One day, emerging from King’s Cross Station onto King’s Boulevard, movement out of the corner of my eye had caught my attention, something small, yellow and rectangular in shape, flapping in the wind. On closer approach, it turned out to be a notice about a planning application affixed to a lamppost, an A4-size page precariously hanging on by weathered zip ties. ⊕ Public notices in and around London’s King Cross in 2019 inviting locals affected by planning applications to ‘Have Your Say’. This visual documenting shows urban streets as unseen textual environments—public notices going unnoticed by ‘the public’. To whom they address is indefinite and undefined. Photos by me. It was an invitation to those affected by the proposed change to the local area to ‘have your say.’ Walking farther up the boulevard, every few metres, on a tree or another lamppost, were more pieces of paper, some yellow, some white, but all laminated to keep out the dependable London rain. On a different day, on a different street, I noticed a similar sequence of notices. No one else took notice. Too small to have any visual impact, too insignificant perhaps to compel attention, lost in the hubbub of a busy thoroughfare, they led a quiet public life.

This type of flyer I found swaying in the wind in King’s Cross is more familiarly called a ‘public notice’: a notice to a/the public, here some intended audience falling under the abstract category of “those affected by the development,” to whom the flyer addresses. Those affected, however, is what social theorist Michael Warner deems an ‘indefinite’ mass, open to interpretation as to who is considered an addressee. ¹ Michael Warner (2005) notes that, “to address a public, we don’t go around saying the same thing to all these people. We say it in a venue of indefinite address and hope that people will find themselves in it.” Who the development affects, in a place like King’s Cross, an important transport hub with connections to the rest of the UK and to Europe, could include the international student, the foreign executive, the migrant worker, the London-born resident, the small business owner, the commuter, the tourist, etc. The list is long and varied. Which of these people will get to have their say, some or all of them? The task proves difficult if the public of the notices, the readership, is indefinite but undefined, unknown. Their authorship too is the work of invisible writers, posted by what Danish urban reformer Jacob Riis refer to as “unseen hands.” ²

Of such communication in the city, it makes me wonder who is doing the noticing? Who gives notice? Who takes notice? What gets noticed? In the case of the London Plan, not many take notice and not much gets noticed. Like the lamppost example, notices of the publication mostly go unnoticed. Only those who are already looking, look for or at them. Tweets by the Mayor of London announcing the London Plan 2021 when it first came onto the scene as a draft for consultation in 2017, received on average less than 100 replies. ⊕ Mayor of London (@MayorofLondon). 30 November 2017. Tweet. Other related posts about the plan while in development don’t reach double digits of user engagement, let alone triple. In the Twitter sphere, where high engagement is considered to be above 1% of a Twitter account’s total number of followers, for the Mayor with 3.2 million followers, 100 replies is equivalent to silence. It begs the question, who looks? Who is paying attention to planning in London? According to the Mayor, when it comes to the London Plan, not many Londoners.

The London Plan is a Spatial Development Strategy (SDS), a statutory document prepared by an elected Mayor or a Combined Authority in England, that provides strategic policies for the development and use of land in the area they cover, in this case, Greater London, a region of 1,500 square kilometres. ³ Produced and published by every Mayor of London, the plan has played a consequential role in the city’s urban change since the formation of London’s local government, the Greater London Authority (GLA) in 2000 with metropolitan oversight of the 32 boroughs and the City of London. “It is one of the most crucial documents for our city,” writes Mayor Sadiq Khan in the foreword to his London Plan 2021, “and what it contains shapes how London evolves and develops over coming years.” ⁴

When the first London Plan was published in 2004 by Mayor Ken Livingstone, it was only the third plan of the kind to cover the wider London region, a 35-year gap since the 1969 Greater London Development Plan (GLDP), which itself was published 25 years after the 1943-44 Abercrombie Plan, the collective name for the Greater London Plan by Sir Patrick Abercrombie based on the County of London Plan by Abercrombie and John Forshaw. The London Plan is also only the second such document to have statutory weight, besides the GLDP, while the Abercrombie Plan was more visionary and not statutory. The London Plan is both visionary and statutory, the policies therein reflect the Mayor’s vision of London’s future as well as determine the planning for it to ensure planning decisions across the capital are in ‘general conformity’ with his strategy.

The London Plan sets metropolitan-wide policy for how the capital, in the Mayor’s view, should take shape over the long term, typically looking ahead twenty-plus years. What is written in it affects every borough, local area and neighbourhood in the city.  The plan is a strategic framework for London’s spatial development having impact at the local, city-region and global city scales. There have been three London mayors and three substantive versions of the London Plan, published by the GLA in 2004, 2011, and 2021, with two minor and further alterations produced in between, in 2008 and 2016. Building on Mayor Khan’s vision of A City for All Londoners (2016), the London Plan 2021 was adopted and published in March 2021. This latest version provides a blueprint for how the capital will achieve ‘good growth’, what is defined in his plan as a better, more inclusive, socially integrated and sustainable city for all Londoners.

The London Plan is one of the most significant strategic planning documents for city-regions and draws considerable interest in policy, governance, academic and built environment circles. The subject has been well covered by scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including amongst others: Duncan Bowie on urban planning, regeneration, and housing strategy; Michael Edwards on economy and community-led planning; Ian Gordon on London geography and urban development; Peter Hall on London history and planning; Nancy Holman on governance, local planning, sustainable development and community participation; Yvonne Rydin on public policy and governing for sustainability; Kath Scanlon on urban policy, housing policy, and housing finance; and Tony Travers on local and regional government, and urban and London politics. Academic discussion has been led predominantly by the London School of Economics and University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning. There has been extensive debate, literature and scholarship on London’s strategic planning and the significance of the London Plan from a planning and local governance standpoint, focused generally on economy, sustainability and urban policy.

Outside of these circles, however, the London Plan is not well known, not especially to Londoners. While there is a wide-ranging body of research to draw upon about how London Plan policies have impacted London and Londoners, there is little research about how the plan communicates them to Londoners and/or how Londoners communicate back about what they want. A small selection of writings has touched upon the communicative practices related to the London Plan and public interactions with it. Economist and planner Michael Edwards (1999) has written about the challenges of communicating planning in London. ⁵ Geographers Carolyn Harrison, Richard Munton and Kevin Collins (2004) has reflected on what and who constitutes ‘public’ in the context of engaging Londoners in the GLA’s policy-making processes, in their study of ‘experimental discursive spaces.’ ⁶ Urban planner Yasminah Beebeejaun (2016) has examined public participation in planning from a London and UK perspective and has raised questions about inclusion and exclusion in public processes. ⁷ Aside from this sampling of exceptions, however, focus has been minimal on, or only tangential to, the ‘public’ significance of the London Plan. Much less attention has been given to the conceptualisation of the public and their role in shaping the London Plan.

The London Plan is a policy document subject to laws mandating public participation, examination in public, and publication. In preparing the plan, the draft is open to public comment on the proposals for how London’s future should take shape. Because the plan has a crucial function in the city’s development, public input into it is also crucial. Each Mayor has a duty to consult and inform while preparing their new plan and is held to account by statutory requirements of the Town and Country Planning Act and the Greater London Authority Act, UK Codes of Practice on Consultation and the GLA Consultation Strategy, in order to ensure “high quality decision-making, informed by the views of Londoners,” and that it is “as representative a picture as possible.” ^{8 9} The plan has a specific remit of consultation to engage with ‘the public.’ This means that the Mayor of London has a legal duty to ‘publish,’ ‘make available for inspection,’ and ‘give notice’ of publication of his strategy. He must facilitate public participation in debate on his vision for London by providing opportunities for appraisal of the proposed policies, feedback on the plan’s direction and ambitions, and general input into its final output.

This is an outcome of the history and nature of public consultation in the English planning process. Consultation was initially introduced as part of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which urban planner and urban designer Peter Bishop describes as a radical nationalisation of individual property rights that allowed affected land owners a basic legal say in changes to their interests. ¹⁰ Consultation became a requirement following Arthur Skeffington’s (1969) report on People and Planning, which was a critique of the land use planning system at the time. ¹¹ The report made recommendations for better public involvement that sought to empower those directly affected by its outcomes (urban motorways, housing clearance etc.). Per Bishop, consultation was also a recognition (under a Labour Government) that the exercising of property rights impacted on the rights of others—neighbouring properties. In the next decades public participation via consultation becomes a tool of planning democracy to redistribute those rights, particularly in 1990s onwards with decentralisation changing local government, which claimed to give greater agency to local people.

Consultation is a legacy concept that originally addressed a dynamic and a relationship to power between people and planners existing when it was first formulated, different from the present planning system; the old (public) land use system has since been replaced by a powerful (private) development sector whose interests are narrower than the wideness consultation aims to accommodate. Yet, consultation remains the primary avenue through which Londoners can have a say in London’s planning and in the London Plan. With the scope and scale difference, it’s debatable in today’s context how useful or effective consultation can be for individual Londoners to affect London’s large-scale, city-wide urban change. Despite this friction, draft publication of the London Plan continues to be framed as a consultation exercise swayable by public opinion.

There are two main ways to get involved in the London Plan, through the consultation draft review process, and if invited afterward, through the Examination in Public (EIP) process, a public inquiry chaired by an independent Planning Inspector appointed by the Secretary of State to test the plan’s soundness. EIP takes into consideration the Mayor’s statutory obligations and submitted public comments. The formal consultation part lasts 8 weeks, the formal examination part, usually 12 weeks. In drafting his plan, the Mayor will have sought out the opinions of select interest groups, but unless invited to do so, there is little public opportunity to participate early on in its formulation. Only once the draft is complete does the wider public get involved.

For the draft London Plan 2017, Londoners were engaged in a two-year process of public deliberation over the city’s proposed transformation, illustrative of public planning at work, arguably a sign of London’s healthy democratic heartbeat. ‘Public planning’ refers to planning that involves the public. See Harding and Quarshie (2021). ¹² This is contradicted, however, by Mayor Khan’s note in the foreword about the London Plan’s obscurity relative to its impact on Londoners’ everyday. It shows that the plan leads a fraught public life. What does it mean for the London Plan to be a public planning document when not many Londoners won’t know about or have come across it, yet all are invited to ‘have a say’? How does the public get involved in planning London if they are unaware of the plan’s existence? Who is the public that does get involved? How is the document made public and how does it perform its public duty?

The County of London Plan conceived ‘the public’ as a general audience that places people on one side (to be educated) and planning on the other (to tell them what is best). The 1960s and onwards sought to close that gap through a push for public participation in plan-making. Today, we see the word ‘public’ not only on its own but in front of other words like debate, space, and good, among many; we can’t encounter a plan without encountering it.

‘Public’ follows us around. So, what does the word ‘public’ mean in the calls for public participation, examination in public and publication, in relation to it being a basic tenet of these three activities? What does it mean to give notice of the London Plan and to make it publicly available for inspection? Despite the emphasis, in the GLA’s twenty-plus-year history, ‘to publish’ has never been scrutinised and ‘public’ as a concept has not been thoroughly interrogated. Key questions of who and for whom does ‘public’ address, and in what form, format or forum, have not been raised. What role does ‘public’ play in the plan’s final outcome? There is a gap in knowledge of the London Plan specific to its production, publication, and related public interactions, and a gap in understanding of the ways in which ‘public’ is associated with and expressed in the London Plan, and the ways it has been conceptualised and practiced to deliver on mayoral visions for London’s strategic urban change.

To publish, in the widely understood sense, generally means to make something publicly available or, per the National Archives definition, “to make information available to the public.” ¹³ The word ‘publish’ derives from the Latin root publicare, meaning “to impart to the public, make public or common.” As graphic designer Paul Soulellis further breaks down the etymology, ‘publish’ means “to make publicly known through an act of announcing or declaring, and it comes from the Latin publicus, denoting ‘of the people’ or ‘open to all’.” ¹⁴ In social and political theory, the capacity to act and participate in public life is commonly understood in relation to visibility; the ability to show up and to show. Politics and power are related to the ability to make visible that which is hidden—to make public. For philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jurgën Habermas in the 1960s, the capacity to appear and debate in the public realm and the public sphere, respectively, plays a central role in a functioning, healthy democracy.

Arendt (1958) defines public in terms of an ability to be seen and heard by all, of participating in a shared ‘common world’ distinguished from our privately-owned place in it, centred on a capacity of people speaking and acting together in solidarity. ¹⁵ Her notion of the public realm constitutes a space of appearance that comes into being through speech and action in which “[political] power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company.” ¹⁶

Habermas (1964) conceives the public sphere also with clear boundaries between the individual and the collective—activities behind private closed quarters versus in the open. His public sphere is a forum for ‘rational-critical debate,’ which came about because of print culture in the 18th century that enabled the expression and sharing of public opinion. ¹⁷ For him, the public sphere is “a theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk.” ¹⁸ It’s an arena of discursive interactions and relations, a theatre for debating and deliberating.

It is a conception of democracy that has been adopted by modern governments around the world, including the UK. According to government guidance, ¹⁹ Habermas’s concept is extensively referenced in the UK government’s guidance on ‘The Public Sphere’ (2009) as part of the Communication for Governance and Accountability Program, a global program it funded to share lessons learned from around the world about best practices in communication.

For governments, the ideal of good and accountable governance is tied to this Habermasian-inspired ideal of the public sphere, having “free flows of information, free expression, and free debate” in the open. ²⁰

But since Arendt and Habermas’s time, there have been shifts in what ‘public’ is and what it means that is not reflected in the government’s definition. Recent scholarship, particularly post millennium, has been critical of these mid-century concepts of ‘the public,’ drawing attention to the privileges and freedoms taken for granted in their definitions. From a feminist perspective, critical theorist Nancy Fraser (1990) challenged Habermas’ bourgeois notion of the public as a homogenous (male) sphere having consensus of public good. For example, women and people of colour have historically been excluded from public debates in ways that white, upper-class, middle-aged, bourgeois males have not. The more intersections there are with race, class, gender and identity, the more absent the groups have been. Their absence from the discursive arenas has meant that different ideas about what is good have not been able to circulate in traditional ways, instead they have had to find other ways. Fraser thus conceives of parallel non-official public spheres: subaltern counterpublics formed in response to the exclusions from dominant discursive arenas, “where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs”. ²¹

Other theorists spring-boarded off Fraser’s work to move away from conceiving the public sphere in the singular and universal sense, toward a multiplicity of forums where there is no clear distinction between the public, private, and intimate. Social theorist Michael Warner (2002) builds on Fraser’s concept of the subaltern to develop his theory of counterpublics. Through the lens of queer theory on nonnormative sexualities, Warner highlights alternative ways of being for certain vulnerable groups and the limitations imposed on them that necessitate a different kind of public existence. Because for example, he cites, for modern gay men and lesbians the distinction between public and private is not as clear cut as the heteronormative general public. It is further complicated by ‘the closet,’ the need to stay in because of the danger of coming out; being out and visibly known as a homosexual is to expose oneself to danger—to risk personal safety—while the identity of a heterosexual is always taken for granted and needs no such public declaration. Closeted queers instead have had to find each other and do private things, hide intimate activities, in public settings—the public bath, bar, or park—and thus creating another sort of public, a counterpublic, which is defined by their tension with and exclusion from a larger public. ²²

For rhetoric theorist Robert Asen (2000, 2002),  “counterpublic refers to those publics that form through mutual recognition of exclusions in wider publics, set themselves against exclusionary wider publics, and resolve to overcome these exclusions.” ²³ They “emerge as a kind of public within a public sphere conceived as a multiplicity,” having “differential power relations” and developed as “explicitly articulated alternatives to wider publics that excludes the interests of potential participants.” ²⁴ Like Fraser and Warner, Asen sees counterpublics as relational to wider publics in which subordinates challenge dominant discourse, offering diverse viewpoints.

Art historian Miwon Kwon (2005) also picks up on such tensions and complications. She writes, “contrary to the Habermasian model, most recent theories of the public sphere cast the public sphere as a site of varying types of competition and contestation, itself fraught with social fragmentation, of unequal and exclusive access, of ‘competing communicative practices.’” ²⁵ In her discussion of public art, she challenges the public sphere as an idealised construction, highlights the existence of “an un-unified public, comprised of disjunctive conversations and incommensurate points of view. Here, the ‘democratic’ public sphere emerges as a competitive, formless, and inconclusive process.” ²⁶ This is in reference to Group Material’s DaZiBao poster project (1983) presented in the streets of New York. This ‘unquantifiable audience’ dispels the fantasy of a cohesive public sphere. Not for affirmation, consensus, or unification, she imagines instead the potential for a new democratic public sphere to be located in the space of coming together of a different sort of intimacy and publicity.

The above emphases on exclusion and where to draw the boundaries between public and private life are also prominent in media theorist and experimental publisher Andrew Murphie’s concept ofghosted publics. Murphie (2008, 2012) identifies the existence of the ‘unacknowledged collective,’ those excluded from or existing outside of the particular authority of acknowledged institutions like the academy, the profession, the corporation, and the government. ²⁷ They are ghosts because they haunt and are both present and absent to an established, recognised public. See also, Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For Murphie, such publics—the amateur, the un-institutionalised activist, intellectual or artist—do not even bother to engage in the public debates that define Habermas’s public sphere and Arendt’s public realm, they refuse them and route around them.

In media theorist Brandon LaBelle’s (2018) interpretation, such forms of resistance also upset or elide established structures to produce what he calls, unlikely publics, those who are representationally and discursively resistant. They “hover unsteadily and ambiguously in the open,” in and out of legibility, and “may withdraw, only to search for new entry points.” ²⁸ LaBelle points out, these publics alert to the conflicts, complexities and inequalities that challenge the implied or assumed equalities and freedoms in the construction of space between people. ²⁹ While Arendt’s public realm hinges on exposure and Habermas’ public sphere hinges on performance in the discursive arena, not everyone can speak and act with the same privilege or in the same manner or by the same capacity to appear.

Sociologist and criminologist Elaine Campbell (2013) likewise calls into question who and what counts as public sphere, who gets involved and how. Given this variety and complexity, and drawing from theorist Manuel DeLanda’s Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory, she imagines a/the public sphere as an assemblage, “a space of connectivity brought into being through a contingent and heterogeneous assemblage of discursive, visual and performative practices.” ³⁰ She considers a/the public sphere to be “an emergent and ephemeral space,” a synthesis of “sites, technologies, communicative modalities, actors, materialities, spatialities and temporalities.”

Taken together, these contemporary theories push past thinking of ‘public’ as an encompassing, single sphere or collective identity. They are more attentive to diversity and multiplicity, to the particulars over the general, to differing urgencies and agencies, to struggles between domination and subversion, and to the ambiguities and uncertainties of showing up. These notions align with political thinker Paul Virno’s concept of the multitude, a contemporary society made of heterogeneous and continually changing groups. ³¹ Publics are plural, contingent, and contestable; they can be subaltern, counter, ghosted, unlikely, un-unified, emergent and/or ephemeral. Warner contends, “the publics among which we steer, or surf, are potentially infinite in number.” ³²

To publish, or to make public, is not only about the site of communication where speech and action take place (public sphere), or about the speakers and actors participating (publics and/or counterpublics), it is also about the modes of communication (publicity), the activities of publics and the medium with which they communicate. In addition to who makes up a public or where a public forms, howthey make public—how they show themselves—defines what kind of public they are. The practices and forms of publicity, art and architectural theorist Frazer Ward argues, is important to the formation of publics. ³³ Ward’s essay is a critical reading of Habermas’ public sphere. These practices may include announcing, posting or documenting, and can take the form of newspaper announcements, online blog posts or government documents, each of which denotes a type of public relationship though not all of them, on their own, constitute publishing.

To document, as media historian Lisa Gitelman unpacks, comes from the Latin root docer, to teach or show. Documenting is an epistemic practice with an intrinsic “know-show function.” ³⁴ For Gitelman, a document is a material object that frames knowledge and is intended as evidence of that knowledge. It is to know something and to show it to someone(s), in some way. Documents by her definition are varied material forms of expression entangled with linguistic meaning, they are familiarly textual artefacts with recognisable patterns and cultural weight, depending on their frames, or context. Documents are integral to the ways people think and live, to the social order that they inhabit, belonging to the institutional, as instruments of bureaucracy, of power and control, as much as they are ubiquitous ephemera of the everyday, of the mundane. ³⁵

To post is another know-show function, a form of announcement or declaration—to give notice—of the people and open to all. In search of specificity, Paul Soulellis questions whether to post is the same as to publish. Based on Warner’s ideas about the existence of multiple publics and counterpublics, he marks an important distinction between posting as making public and publishing as making a public or several publics. ³⁶ While posting makes something available, publishing creates a space for the circulation of discourse, from which a public is formed. Along a similar vein, for writer Matthew Stadler, publication is “not just the production of books, but the production of a public.” ³⁷

Posting a notice about a plan on lampposts in the streets of London or tweeting about it is different from disseminating that plan for deliberation. The lamppost is an endpoint of communication that is not reciprocal. The notice is offered for informational purpose, but it alone provides no opportunity for further discussion at the site of reading, no mechanism to write back or to chat with other lamppost readers. There is no way of knowing who else has stood in the same spot I did on King’s Boulevard. Until or unless a crowd gathers, either onsite or connected online via networked technologies, no public is formed, no discourse can take place, no ideas can be exchanged. Tweeting about the plan has the same effect if there is also no exchange between tweeters. A public forms only once there is a response of some kind—when a space of discourse opens up. As Soulellis has put it referencing Warner, “the public emerges from the conversation,” it is “a self-organised form that does not exist outside the discourse that addresses it.” ³⁸

Writer Rachel Malik further defines publishing as a set of processes and practices—not merely an end product—that gives visibility to ideas, work and knowledge and opens their horizons. ³⁹ This notion of publishing as a verb, rather than the thing itself, is also how critic and art curator Nat Muller conceives of “publishing as a gesture”—the pre-action: ⁴⁰

A gesture is movement. The crux of publishing is when motion, circulation, is involved, when flow is added to the equation. Returning to Gitelman’s definition, if to document is to know–show, then to publish is to know–show and, I would add, flow. By flow, what comes to mind is philosopher Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘immutable mobiles,’ sociologist Manuel Castell’s notion of the ‘space of flows’ underpinning his concept of the networked society, and filmmaker and writer Hito Steryl’s concept of the ‘poor image’.

For Latour, there is a direct link between mobility and print technology, which has anchored our modern understanding of what is a publication. He draws from Elizabeth Eisenstein’s analysis of 15th century printing press (she considers it to be a mobilisation device) to advance his concept of immutable mobiles, a thing of fixed content that’s made mobile by multiple copies, like a map or a book. ⁴¹ In his examination of the role of drawing and images in the ways ideas evolve and exchange, Latour remarks on the ‘accuracy’ and ‘consistency’ of the original material made possible by the press, enabling ideas to travel without changing—“mobile but also immutable.”

For Castells, various kinds of movement (“flow”) are ever-present in all aspects of contemporary society; capital, information, technology, organisational interaction, images, sounds and symbols. In addition to being an element of social organisation, flows “are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life.” ⁴² He proposes there is a space of flow that characterises the social practices that dominate and shape the networked society, “[it] is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows.” ⁴³

Steyerl too recognises the importance of flow but contrary to Latour’s emphasis on the fixity or fidelity of ‘the original,’ she values change, such as the degradation of copies as they flow in our digital age. The poor image like a low-resolution JPG, for example, is a “a copy in motion.” ⁴⁴ Through dispersion and displacement, and its “fractured and flexible temporalities,” the poor image can defy or appropriate, and conform or exploit. Rarely what we encounter is an original, more likely it is a copy of a copy of a copy. Unoriginality is something that artists and experimental publishers value for their transformation potential.

For me then, the critical thing when it comes to publishing isn’t that knowledge remains immutable when it moves. When content changes hands, media, and sites of engagement—its meaning inherently also changes. How and where the spaces of exchange shift are as important as what is being exchanged. Circulation of knowledge matters as much as the production of knowledge, it stretches beyond any one public and entangles with others. Circulation is crucial. As illustrator and designer Luise Vormittag puts it,

A print copy of the London Plan is nothing but a stack of paper glued together by the left edge. Where it is found in the planner’s room, at the architect’s office, on a GLA officer’s desk, at the community hall, in the classroom or online—its movements—and when it is talked about and debated on, are what makes it a publication. They are what gives it life and meaning.

Publishing, like public, is an elastic term, an expansive concept. In this sense, publishing can be understood as beyond making public or visible but making ‘explicit’—explicit not just in terms of clarity, but in the Latin root explicare sense of ‘to unfold.’ Process rather than product, publishing is an unfolding that exposes, reveals, opens up; a state of becoming that produces and reproduces meaning. Publishing is the making of publics through circulating knowledge and discourse, a gesture with intent. While publishing has been commonly defined in relation to mid-century conception of the public sphere rooted in appearance, availability and access, it is about more than making something appear, available and accessible. As recent debates have expanded upon, publishing is tied to acts of documenting, posting, gesturing, reproducing and, crucially, circulating—all integral to the production and dissemination of the London Plan. The question then is, what kinds of public(s) does publication of the London Plan produce? Who are the plan writers and readers, what do they know, how do they show it, and where does this knowledge flow? What do their acts of making public unfold?

The story of publishing since the 15th century has been well covered in publication history, with extensive studies on print’s transformative role in culture and public debate, as well as its relationship to architecture and urbanism. Print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein elucidates in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) how the advent of print brought about a communication and cultural shift to early modern Europe; architectural historian Beatriz Colomina examines in Privacy and Publicity (1994) modern architecture’s engagement with mass media as the site of architectural production, and uncovers in Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines (2006) how little architectural magazines later in the 1960s and 1970s radically transformed architectural culture; architectural historian Mari Hvattum and architect Anne Hultzsch provide new insights in The Printed and the Built (2018) into the relationship between architecture, print culture and public debate in the nineteenth century; contributors to OASE Journal for Architecture’s 100th issue explores the architecture of the journal (2018) through the relationship between OASE, its graphic design and its graphic designer Karel Martens, and includes architect Carlo Menon’s examination of the history of architectural magazines.

Publishing and print have also been looked at from a media studies perspective as forms of resistance. In the late 20th century, underground press and independent publishing was a stalwart activity of counterculture, producing unofficial, sometimes illegal, oftentimes unauthorised periodicals and publications for activist and artistic transgression against dominant groups. Britain radical politics in the 1970s, as studied by graphic designer Guglielmo Rossi, was formulated and enacted through radical presses. ⁴⁵ According to graphic designer Jess Baines, the 1970s and 1980s saw London’s printmaking workshops turned into “DIY [Do-It-Yourself] sites of political and community activism that rejected the traditional role of the artist to participate in a network of campaign groups, radical publishers and alternative distributors.” ⁴⁶ See also Baine’s writings on ‘Experiments in democratic participation: feminist printshop collectives’ (2012) and ‘Democratising Print Radical and Community Printshops in Britain 1968-98’ (2016). Similarly in America, media historian Kate Ecihhorn uncovers, the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of publication activism—AIDS, queer and anti-corporate activists and artists deploying the copy machine to self-organise and protest. ⁴⁷ Technologies like xerography, Eichhorn writes, enabled independent groups “to imagine and in some cases even realise radically different types of cities, publics, and counterpublics” and consequently, their associated postering activities “changed what cities looked like.” ⁴⁸ These alternative publishing practices have emerged from or were inspired by the counter-culture of the 1960s realised through experiments in self- and ‘underground’ publishing, so called because “they are so totally divorced from the established channels of communication”. ⁴⁹

As the above demonstrates, there is new media archaeology that sets familiar objects associated with publishing, like the photocopier and the typewriter, within new histories of social or political change whose legacies persist today. See Darren Wershler’s The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (2005) for a history of writing culture via the typewriter. This development is part of a continuum of innovation. By media artist Alessandro Ludovico’s (2012) account, publishing has been in a period of profound transformation since the late 19th century and more recently in the late 20th with the technological shift from paper to electronics, what he calls “the mutation of publishing” since 1894. ⁵⁰ Against popular claims in the new millennium of “print is dead,” he points to the activities of artists, activists and technologists who creatively adapted to the changing media environment and mixed paper and pixel to open new avenues for hybrid publishing and new relationships between analogue and digital, and print and forms of non-paper-based publication.

Research labs in the past decade like MIT’s Centre for Civic Media and Harvard’s metaLAB place networked technology at the centre of their research and design work, widening the scope of print-based scholarship into the digital. Meanwhile, Ludovico’s Post-Digital Publishing Archive is an online platform to “systematically collect, organize and keep trace of experiences in the fields of art and design that explore the relationships between publishing and digital technology.” ⁵¹ However, I have found that implications for the urban to be at the margins of these studies. Conversely, contemporary research into creative public-making urban practices tend to focus on public space as the primary subject and site, less explicitly on the means or modes of making public. See Public Space? Lost and Found (2017); and Explorations in Urban Practice (2017). It’s an observation that echoes urban geographer Kurt Iveson’s critique of the urban focus on ‘public’ as a spatial concept. ⁵² Sitting at the periphery are insights into the publishing activities and practices of publics, a gap in understanding for instance how a city like London and Londoners engage with publishing for urban change.

Since the early modern, as print technology became ubiquitous, affordable, and widely available, the increased access to tools saw an increase in production of knowledge capacity and the number of knowledge producers—that greatly influenced the public conversations about and around the built environment. But while publication history has richly crossed paths with architectural and urban history, as seen in cultural historian David Henkin’s City Reading on public texts in antebellum New York, ⁵³ the emphasis has either been on the last early to mid-century or on moments and media of radical transformation that Rossi, Baines, Eichhorn, and Ludovico have covered. There is little scholarship on the current urban publishing landscape, and particularly, on the production and design of government publications to the everyday transformation of the contemporary city. If the focus has been mainly on hidden, underground or experimental histories of publishing, then it has come at the expense of paying attention to in-plain-sight communications like policy documents, reports, development plans, in the production of urban publics.

Possibly because they are too bureaucratic or technical in content, or perhaps too prosaic in visual expression, design research into this area has not held high interest, there hasn’t been any substantive design studies on the communication of government publications. Extending Michael Edwards definition, I define communication widely here to include the ways in which people share knowledge and ideas about the city, its past and future, the exchanges between people and various individuals or groups involved in shaping it, such as governments, local authorities, institutions, scholars, practitioners, campaigners, activists and residents, among others. ⁵⁴ This definition expands upon Michael Edwards’ definition in Edwards, ‘Planning & Communication in London’. (p1) Political communication theorist María José Canel has led scholarship on government communications, which she describes as involving “constant exchanges of information and communication about policies, ideas and decisions between governors and the governed.” ⁵⁵ Her research covers policy publications but is theory-led, not design or practice-led. In the UK context, architect and planner Matthew Carmona has written about the design tools of government—the formal and informal tools of design governance which include “the range of instruments, approaches and actions that policy makers deploy in order to steer the contexts, actors and organizations for which they are responsible towards particular policy outcomes.” ⁵⁶ Carmona suggests, “a substantial bank of knowledge exists on ‘policy’ and ‘design’ as separate concepts but a limited body of academic theory and scholarly knowledge exists at the intersection between the two concepts that is ‘design for policy’.” ⁵⁷ He addresses this design gap at the urban design scale. Similarly, in my view, notably absent from scholarship is knowledge on ‘communication design for policy’ or ‘publication design for policy,’ and in the case of the London Plan, on grasping design at the document scale, like how documents are produced, shared and interacted with.

Communication design, also known as graphic design, is concerned with how humans communicate, the media, strategies, creative processes, and systems of representation and information organisation. I use communication design as an umbrella term to describe the design of the forms, means, and modes of communication, as well as the historical, social, cultural and political conditions and contexts in which they were created and used. For more on communication design and publishing practices, see Methodology section. This includes the design of publications, for which there is currently no bank of knowledge about government or policy documents, at least not for London planning. A focus on local government publications and their designs is generally missing from the record. Therefore, there is a need for a closer examination of the intersection of urban policy and communication design, the uses and users of these official documents.

Thinking of uses and users brings to mind feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed’s critical questioning of the uses and users of institutional documents. ⁵⁸ Ahmed looks at ‘diversity documents’ written by institutions promoting inclusion. In her book, What’s the Use? (2019), she further explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users and how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. ⁵⁹ Ahmed takes up the word ‘use’ and follows it around. I wish to give the same kind of attentiveness to London Plan documents and the uses of ‘public’ found in/out of them. Borrowing Ahmed’s term, what are the uses of public and its usefulness for the London Plan? What are the public intentions? What does public mean in, and for, the London Plan? What makes the document public? How does it relate to the Mayor’s duty to publish the London Plan? How does the plan work or perform in public? How are the plan and associated documents produced, published and distributed, gathered and archived, by and for whom? How do the documents move around and who moves them? Which public(s) does the London Plan address? Which public(s) are formed from interacting with it? What form(ats) do these publics take shape?

This practical research project is a communication design examination of the London Plan asking these and other questions about its ‘publics.’ Through the case study of the London Plan 2021, it investigates the notions and uses of ‘public’ and seeks a better understand of the relationship of publishing (public-making) to plan-making and policy-making in London. Linking graphic design and urbanism, the project addresses the gaps in scholarship on planning and policy documents from a communication design viewpoint. It defines the conditions and spaces of participation and publication, and maps the experiences of select participants, as well as my own participation, involved in the public processes.

In light of the mayoral requirements to publish and to ensure public involvement in the London Plan’s development, the plan is understood here to be a ‘public planning document,’ read two-fold: 1) a planning document made publicly available, and 2) a document of public planning, involving the public. Examining the draft plan’s development from 2017–2020, the project interrogates how the two readings inform and interact with each other. The thesis situates the London Plan as a material, ‘discursive site,’ a term used by Miwon Kwon to describe the specificity of context, audience, and community associated with the network of social exchanges and interactions that transform a physical place. ⁶⁰ Kwon is referring specifically to public art’s relationship to urban identities but her writings about the need to be site-specific, context-specific, audience-specific, and community-specific applies here to the London Plan. To meaningfully examine the publics of the London Plan, this research project gets site-specific, context-specific, audience-specific, and community-specific about which publics the London Plan addresses and in what forms, formats and forums they take.

Designer Mindy Seu defines publication beyond its usual format association to ‘the printed and bound book,’ and rethinks “publication to mean the site at which a public is formed.” ⁶¹ Michael Warner theorises that, in the way texts circulate for a limited time, “publics have activity and duration.” ⁶² The project examines the London Plan as the site at which a public is formed, briefly bound together by the activities, duration and texts of the draft consultation and examination in public process. It considers the publishing gestures related to the plan’s documents—wrought with intentionality, motion and agency, rooted in the concepts of publics, flow, and unfolding and informed by the theories of publishing described above. The thesis sets the communication design of the London Plan within wider ‘public’ contexts and reframes conventional thinking about the plan’s publics, underscoring the complexities of ‘the public’ getting involved in London’s strategic planning.

According to Iveson, the social imaginaries of publics and the spatial imaginaries of ‘the city’ tend to be treated as separate concerns of their disciplines, social theory and urban studies. In his examination of the diverse forms of public address, he advocates thinking about them as connected. Looking at the relationship between the two imaginaries, he posits “there are three distinct but related ways in which cities play a part in the formation and interaction of public social imaginaries — as venues of public address, as objects of public debate and connection, and as collective subjects which serve as the common horizon for diverse publics.” ⁶³ (emphasis mine) London, via the London Plan, will be shown to exemplify all three: it’s a venue where public address takes place, an object of intense public debate, and a subject that brings different publics together.

In Publics and the City, Iveson sought to establish a conversation between urban studies and critical social theories of the political ‘public sphere’ and to better connect polis and print. This thesis expands this conversation and makes further connections. It does so by drawing a bridge to communication design. According to Iveson, “city and media take shape in relation to each other.” ⁶⁴ Thus, the London in the London Plan takes shape in relation to the media that communicates the London Plan. Echoing Iveson, it is important to ask then, what is the shape of the public sphere? The thesis is concerned with, and asks questions of, the shape­ of the London Plan’s public sphere, attuned to the circulation of planning documents as public texts, their hypertextuality and the hyperattention involved in the London Plan’s making. The research herein makes a practical contribution from a communication designer’s perspective to the field of urban media studies, expanding knowledge of media and cities at their intersection.

In the spirit of Sara Ahmed, the thesis takes up the word ‘public’ and follows it around, wherever we may find its associations with and adjacencies to the London Plan. Structured to address three primary aspects, Part One focuses on context and concept—what makes the London Plan a public document, what are the conditions of its publicness, and who do they may include. Part Two focuses on communication—how the Mayor and the GLA communicate the London Plan and how does ‘the public’ communicate in turn. Part Three focuses on circulation—where do we find London Plan documents, looking at the ways in which the texts move and when they show. Each chapter concentrates on one form, format or forum of public:

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Part One: Context and Concept   

01   Public Planning

02   Public Imagination

03   Public Participation

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Part Two: Communication

04   Public Relations & Publicity

05   Publication

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Part Three: Circulation

06   Public Record

07   Public_HTML

08   Public Library

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Following the first chapter, each chapter builds conceptually, if not chronologically, upon the version of public examined before it, the thesis ending on reflections about, and a proposal for, what a public document can be. The chapters connect one public to the next by treading and re-treading the old paths that the word has taken and the new ones it can take. Moving in an iterative way, each subsequent exploration revisits the ideas and histories discussed in previous explorations to pivot toward a different angle of examining and understanding the different conceptions and expressions of public. The chapters start from the basic questions, “What is public?” and “Who is public?” then move toward more meaningful questions, “How is public?”, “Where is public?” and “When is public?” How addresses techniques and practices, Where addresses scenes and screens, and When addresses time and memory.

Chapter 1 addresses the public of a public planning system and a publicly elected Mayoral system, both working in the public interest and under specific public statues. It outlines the planning context for London and the circumstances and conditions that frame the terms of engagement with the London Plan. It 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, the Greater London Authority, and driven by the ambitions across mayorships for the capital’s continuous growth and globally competitive place in the world. Because of an institutional arrangement which is shaped by, and also shapes, the relationship between London, the UK and the rest of the world, the chapter underscores, there are political demands as well as constraints placed on the publicness of the London Plan.

Chapter 2 addresses the public in public policy and the imagination of an inclusive ‘public London’ widely held, and aspired to, by those involved in the London Plan and plan-making. It reflects upon the concept and uses of the word ‘public’ in planning and in Mayor Khan’s vision to make London a ‘city for all.’ The chapter identifies the trouble with ‘public’ and its association to the concept of ‘all’ prevalent in policy rhetoric, which imagines all Londoners taking part in shaping London’s future. It critically examines the persistence of the language of all, problematising the conceptualisation of the universal, singular and neoliberal public getting involved in the London Plan. Despite the plan’s public importance, identified in Chapter 1, the public sphere of the London Plan, this chapter argues, has problematically gone unexamined, sustaining a narrow view of Londoners’ relationship to London and their role in shaping the city.

Chapter 3 addresses the public of public participation, the main democratic instrument with which planning in London, and the planning of London, involves Londoners. It details the participation context in which the London Plan’s invitation for the public to ‘have a say’ in the capital’s urban change is issued. It 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 the UK, in relation to broader changes in planning and participatory democracy. The discussion connects to contemporary planning theory discourse about the ‘dangers’ of communicative planning, a way planners practise planning based on communication, that which frames the GLA’s undertaking of public participation in the London Plan. This framing poses intractable challenges given the limited understanding of the role of public communication that pervades. Because the plan is the product of a complicated planning and governance system, as discussed in Chapter 1, shaped by a narrow concept of the public sphere, as discussed in Chapter 2, this chapter posits there will always be, in planners’ term, a “never-ending struggle” for public involvement in the London Plan, a perennial difficulty in having a say, resulting in only “some small gains in wording.”

After establishing the terms impinging the London Plan’s publicness in Part One, the middle of the thesis, Part Two, pivots to address the acts of making public and connecting with publics related to the Mayor’s remit to give public notice of the plan. Whereas Chapters 1-3 discuss the London Plan and the city’s shaping as the subject of public deliberation, going by Iveson’s categories, Chapters 4-5 attends to the plan as a designed object shaped by the contours of those debates. Chapter 4 looks at the larger role of public relations and publicity in telling and selling the London story, examining the narrative drive behind the London Plan. It considers the relationship between branding and the plan’s document design that orients the London Plan as a marketing document for investment from private developers as well as central government. The issues brought up in Chapters 1 and 2 about the structural and conceptual constraints again likewise have influence here on the address of the London Plan, mainly involving the neoliberal public discussed in Chapter 3, the one with purchasing power.

Chapter 5 addresses the public in publication as part of the Mayor’s statutory duty to publish the London Plan. It examines the publication context and the counter-publication imperative in the shared project to publish London’s future. Reflecting on the marketing drive identified in Chapter 4, it asserts the influence of private sector processes and corporate practices on the visual communication of the public sector that results in the London Plan looking like an annual report. This chapter highlights the tensions inherent between the needs of a corporation and the aspirations for public input and draws out the common practice amongst plan-makers and plan-commenters alike to achieve their goals through the production of data-based evidence.

The final Part Three considers the venues and avenues of address, specifically examining the time when, and the place where, public happens, shifting focus to the technologies facilitating public-making. Chapter 6 addresses the duration and temporality of publics, the conflict between the transience of the London Plan documents and the desired permanence mandated by public accountability. It reviews the administrative and record-keeping imperatives that govern the London Plan’s electronic, documentary output for the public record, in service of the GLA’s corporate memory, illuminating the decisive role the portable document format (PDF) plays in simultaneously making the plan visible and invisible, memorable and forgettable. This chapter connects with the last chapter’s discussion about the GLA’s corporate operations and expands upon how they play a part in determining the plan’s public access.

Chapter 7 addresses the location and movement of publics, focusing on the primary public forum with which the London Plan is accessed. It follows the London Plan’s documents around online and explores how the plan works as HTML (hypertext markup language), meaning text that is linked to other text; as an assembled document containing other documents. It comments on the relationship between the plan and the GLA’s Digital Estate, the term referring to london.gov.uk and dozens of associated websites, applications and services. This chapter underscores the technical challenge to keep a public record, a main concern of administrators discussed in Chapter 6, in light of unstable Internet-based platforms used to document the plan, leading to archival absences. Chapter 8 describes my design proposal for a London Plan Public Library in response to the documentary gaps identified in Chapter 7, an alternative digital platform for accessing London Plan documents.

The Conclusion reflects on the practical investigations and the conceptual discussions across all chapters of the publics of the London Plan 2021. Methodology, the next section, outlines my approach to undertaking the research project. Lastly, the publics this thesis addresses are those who study, craft, administer and/or materialise the London Plan, and those who object to, debate with, and challenge them.