A recently released academic paper questions the very basis of Media City and the BBC move as a tool for creating jobs and equality in the community and sorting out Salford’s economic problems. Its author, Brett Christopher, is well out of the way of any vested interests, based at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Basically, he argues that the benefits cited for the Peel Holdings led project “appears to be an article of faith” which get repeated by its champions and somehow gains credibility.

He writes that “we can perhaps think of the project as a form of `corporate gentrification’…whereby `real estate development becomes a centrepiece of the city’s productive economy, an end in itself’…” Or in plain English, that Media City is more about building loads of luxury apartments, expensive commercial spaces and places for “elite consumption practices” than anything else. Read full article at the Salford Star website.