Curzon Park, as architects HOK International have tentatively titled it, is designed to act as a hub for pedestrians strolling across 100 acres of land with offices, apartments, a refurbished railway station, a central library designed by Sir Richard Rogers, and a science museum.

John Rouse, chief executive of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, says Britain's second city is playing catch-up with other regional capitals such as Leeds and Manchester, and with overseas trail-blazers such as New York.

The park's location in Birmingham, the hub for car production in the UK, lends it a special piquancy. Rebuilding in the 1960s and 1970s put pedestrians firmly in second place to motorists.

Two concentric ring roads made Birmingham easy for drivers to navigate, and threw up roaring barriers that walkers could cross only by passing through dank and threatening underpasses.

Over the last 10 years, under a council dismayed by the poor image of its city, developers have opened up a series of pedestrian routes attempting to be as attractive to the casual stroller as the ring roads are to an industrialist driving a Jaguar.

But the city centre, the focus for much rebuilding work - including the replacement of the Bull Ring shopping centre - has remained hemmed in by the inner ring road.

Now Masshouse Circus, a raised interchange on the ring road described as '800 metres of motorway on legs' by Richard Green, director of the Eastside project, is being demolished.

This should allow a street life created in part by the city centre's growing numbers of residents to spill over into a district currently notable for its industrial dereliction - and the smart new science museum housed in the Millennium Point development.

The demolition of Masshouse Circus offers 'a real opportunity to build a significant new development', says Mr Rouse.

Mr Green says that while the perimeter of Eastside would be easy to reach by car, walking would be the main means of transport within it.

The routes would include tree-lined boulevards and tow paths opened up by the renewal of a network of canals, many of which are currently hidden beneath concrete.

According to Pierre Baillargeon, head of commercial architecture at HOK International, Curzon Park is intended to act as an ultimate destination 'as well as a way of distributing people'. His firm persuaded the council it should be moved eastward on the plan, away from the city centre, so Eastside would have its own natural focus.

Mr Rouse calculates there is 'a significant risk' in trying to sprinkle the fairy dust of the city centre's renaissance so far into what is currently a deprived area.

HOK and the council hope that properties fronting Curzon Park and the canals will command premium prices. But high-spending companies and home-seekers will stay away if the redevelopment does not develop a buzz of its own to rival the city centre, or if crime becomes a problem.

Fostering that buzz is itself the best form of crime prevention, says Mr Baillargeon. 'You need to plan the development so there are attractions in each area to create the human activity that makes them safe.' For example, a thoroughfare is a lot less attractive to muggers when it is lined by shops and cafes, he points out.

However, proposed zoning of Eastside into themed quarters smacks uncomfortably of London's disastrous Millennium Dome.

A learning quarter underpinned by the library, the science museum and local academic institutions makes sense. But the establishment of a village for media enterprises - which in the UK are now heavily concentrated in London - looks more like wishful thinking.

Birmingham, which has a good record of reconciling the disparate interests of private businesses and public sector bodies, has up to eight years to prove sceptics wrong, Mr Green reckons.

The fact that landowners such as British Waterways are backing the plan should make it easier for HOK's pretty artist's impressions of Eastside to become reality: and then the Brummies' frequently-voiced observation that their city has more miles of canal than Venice might no longer be offered with quite such a wry smile.

Copyright: The Financial Times