Member Article

World coming to Liverpool to share waterfront expertise

The Liverpool Waterfront Business Partnership (LWBP) is to welcome representatives from across the world at a key event in June.

The first ‘Liverpool International Waterfront Forum’ is set to take place over 18 and 19 June at a number of locations along Liverpool’s iconic waterfront, and has been timed to coincide with the ‘Cities, Enterprise & Urban Business’ week of the UK’s International Festival for Business (IFB).

The IFB is the largest business festival of its kind to be held in the UK since the Festival of Britain in 1951. The 50-day festival runs across seven weeks in June and July and will be focussed on the Liverpool city region.

The forum itself will bring together key note speakers from Copenhagen, Liverpool, Shanghai and New York to discuss waterside regeneration and city waterfront promotion with leading practitioners, academics and business leaders from the UK.

The main conference will be held on the 19 June at Tate Liverpool, and will feature a series of interactive sessions.

Talks from international speakers will be weaved around presentations on the future of Liverpool’s waterfront by key representatives from Liverpool’s business community. Open debates will also take place with the audience on lessons to be gleaned from waterfront areas across the globe.

Chair of the LWBP, Sue Grindrod, said: “Cities are known as the engines of growth and their waterfronts have come to symbolise their drive and ambition. A city’s waterfront has effectively become its ‘shop window’ to the world, and in Liverpool’s is already being admired by the millions of visitors to the waterfront each year.

“We are proud to be hosting the inaugural Liverpool International Waterfront Forum during the IFB, and see this as a further sign that Liverpool is rightfully retaking its place alongside other global waterfront cities. Liverpool is no longer a city that can only learn about regeneration from other cities, but one that has a positive story which other cities in the World now wish to hear.”

Max Steinberg CBE, chair of IFB, said: “The River Mersey and its waterfront frame and define Liverpool’s identity. Our waterfront is iconic, a symbol of Liverpool and an eloquent statement of the city’s restored confidence and global ambition.

“The waterfront has been a key part of Liverpool’s regeneration and this forum will be an excellent chance to share what we’ve learned with other world leading waterfront cities and to discover how much further we can still go.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Malia .