Following the formation of a new local government in the new millennium, the Greater London Authority (GLA), the London Plan has been an important policy document for the spatial development of London. Published by the GLA, it is a strategic framework representing the vision of each new Mayor of London for how the metropolitan city will take shape in the long term. Its drafting is subject to statutory regulations for public participation, examination in public, and publication, made available for public inspection and comments. The draft review process is a public invitation for inputting into the plan’s development, exercised during a formal period of draft consultation and examination in public hearings. Despite this clear public mandate, however, there has been a lack of clarity, in both policy text and urban scholarship, about what ‘public’ here means.

Through a primary case study and a communication design examination of the London Plan 2021, this practical research project has explored the ways in which the London Plan is a public document: as a historical record and a public record of accountability of the GLA and the Mayor of London; as a production for/of the corporate memory of the GLA and the Mayor’s business of government activities; as a marketing document and an annual report to attract internal and international investment; as a portable, digital document instrumental for gathering, collating, and distributing information; as hypertext (text joining other texts) and hyperlink (a document of documents) part of an archival web for assembling, disseminating and circulating knowledge; and as the site at which different publics come together, attentive to and in attendance at events across the city, in-person and online, to debate the future of London.

In the popular imagination and the planning imagination, public is generally considered as being singular, stable and perpetual—think ‘the public’— whereas, according to contemporary theories, publics are multiple, complex, complicated and contradictory, and constantly changing; and defined by their temporality and attention. While there is recognition amongst policymakers, planners and participants alike working on the London Plan that the public is not homogenous or a monolith, there is little reflected in policy about how to address this heterogeneity. Public participation is necessary to shape the London Plan. But the practice of it is insufficient in the ways ‘public’ is narrowly conceived and expressed in the processes for getting involved.

Contradictions abound that challenge the plan’s public status and limit who gets involved: the London Plan is an exhaustive document that’s also exhausting, involving a large amount of labour and an attachment and commitment to words in the hopes to change them. There is great specificity in policy about the need for public input but a lack of specifics on how to go about it, statutory requirements to conduct public participation without direction on how to do so; the plan is a key part of the Mayor’s strategic power but contradictorily “has no teeth,” sandwiched in between tiers of government that limit how much the Mayor can do and with what funds to deliver on his vision; and via the portable document format (PDF), the plan is made publicly available and easily shareable but it is also made nearly invisible, document dispersal often leading to disappearance. Wrangling with the London Plan means wrangling with tranches of documents, an array of texts vying for attention, caches of text hidden behind deep links. It means wrangling with public as an imperfect term with a variety of uses.

The publics of the London Plan are complicated, the use of ‘public’ is troubling, instructive of the complexities of the English planning system and of London local governance. In the context of the London Plan’s defined role and function in the capital’s strategic planning, the Mayor of London must walk a difficult tightrope to deliver on a vision of London’s future and invite Londoners to have a say in it. Policymakers face criticisms of making processes intentionally opaque and complex to limit participation, but the reality of the situation—technological, political, economic forces beyond their control—ties their hands, limiting what is ultimately achievable. Such constraints place the plan in a difficult spot to squeeze out public input from a very tight space.

Chapter 1 covered the planning, financial and institutional arrangements that make the London Plan a ‘crucial’ but ‘weak’ document in light of the GLA’s local government standing as a strategic authority under tremendous pro-growth planning pressure to ‘build more’ to sustain London’s competitive position as a global city. Open invitations for public participation in shaping the capital’s development run up against the constraints of the Mayor’s strategic remit, the limitations on the GLA’s time and money, and dependence on the global market for funding and on local authorities for delivery.

Discussion in Chapter 2 centred on the public respondents who show up to participate in London’s planning. There is a conceptual disparity between the imagined ‘all’ of who gets involved in designing a ‘city for all’ and the usual suspects that typically appears. As Chapter 3 showed, repeat calls to ‘have a say’ are contradicted by a gap between the rhetoric and the practice of public participation that has persisted since the time of Patrick Abercrombie (1943) and Arthur Skeffington (1969). It shed light on the structural barriers that participants like Just Space, London Tenants Federation and other community groups face to have a greater say. The high number of written responses to the consultation and the approximately 200 hours of public hearings of the examination in public, attest to a public participation process that on appearance works well, as has been argued by the GLA. This is contradicted by some participants’ sentiments that, after all the labour of participation, little fundamentally changes, achieving only some small gains in wording. The London Plan may be held up by its advocates as portent of planning democracy, but the sclerotic processes in place to ‘have a say’ eclipse genuine aims to get more people involved and more diverse views counted.

To supplement the historical trajectory of planning and participating in London detailed in Chapters 1-3, Chapters 4-5 outlined a parallel publication history that has changed the relationship between planning and people, which moved away from the one-way broadcasting of the 1940s, when London strategic planning first came onto the scene necessitated by postwar reconstruction. Communicating about London’s planning has transformed from a sole-source, authoritative, posting activity of government in which publicity and planning education were for ‘the public,’ conceived as a singular entity, into a plurality of activities undertaken by different, multiple publics, formally and informally. Since the last mid-century, activities associated with public-making in London’s plan-making have evolved from circulating knowledge in a patriarchal, top-down manner to circulating knowledge from the bottom-outward, moving away from centralised expertise toward dispersed expertise.

In the 1940s, publicity relative to press relations was instrumental to planners’ campaigns of public persuasion, best represented by the successful publicity campaign of Abercrombie’s County of London Plan. By the new millennium, publicity gets taken over by the property industry and developers. Chapter 4 discussed the London Plan as a marketing prospectus, telling and selling the London brand story to market the capital to an external, international audience for investment. A necessary alliance between the private sector and a cash-strapped public sector exists to promote the London brand in order to attract global investment and secure funds for delivery. A number of marketing and global market forces have driven the development of London and the development of the London Plan in tandem.

The chapter examined the ways the plan shows up elsewhere in public, at designer conferences, investment forums, international exhibitions, to disseminate mayoral visions and gain buy-in, part of the communication ecosystem contributing to the city’s marketing and identity. While the County of London Plan and the London Plan were precipitated and animated by different circumstances, this history illuminates the vital role publicity has played, obvious and visible during Patrick Abercrombie’s time, and in the background but no less important in the present.

Chapter 5 considered the publication context and the acts of publishing in which the London Plan is produced. It looked at the use of publishing as a planning practice that pushes public participation in specific evidence-oriented directions. There was a ‘participatory turn’ in the 1960s that pushed public participation towards the consultation-involvement route and away from the publicity-information route of information gathering and giving. But involvement in planning today invariably still involves publication of gathered information. The chapter illustrated how the London Plan’s standardised look across mayoralties and the document’s annual report likeness was designed to be informative of the work of the Mayor and the GLA. Branding was instrumental to raising the profile of the newly established GLA in 2000 and to outreaching to an internal audience of Londoners who had low awareness of the activities of the Mayor and the London Assembly.

At work is a pattern of publishing for documentary–data purposes by a handful of those in the know: publications are designed as know-show documents, flowed within an inner circle, to make policy arguments in which conclusions are typically already determined. The publications continue the 1940s planners’ practice of expert-led, information-posting, in which information is made publicly available and circulated for consensus-building but not necessarily for debate outside of the circle, usually pre-baked with assumptions and priorities of the report-makers. Reports are an in-audience production and circulation, mainly read by other report-makers. Notably, publications about London planning have come from within two circles of publishers: experts and other-experts. The first circle produces documents that are informative whereas the second circle’s production, in response, tends toward interventionist, publishing their own reports as a tactical necessity; both concerned with producing evidence to advance a particular vision of London’s future. The through line across this historical trajectory has been the emphasis on evidencing knowledge through publication and counter-publication. Publishing, what was once the exclusive purview of officials, gets taken up by all involved.

The London Plan is available as a printed document, but it is its digital edition that has the most presence and draws the most public attention and interactions. Chapters 6-7 discussed the new media affordances of digital technology that facilitate the London Plan’s production and enable participation in its draft development processes, and which at the same time, hinder it. In principle, anyone with an internet connection and access to a personal computer can participate. Word processing, desktop publishing, and digital documenting have made it possible for GLA officers to produce documents in-house and share them widely by keyboard and mouse, and also have made it possible for others to respond to their work by performing similar sequences of presses and clicks. For example, Microsoft Word was used to type up the chapters of the draft London Plan 2017, then InDesign to assemble them and create a collated PDF, then HTML to publish the digital document online on london.gov.uk to circulate. These writing and publishing activities are mirrored by those responding to the draft, producing their own Word and PDF documents, with some also self-publishing online on their blogs. Participants, empowered to be editors, are able to track changes and follow along as the draft iterates through versions until the final finished form.

The apparent ease of these tools gives the appearance of a smooth pipeline from production to publication, with participants benefitting from such an open, seamless workflow. What gets obfuscated is the tedium, labour and amount of screen time involved; the challenge for everyone, inside and outside of City Hall, to keep up with or keep track of the document flow; and the difficulty to navigate in bits and bytes. Documents move, URLs change, webpages get taken down, new ones thrown up. The state of the Examination in Public Library, the main repository for all London Plan documents on the GLA website during the draft review and development stage, is in constant flux. It’s a live site that reflects the live nature of the London Plan. While on the one hand, this positively communicates the plan’s continual tending, on the other hand, the movement represents a certain instability to its publicness—fragile and fugitive—reflecting the precarity of the entire process.

Through new media technology, the London Plan performs visibility, however, it also hides in plain sight. While a major focus of the London Plan is on marketing London to secure a particular future for the city, a corresponding focus is on remembering London in a particular documentary state to secure the GLA’s corporate memory, which is sometimes in conflict with the needs and demands of public memory. The GLA’s website works as an archival web to record the activities of the Mayor, and the EIP Library as a digital archive of plan activities. They are only stable for short periods of time; the collection grows and shrinks as the plan develops. Site visitors are likely to encounter broken links and unpublished pages at each milestone of progress. After the consultation ends, documents further disperse, and some altogether disappear. Memory machines are relied upon to not forget, to coax texts out of hiding.

In the London Plan, there is an implied association between public and all, as though they are equal concepts. The intersecting histories show, however, instead of all or everyone, it is only a concentrated few with much to say about the capital’s urban change who get involved. Despite a desire to include all Londoners, and despite the ‘enormous’ amount of consultation purported to have taken place with Mayor Khan’s London Plan 2021, the increased amount of people ‘having a say’ about London’s future turns out to be the involvement of a highly engaged but ultimately narrow few. The rhetoric of ‘a city for all’ may aspire to wide inclusion, but, in practice, not all publics are included. Not all publics have the same agency, sway, or weight in say. Not all publics present themselves. Not everyone has or can have a say—some Londoners but not all.

The assumed freedom to participate—to have presence in the public sphere as conventionally understood—is unequal. Not just anybody can show up, and even when they can or do, visibility alone is not enough. A few highly motivated people were in attendance at the consultation and examination events of the draft plan 2017, a fraction in comparison to the image of well-attended participation promoted on the GLA’s website. Those who take part in the city’s shaping belong to a privileged, self-select group of textual producers, collectors and circulators having the motivation and capacity to appear, the attention span to follow public proceedings, and the resources to give a response in writing. The effort of going through the public processes of shaping the London Plan is best summarised by London Tenants Federation’s comment about their participation: ¹

Although participants can’t always be heard in the ways that they want to be, and the impact of their participation is not wholly measurable, they deem their attendance still important. To have their presence noted. To have what they say put on public record.

In a circular, mutually reinforcing way, the publics that show up are the publics who frequently make their texts public, those like LTF who go on record and get press about what they have to say. Through their frequent acts of publishing, through attention and attendance, they constitute a public. Thus, a textual public, a public (of) text, forms: who must actively work with text in order to meaningfully engage in the planning process. Tasks include reading and interpreting the main plan text, drawing from and across different hypertexts (links to other texts), and writing-in their own text. Various publics come into being through textual evidence. Through this attention to text, an attentive public, a public (of) attention also forms: formation of a public in terms of (paying) attention (to what and whom), attendance (where and who shows up), and attending (how, in what ways is care given/taken). The onus is on text readers to put the texts together, to follow the flow of documents. Slugging or wading through the London Plan requires a capacity for a particular form of attention—dogged and sustained—as well as a particular attentiveness to intention and meaning.

As such, only a small but devoted following expends the energy needed to read the texts, whereas the plan remains impenetrable to others who cannot afford the same time and intensity of reading attention. ‘Hyper’ means to go above and beyond—to exceed the normal bounds. Participants have had to go above and beyond the normal bounds of text and attention. The public(s) of the London Plan are ‘hyper-textual’ and ‘hyper-attentive’.

In summary, the London Plan is a public document that, in some significant design ways, is not public, least not in the way it is conventionally understood in visibility terms. This practical research project has examined the particular constellation of publics at play, cataloguing their multiple registers. From my perspective as a communication designer, using communication design methods, the project has focused on the form, format, and publication design of the London Plan, not its content or policies as per the typical focus in urban studies. The project interrogated the London Plan as a public planning document, reading it doubly as a planning document made public and as a document which is the outcome of public involvement in planning, showing how these two readings sometimes contradict one another. It examined how the theories of ‘public’ and ‘document’ and the history of London’s planning, have shaped, limited and influenced the production and publication of the London Plan, rooted in particular notions of publishing related to the concept of a plan and a city for all.

The London Plan represents unresolved tensions between the Mayor of London’s restricted power at the national level and the desire/claim to empower Londoners to have a say at the local/neighbourhood level; between old concepts of consultation and new calls for collaboration and co-production; between the practical reality of a legalistic planning system limiting who can participate and the ideal of a pluralistic democracy wanting everyone to participate; between the media affordances and constraints of print and digital technologies that make information publicly available but also renders it invisible or inaccessible. The fraught context of the plan’s publication means that its public life is also fraught, a struggle compounded by the lack of nuances and clarity about the conditions of its publicness.

In the heyday of planners in the 1940s, plans for London were mass communicated and widely circulated, aimed at a general audience. By contrast, communication in planning now is significantly more niche, in limited circulation, reaching specialised audiences in concentrated circles of knowledge, often comprising of the usual and the familiar. Yet, despite starkly different contexts and circumstances of publication today, practitioners and officials, including some in the GLA, still see the decades-old publishing practices, and cite the proliferate publicity material, as a standard to reproduce. This is telling of the need for a new public standard, for alternative, contemporary definitions of what it means to make plans public.

In following the London Plan 2021 and the word ‘public’ around, the thesis is a starting point for such a re-examination. It problematised the definition of public impacting the spatial development of the city today, conceptualised by plan producers and respondents as a singular, universal (neoliberal) sphere contingent upon visibility: as if there is only ‘the public’ and not many publics; as if public and community and Londoners are synonymous; as if consultation equals participation; as if to be seen is enough to be heard; as if the global and the local are an oppositional binary of public interests; as if tracked changes are real changes. Instead, the thesis offered insights into a number of ways the plan makes public and interacts with various authors and audiences. What they unfold is a complicated picture of London Plan-related public-making. Rather, there exists a public of multiple publics connected through hyper attention paid to hypertext, representing some but not all Londoners.

In light of the rigidity of a complex planning system, the thesis raises concerns about the usefulness of public consultation of the London Plan for Londoners. If public participation, examination in public, and publication are central to plan drafting, then what are the meanings and uses of ‘public,’ the word on which they hinge? In its current form with existing gaps in understanding of who/what/which public and when/why, it is difficult to grasp the measurable value of the London Plan’s public processes. To widen involvement in the London Plan, we need to ask of its publication, what is the aim of communication? Where are the sites of communication, and what are the modes of communication? The design proposal for a London Plan Public Library (LPPL) begins to address these questions, presenting an alternative digital platform to engage with government publications beyond simply making documents available for all to have a say. It takes the GLA’s EIP Library as a basis upon which to re-organise and re-present information, conceptualised as a space for finding as much as for interrogating. LPPL is a different way to think about, and access, public planning documents.

In summary, public participation has been used as a blunt instrument of planning democracy, designed to sweepingly legitimise the process by which the London Plan takes shape. In condensed format, the Mayor of London puts forward his draft proposal, the public comments on it, the Mayor makes changes, then publishes the final plan. Here, public participation in the form of public comment serves a signalling purpose, to show that democracy has happened, out in the open for all to see. The process is not designed to reflect the subtleties of discussions happening inside and outside of City Hall, on and off pages and screens, and elsewhere the deliberations take place, nor does it address the outcomes. There is no follow up debrief or public announcement about the results of participating. There are no public mechanisms to rectify the unhappiness of some participants with the final product. There is an over-reliance on the process of communicative planning—planning through debate, based on communication—to widen participation but a gap in understanding the role of communication and the conceptualisation of ‘the public’ it aims to address.

The London Plan, as described on the GLA website, “is a material consideration in planning decisions,” but no material consideration has been given to the specificities, geographies, temporalities and movements of publics that inform its development, publication and post-publication. How much weight the draft London Plan has in decision-making is a question that planning lawyer Simon Ricketts addressed when Mayor Khan’s draft London Plan 2017 was published, pointing to political, legal, and practical answers, as well as, in his words, a facetious one: at 2kg, according to Ricketts, it’s a “whopper.” ² Not addressed in his reflections and in most planning literature on London planning is, how much weight does ‘the public’ have in decision-making. While the London Plan “gains more weight as it moves through the process to adoption” per the GLA, however, the process doesn’t probe the specific relationship to power different participants have which determine the weight of their input. The process doesn’t consider the physical weight of a 500-page document, the literal and figurative burden of carrying it around from public meetings to the public inquiry. It doesn’t account for the embodied heaviness of sifting through tranches of documents, the strain put on both eyes and backs, and the labour demanded of ears to listen for hours and hands to write thousands of words. There is a weight to the London Plan that is collectively endured by those involved in order to have a say about the future of London, yet unequal opportunities for what is said to have weight, narrowed in place by institutional and financial arrangements between London, the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. Thus, the future of London, in published form, may weigh 2kg but few Londoners know it.

General criticisms about the participatory process have long been acknowledged to some degree by the GLA and mostly recently addressed by their Planning for London programme launched in 2022 in preparation for the next London Plan. It is set up “to gather evidence, get the views of Londoners and others and identify issues and options that a future review of the London Plan could consider,” and through an engagement portal, “includes a number of opportunities to give your views.” ³ But it seems to repeat the same old pattern: an emphasis on public engagement amidst an absence of criticality, or even fundamental questioning, about the meaning of public in public participation, examination in public, and publication, the three main drivers of the plan’s publicness. This research project has raised some questions that we may start to ask about the London Plan’s publics beyond a social-spatial concept of ‘the public’ and public space. Many more are needed. There needs to be a full public inquiry into the London Plan’s publicness. Hopefully, my line of inquiry from the perspective of a communication designer sets an example for alternative ways to think about the London Plan’s relationship to Londoners. The hypertextuality and hyperattention covered here are but a few facets of its complexity. I believe, with this kind of knowledge and more that may come from others’ nonconventional readings of the London Plan, it will lead to a better understanding of, and greater possibilities for, the role public-making plays in the plan-making of London.