The London Plan is the Mayor of London’s flagship policy document, a crucial blueprint for the UK capital city’s strategic spatial development over the long-term. It is a document of great public consequence, subject to statutory calls for public participation, examination in public and publication. In preparing the draft plan, the Greater London Authority makes it available—open to all—for public comment on the proposals for how London’s future should take shape. However, according to Mayor Sadiq Khan in the foreword to his 2021 plan, not many Londoners know about it. Yet, all were invited to ‘have a say’ on the 2017 draft for consultation. Given the lack of awareness, what does it mean for the London Plan to be a public document? Who is the public that gets involved? How, where, when, or for whom is the plan public?
This practical research project attends to the public(s) of the London Plan 2021. From my perspective as a communication designer, it raises questions about the communication and design of the document, and sheds light on the complexities and contradictions of its publicness, addressing a gap in scholarship on the conceptualisation and role of ‘the public’ in shaping the plan. The project seeks to better understand the relationship between public-making, plan-making and policy-making in London. It takes up the word ‘public’ and follows it around, each chapter focusing on one form or format of public. Through a combination of documentation, policy review, interviews, participant observations, graphic design experiments and a design proposal for a London Plan Public Library, the research pays attention to the public-making practices of plan writers, editors, readers and respondents, and the ways in which they produce and circulate text. In so doing, the thesis situates the London Plan as a material, discursive site at which a public of multiple publics forms, briefly bound together by the activities and duration of the draft review processes. Through hyper attention paid to hypertext, some but not all Londoners participate. ‘Hyper’ means to go above and beyond—to exceed the normal bounds. The public(s) of the London Plan are ‘hyper-textual’ and ‘hyper-attentive.’
In multiple ways, at a number of scales and across disciplines, this practical research project benefits both academic and non-academic audiences. Bringing the fields of graphic design and urbanism closer together, the project contributes new transdisciplinary knowledge about the communication of planning documents and makes original connections between research and practice. There exists a wealth of academic literature on public participation in planning, widespread recognition of the importance of involving and consulting the public in developing plans for an area. However, in the context of plan-making and policy-making in London, there has been rare focus in urban studies or media studies on how such documents are communicated: the design, media, form, and format they take. Missing are substantive examinations of the public-making practices of the Greater London Authority. Particularly absent is an understanding of how the Mayor of London’s policy documents are produced and shared and how the wider public responds to and interacts with them. Through a primary case study of the London Plan 2021’s publication, the project sheds light on public input into the plan’s draft development and, as seen through the lens of my practice as a communication designer, illuminates the contexts, aims, modes, and sites of its communication. It identifies the need in planning scholarship and professional practice for a more critical inquiry into what public means relative to the London Plan’s public processes of public participation, examination in public, and publication. These findings herein have broad implications for the GLA’s approaches to public discourse, public policy design and public service delivery, and would be equally useful for other local authorities engaging with their publics.
In parallel, through my dissemination of the research via the London Plan Public Library (LPPL), an original online archive I developed and designed, the project proposes an alternative research methodology for probing the London Plan’s publicness and illustrates graphic design methods for working with public policy documents. From a practical standpoint, LPPL expands access to information about the London Plan, responding to a key issue identified in this thesis. Access to information is a core tenet of democracy: essential for the circulation of knowledge across communities; necessary to public discourse enabling citizens to hold authorities to account; and vital to the work of journalists, researchers and activists, to name a few. But, despite efforts by governments to make information publicly available, documents are not always easily accessible. The abundance of material online means that, paradoxically, information is difficult to find. In the specific case of the GLA’s government website at london.gov.uk, in preparation for a redesign in 2020, the GLA described in the project brief a need for better information infrastructure and easier public access. Conceived as a design proposal for future consideration, LPPL addresses this need and presents an example of an alternative digital platform for finding government documents, more visual and flexible than the GLA’s current list-style database system, the EIP Library. With interactive options for a curated digital experience, LPPL shows a graphic way to organise information, sensitive to form and format, opening up more inroads to access documents. It’s designed to benefit a wide range of users and readers, including GLA officials, local authorities, scholars, practitioners, campaigners, community groups, and anyone wanting to engage with the London Plan. LPPL provides a design template for what an online document library can potentially be, a valuable resource for supporting public debate about London’s future.
Overall, the project outcomes are beneficial for both policymakers and their publics to advance debates about planning in London; for the former to better understand the reach and impact of their publications and for the latter to grasp the potential to shape discourse through creative engagement with policy documents. For designers and/or researchers working at the intersection of design practice and research, the project also offers an expanded methodology of alternative ways of working with documents, archives, text and image.
The Introduction covers the history and conceptual frameworks underpinning the research project and the London Plan broadly, and provides the context for a communication design examination of the London Plan 2021 that was prepared and produced by the Greater London Authority and Mayor Sadiq Khan. By visually mapping how the document was made public through the processes of Draft Consultation and Examination in Public (EIP) occurring from 2017 to 2020, the project seeks a better understanding of the complex, heterogeneous ways ‘public’ has been conceptualised in London planning and has shaped the debate on London’s future since the first plan was published in 2004 by Mayor Ken Livingstone.
The empirical focus of this research project is on the London Plan 2021 by Mayor Sadiq Khan and its 2017 draft for public consultation, situated in relation to past London Plans by Mayors Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson and contextualised within a broader history of the relationship between Londoners and London’s planning. The project is particularly concerned with the design, documentation, communication and circulation of the London Plan, including its materiality, form(at)s, graphics and visual language, textual-spatial arrangements and media affordances. It investigates the London Plan specifically as a publication, examining its role as a public planning document. The thesis sheds light on the acts of public-making—activities like producing, editing, commenting, disseminating and archiving the plan—through a methodological approach of communication design as a critical mode of inquiry and publishing as practice as research. This involves a combination of participant observations and testimonies; semi-structured interviews; literature and policy review; comparative analysis of publications by the Mayor, the GLA and respondents; and practical design investigations using reproduction and republication methods involving graphic experiments working with texts, including writing/reading alone and together with others. Working from the unique perspective of a communication designer, I engage with the texts/pages/documents of the London Plan in graphic ways to read the plan different from how it has been typically read for content by others. These creative interventions, informed by my practice, illustrate an alternative way of studying the plan as well as an alternative way of doing urban media studies, addressing a gap in understanding the design of communication when communicating about the design of cities.
Part One focuses on context and concept; what makes the London Plan a public document and what are the conditions of its publicness. Chapter 1 reviews the difficulties of strategic planning in London and discusses the instrumentality and fragility of the London Plan in the city’s spatial development—a ‘crucial’ but ‘weak’ document beset by London’s unique metropolitan governance structure and entangled with narratives of growth and global city since the Greater London Authority’s formation in 2000. Chapter 2 considers the use of the word ‘public’ in planning policy text and in Mayor Khan’s vision to make London a ‘city for all’, and how a public of all Londoners has been imagined to take part in shaping London’s future. Chapter 3 situates the London Plan against the backdrop of local and national changes to public participation since the 1960s when the term was first conceived, in relation to the invitation for the public to ‘have a say’ in the capital’s urban change, and the struggle to do so.
Part Two focuses on communication; how and what the London Plan communicates. It examines the document design of the London Plan 2021 in light of the plan’s history as a corporate product—a marketing brochure and an annual report—in tension and conflict with the ‘public’ imperatives driving its publication, understanding it as a contested site of textual production in service of the corporate memory. Chapters 4 & 5 look at the physical properties, graphical arrangements, and media form/ats of the London Plan, in consideration of the materiality of text, the array of texts and countertexts within and around the plan, participants’ publishing activities, their writing and reading practices, and material inputs and outputs.
Part Three focuses on circulation; how London Plan documents are collected, organised, distributed and shared—the ways in which the plan moves. Chapters 6-7 are a granular exploration of media history and visual communication of the London Plan as a portable, hypertext document. Through a design proposal for a London Plan Public Library (LPPL), Chapter 8 rethinks governmental documentary practices in terms of a digital archive. LPPL is an online archive which reproduces the Examination in Public (EIP) Library originally posted on the london.gov.uk website, in a new visual format, and explores the relationships between documents—and maps relevant paths and connections, but also highlights documentary gaps and missing or broken links.
The Conclusion reflects on the practical investigations and the conceptual discussions of the publics of the London Plan 2021 which takes into account the textual and the attentive. It reflects on two material considerations framing involvement in the plan’s development: the labour of participation and the primacy of text; and examines the tensions that exist between the effort to speak and listen—to pay attention—in order to have a say, on the one hand, and the text-based nature, on the other hand, to formally do so. It considers the longevity of planning versus the brevity of having a (public) say, and how, through attending and paying attention, participants become a public, if briefly, to make words count and views known. In so doing, the research theorises an alternative notion of public that emerges from interacting with the London Plan, one centred on text, time and attention. It ends on a call for a ‘public inquiry’ into the publics of the London Plan.