- guardian.co.uk, Saturday September 11 2004 09.05 BST
This could be because I have a chronic illness, and ill people can generally say whatever they like (the word invalid comes to mind), or just because, in the north-east, the campaign buses are out, and we are discussing the idea of a regional assembly, and it seems as good a time as any to be utopian and demanding. Also, the Yes campaign in the north-east (which Tony Blair and John Prescott came to support in Middlesbrough yesterday) is actively involving poets, artists and musicians as part of its campaign and for the first time I am being invited to read my poetic manifestos at political meetings along with other poets.
The north-east is in a state of manifest change, but increasingly I feel as if my city, Newcastle upon Tyne, has been hijacked by town planners and property developers who don't care about the greater horizon or whose view they block.
When I first moved here, 25 years ago, there were no tourists. The train screamed through Newcastle station on its way to Edinburgh, and we trudged on, in semi darkness, unobserved. Now new hotels, multi-storey car parks and shopping malls grow up like Japanese knotweed, and sightseeing buses trundle up and down Grey Street on their way to our glittering quayside.
This bland kind of tourism depresses me. If it were down to me, I would encourage visitors rather than tourists, and I would give them very little information, no brochures or brown signs. People would have to find out what was going on by talking to residents. They would have to engage with a place. Visitors would want to come here because it was different, not just another destination on a glossy map.
I would like the regional assembly to give the city back to its artisans - not just "artists" in the middle-class sense of the word, but anyone who made things with their hands: cake-makers, welders, embroiderers, poets, blacksmiths, shipwrights, gardeners. The north-east has a rich history of making, and I would like to fill the city with the sounds and smells of creativity, instead of whiffs of Starbucks coffee and the sounds of demolition.
There are many buildings I remember that I would like to rebuild; lost cinemas, alleys and lanes. I would certainly forbid the building of any more luxury apartments or offices, and prioritise studio spaces and public housing. Sometimes the city centre feels like a great mouth with no teeth, filled with empty flats owned by companies, and the terrible ambience of lonely, temporary businessmen.
I also want the assembly to make the north-east an America-free zone, with no McDonald's, KFC, or any other ugly chain. I want to applaud the particular and the unrefurbished; ancient sweet shops, chaotic electrical suppliers, tattered pubs with beautiful views, fish sellers at North Shields, Jackie White's market in Sunderland. I want my city centre to be memorable, unlike any other.
Broadly, things would be smaller, more intense and individual. There would be no lavish municipal firework displays or corporate events. The artist Joan Miro believed that we could only be truly cosmopolitan if we studied the place where we lived, our family histories and the stories of the past. Everyone should be taught the history of their street from an early age. We should treasure local foods, chip butties and Craster kippers, stotties and pease pudding, and Gregg's cheese and onion pasties.
I also think we should introduce the idea of an afternoon nap for all workers, which has been proved to help productivity. The afternoon in the city would be dreamy and quiet. Live music would replace muzak.
Everyone is very polite when I start speechifying. Obviously I have no concept of economics, of the complex issues facing town planners. But where are all the visionaries? If Letchworth Garden City could be built as a vegetarian city with no butcher's shops, why can't the north-east make some radical decisions about its landscape and community, and dare to take a stand against homogeneity?
Opinionated ill people are unlikely to attend long boring meetings, and I doubt if many artists or visionaries could stand the bureaucracy of local government, but I will still be voting for the regional assembly. The No lobby is so, well, negative, and from where I am standing, what have we got to lose?
· Julia Darling is a poet and novelist; her latest collection is Sudden Collapses In Public Places; her latest novel is The Taxi Driver's Daughter
