Improving communities through knowledge intensive regeneration - Mediacity Iconic Project : 1st deliverable as a project report about diagnosis

MediaCityUK is a purpose-built creative and media development in Salford Quays, Manchester. It aims to bring together companies from across the sector and establish an international centre for excellence in the digital media and creative industries. It is expected to create more than 15000 jobs and provide workspace for 1100 creative and related businesses. The overall research aim is to assess and appraise the MediaCityUK project to what extents it will contribute to the sustainable communities vision put forward by the UK government. Therefore, the focus in the research is on the social sustainability to appraise the project and explore how MediaCityUK will support the local community and to investigate how that could be simulated via adopting BIM and GIS concepts. The objective of this report is to elaborate the Mediacity project including its vision and programme in regard to its contribution to sustainable communities through the use of a range of research methods as detailed below. The report has four main parts. Part 1 is an introduction to MediaCityUK project and in this part physical properties of MediaCity, the role of public organizations in the project and sustainability issues related to sustainable communities are covered. Part 2 is about New Century City (NCC) and Ideopolis concepts. In this part, the given concepts are defined, NCCs around the world are briefly introduced and Manchester City Region is evaluated as an Ideopolis. This part also expresses the importance of university engagement with NCC and Ideopolis concepts. Part 3 is the analysis section of the report. In this part, the data collected via literature review, interviews and focus group meetings are analyzed systemically. Initially, interviews are analyzed and interpreted with concept mapping techniques which helped to recognize various evidences from Mediacity project in terms of environmental, social and economical sustainability. It is then followed by the evaluation of the MediaCity project with NCC and Ideopolis projects by benchmarking the recognized evidences of the MediaCity against the features and characteristics of those NCCs and Ideopolis in order to understand to what extent Mediacity is an NCC and contributing to Ideopolis vision for Manchester. This analysis helped to measure how well MediaCity can help for sustainable communities through knowledge intensive regeneration. As a result of these evaluations from concept mapping and benchmarking, SWOT analysis has been carried out to clearly identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of MediaCityUK project in regard to sustainable communities. Finally, Part 4 describes a vision based on the findings and concludes the report accordingly. The target group of this report is the stakeholders involved in the MediaCityUK project as well as the members of the consortium in the research.