is as much a fixture of the ‘new’ city as manufacturing was of the ‘old.’ Every area has its despairing estate agent’s sign promising an ‘exciting opportunity’ affixed to a bare concrete shell. Thousands of square feet of office space is going unoccupied, with ghostly spaces looking as if they had been abandoned haunting the city centre.

This amount of construction is quite deliberate. The regeneration bodies acknowledge that Sheffield requires a greater amount of high specification office space in order to attract business and develop its ‘knowledge economy.’ This is focused on the city centre because such virtual industries are not constrained by proximity to physical resources as heavy industry once was. As part of this, the city seeks to create a ‘critical mass’ of businesses in the centre which will stimulate demand in the local economy through their operation. It’s a difficult situation, because it requires the creation of genuine business infrastructure in a city which has lost a great deal of it; the currently low number of businesses operating in the city means that fewer are attracted to begin with. 

There are two questions that come out of this. Why create this all anew when there are so many spaces that are unused and emptying all the time? And why so much? We don’t have the answers, and we’re more confused the more that we look.