The photo above was taken from my old flat in Walthamstow, a northeast London neighbourhood which has seen a lot of urban change because of population growth and the Borough of Waltham Forest’s ambition to bring significant investment and opportunity to businesses and residents in the area. Urban change is defined here as the physical and infrastructural transformation of a city over a period of time, including spatial, social, cultural, economic and environmental changes. It’s a story that’s replicated across many parts of the city today. According to the last census figures London is set on a path of unprecedented growth and urbanisation, at twice the rate of the United Kingdom as a whole. In 2015 the population surpassed its post-war peak, now projected to grow past 12 million by 2050. The city faces critical urban questions about how to meet such intensive growth while addressing pressing issues like the housing and climate crises. How to plan for such growth, how to accommodate the populace, where will they live and work, how will they move around? Such questions don’t have easy answers because London is a functional urban region spanning 150 miles across.

London’s geography is varied. According to Ian Gordon and Tony Travers, it involves many substantial communities with different mixes of population, business and political preference. ¹ London is complex and diverse—historically, economically, socially, and also, spatially. In a special issue of City, Culture and Society on London’s transformation 2000–2010, Gordon and Travers wrote about the difficulty of governing London in relation to its complexity, diversity and variety as a metropole. Relating to political scientist Doug Yates’ (1977) original thesis about the governance challenge typically facing major cities like Yates’ New York, they argued that London is likewise an ‘ungovernable city,’ at least in strategic planning terms. ‘Ungovernable city’ is Yates’ concept referring to the peculiar tensions and processes associated with the role of metropolitan governments. Sandwiched between higher-level government and citizenry, they have a unique function but also a fundamental structural problem delivering urban services at the ‘street-level’. Where there are high levels of diversity of people, cultures and business activities, and strong potential for interaction among actors and issues, planning for London’s complexity and variety is challenging. In their paper, they examined the role of the London Plan—a city-wide policy document for future growth—and questioned how the processes of strategic planning in London could be used as an effective means of steering change affecting over eight million people.

The map shown here ⊕ London’s Diverse Character, Allies Morrison (2016) Historic England Local Character and Density Report comes from a report produced by Historic England in 2016 to better understand how London has grown in terms of development density—and what its growth has meant for the capital’s present and future urban character. It shows a range of industry and economic zones, green spaces, historic and contemporary town centres, infrastructural networks, and how they all interact. This kind of mixing has happened in one large part because of the green belt established in 1935, a means to limit urban sprawl within a ring of sustainable development and also provide recreational space for Londoners. As London’s growth bursts at the seams of its border today, it has become a heated policy debate whether or not to allow development beyond the belt. ² One side of the debate perceives the green belt as “an anachronism, restricting land supply” and therefore deepening London’s affordability crisis; the other sees the spread into the green belt as socially and environmentally irresponsible and wants to continue to make the most of the inner-city sites, including the reuse of brownfield lands. Some argue that the containment strategy is no longer viable given the intensity of development within its boundaries putting pressures on services such as transit and housing provision. Local authorities grapple with policy decisions as these, about transit location and housing distribution; where and how to meet demand and supply; how to divide such assets across metropolitan, urban and suburban priorities.

Slightly pivoting Gordon and Travers’ argument about planning the ungovernable, the story of London planning can also be read as one of successive governments trying to govern the ungovernable, and to varying degrees, control its expansion and address its fragmentation. The challenge to contain or stimulate the city’s growth is a main rationale for the system of local government London has today. After the abolition of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1986, there was a 14-year power vacuum in the city. A number of groups and committees in a complex network tended to various city services, but no centre or overarching strategy bound them. Part of this ungovernability stems from the intentional disbanding of the GLC that was under Ken Livingstone’s leadership, an outcome of the ugly fight between local and national politics in which, writer and journalist Owen Hatherley suggests, both the Conservative central government and the national Labour Party feared Livingstone’s New Left Labour and his popular local brand of socialism. ³

At the start of the millennium, a new government structure was introduced in London in an attempt at strategic governance and ‘sustainable growth’, albeit with two major caveats. Recognising London’s strategic position and its increasing importance as a global financial centre, parties across the political spectrum wanted to ensure the capital’s continuing development and market competitiveness. The Greater London Authority was established as a London-wide body to be headed by the Mayor of London, a directly elected official, following the North American model of municipal governance. Other democratically elected officials, forming the London Assembly, would provide scrutiny of the Mayor’s work. The Mayor was given statutory power over policy areas like the environment, economy, transport, spatial development, culture, etc. But while the Mayor sets the policy agenda for the direction of London’s development, significantly, one, he is not in charge of service provision, a responsibility that rests with individual boroughs, and two, central government provides the funding. ⊕ London governance structure in relation to central and local government. Graphic illustration by me.

Having come out of a contentious period of radical left GLC activities, central government was not keen on handing over too much power to the Mayor, resulting in what Hatherley describes as a “mooted mayoralty,” the role “a combination of manager and showman” without the same control over taxes and public services allowed by his American counterparts. ⁴ Instead, central government maintained a tight hold of the public purse, leaving the London Mayor with only seven per cent of funds raised from businesses and residents compared to New York cut of over 50% and Tokyo’s 70% of funds raised. ⁵ In 2016, the London Mayor had an annual budget of £16.3 billion versus the New York Mayor’s three times larger $53 billion budget. Consequently, the new institutional arrangement puts the GLA and the Mayor in a hands-tied situation whereby they must financially rely on central government on the one hand, and on the other, depend on local authorities for delivery and policy enactment. If London’s pre-GLA governance was fragmented and dispersed, in Mark Kleinman and Peter Hall’s view, a “network governance with no centre,” it was now replaced by a new system of “network governance with a weak centre.” ⁶

Aside from control over transport through oversight of Transport for London (TfL), a major service remit, the Mayor’s power is primarily exercised through a series of strategies the Mayor publishes, the London Plan being the crucial document that ties them together. The London Plan serves as a city-wide response to the key areas of his responsibility, including TfL, a vision and framework for how London should develop. Towards the London Plan(2001) was the first strategic planning document of the first elected Mayor of London, incidentally Ken Livingstone, paving the way for the first London Plan (2004). The former GLC leader won as an independent. Livingstone presented London as a global city, a concept by sociologist Saskia Sassen to describe geographies of centrality, their inter-urban networks and the flow of information, labour and capital that propels the world economy. ⁷ He made the case that, ⁸

However, achieving this ambition was not simple. The new London governance structure introduced a layer of complexity: an additional tier of government that, instead of the local authority directly responsible for planning as is elsewhere in the rest of England, planning power is shared with the boroughs, placing the GLA between top and bottom of a top-down national planning system. Currently, the London Plan sits under the National Planning Policy Framework and above each of the 33 boroughs’ Local Plans, which in turn presses upon the Area Action Plan and then the last level, the Neighbourhood Plan. ⊕ The London Plan’s place within the UK planning system. Graphic illustration by me.

On London’s capital needs in relation to the first London Plan, Gordon asserts that the basic position of the Mayor and the GLA as a whole is very weak, both formally and in terms of resources. ⁹ He notes, crucially, the city relies on a mixture of government and private sector funding; key elements in the Livingstone plan were chosen to maximise the chances of securing central government backing and resources for the strategic items and major elements of infrastructure. Central government decides the budget while local authorities deliver, thus the Mayor and the GLA mostly are a symbolic role wedged in the middle. Geographer Carolyn Harrison further points out this  blunted power is due to a lack of responsibility for key parts of the welfare state—education, social services, housing and health—and the requirement of proposals to fit in with national policies and spending. ¹⁰

At one end, the London Plan must conform to national policy and gain approval by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government; but since the boroughs hold ultimate control for policy implementation, the local authorities’ input into the London Plan adds pressure at the other end. Complicating the flow of power is Britain’s uniqueness in having a discretionary planning system, where development proposals are taken on a case-by-case basis and plans are not legally binding, only needing to ‘have regard’ to material considerations wherein material is not defined in legislation but discretely determined by the local authority and the developer, the development’s decision makers. ¹¹

Given public funding challenges, the developer and the private sector play an outsize role. Planner Duncan Bowie notes that, “basic council services are contracted out, with senior council officers being more contract managers than the deliverers of services. Councils are now enablers of the private sector. Their role is to establish a framework in which the private sector can make sufficient profit from providing services to ensure continued investment from their shareholders.” ¹² Far beyond other major cities like Paris and New York, the public/private sector balance in London is shifted in favour of the private sector to which British governments since Thatcher’s first administration has handed over local government, giving them control over both investment and service provision. Although the local authorities are officially responsible for service delivery such as housing, the resources and power of implementation reside asymmetrically with the private sector.

While being at the second topmost level the London Plan does set the tone for the planning tiers below it, and although the Mayor’s policy priorities do have statutory weight, consequently, much of the plan’s teeth rests at the discretion of the boroughs (but really, developers), and its sharpness is reliant on the generosity of central government and the ruling party in power at the time. The Mayor’s purview is therefore limited to ‘strategic’ matters only. Thus, for example, Harrison writes, “in the context of promoting a sustainable city, the GLA has restricted powers and responsibilities and must rely on working with other institutions and its residents to effect a more collective understanding of what this vision might involve.” ¹³

Therefore, consideration of the London Plan in this research project takes into account the difficult balancing act City Hall must perform in light of the weakness of London’s local government in enacting policy. It acknowledges an intractable structural barrier that complicates the seemingly simple, open invitation to Londoners to have a say in shaping the future of London. It is not so easy to have a say, arguably, when the London Plan is the product of a weak governance centre having a limited say itself. The Mayor and the GLA’s relative institutional powerlessness, in this context, set the high importance of strategic partnerships and the need to engage with others, inside and outside of government.

In addition to its unique strategic, institutional arrangement, London’s present form of government is the outcome of a pattern of growth rhetoric that has animated talk about the future of London for decades. All three London Plans since 2000s—across different mayoralties, political ideologies, and planning aims—have one common thread: the predetermination that growth is the way forward. Modern London emerged from the reconstruction of post-war Britain after the acute devastation of the capital. Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan and 1944 Greater London Plan were responses to unplanned, uncontrolled urban and population growth (‘sprawl’) that had been a cause of concern for over a century prior. ¹⁴ Until the mid-1990s, contraction and dispersal were priorities, but half a century after Abercrombie’s proposal for radial growth, the shift in focus to inner-city growth, spurred by demographic changes and new economic pressures, has become a contentious subject of local and national debate. Contemporary discourse about London’s development is concentrated chiefly on defining, contesting, limiting or accelerating its growth.

Chapter Two of planner Peter Hall’s book London 2001 (1989) is entitled precisely ‘London’s Growth’, which seeks “to understand better London’s present problems, above all to understand the problem of its growth.” ¹⁵ His writing in the late 80s was concerned with, and had expressed concern for, the city’s future in the context of growth, making the argument of the need for a metropolitan-wide strategic plan. It set the scene for Towards the London Plan, which came out in 2001 coincidentally the same year of his book’s titular forward-looking vision. As chair of the Mayor’s advisory group of external academics and professionals on the draft London Plan to follow, and then as contributor to scrutiny hearings during its public examination, Hall played a key role in advocating for city regional planning, the relationship of London to the wider metropolitan region. His ideas of strategic and regional growth corridors, particularly expansion into the South East, has had a large influence on the first and subsequent London Plans.

At the end of millennium, architect Richard Rogers, chair of the Urban Task Force, published the also greatly influential report, Toward an Urban Renaissance in 1999 and the companion Our Towns and Cities – the Future – The Urban White Paper in 2000. Arising out of attempts at the time to address perceived urban decline and rethink urban policy, the study recognised the role of cities, using London as one example, as “engines of economic growth”. The 1999 report “establishes a framework to deliver a new future for urban England” and “sets out a commitment to urban communities and establishes for our town and cities in which an image of failure and decline is replaced by one of opportunity and sustainable growth.” ¹⁶ His report and its focus on urbanisation had resonance with a 2000 United Nations report that predicted world population growth will occur, and will be virtually all concentrated, in urban areas of the world, and that by 2007 the number of urban dwellers was expected to exceed the number of rural dwellers for the first time in history. ¹⁷

Rogers’ findings were applied to London when he became the Chief Advisor to Mayor Livingstone on the Architecture and Urbanism Unit (A+UU), and ideas of the Urban Task Force were translated into planning policies through the forthcoming new London Plan. ¹⁸ Though Peter Hall also sat on the task force, Rogers’ ideas radically departed from Hall’s, keen on the compact city model of intensifying development inside London. The tenets of Toward an Urban Renaissance became broad policy directions in Towards the London Plan and would filter through A+UU’s work. Rogers asserts in 2002 his ‘vision for London’s urban renaissance’ in the introduction of the GLA brochure promoting A+UU: “Over the next fifteen years, London’s population will grow by at least 700,000. We need to harness this population growth and the economic growth that goes with it to make London a more sustainable city.” ¹⁹ A section of the brochure entitled, ‘Sustainable growth in a world city,’ would later be echoed, sometimes verbatim, in the 2004 final plan, what many in the built environment profession call the Rogers-designed Livingstone plan. ²⁰ Rogers’ term and concept of ‘urban renaissance’ is sprinkled throughout the plan.

Hall and Rogers’ work and their separate but overlapping concern with growth management framed early thinking about the London Plan in terms of growth. Gordon and Travers remarked that “growth was absolutely central” to Livingstone’s plan, whose “vision rested on the view that large scale population and job growth was inevitable for London because of its global city role, and that the London Plan should be geared to accommodating this.” ²¹ The clear need and challenge were identified in a 2002 Mayor of London publication explicitly titled, Planning for London’s Growth, which provided the statistical basis for the London Plan. ²² ⊕ Mayor of London (2002) Planning for London’s Growth ⊕ Mayor of London (2002) Planning for London’s Growth. Page excerpt.

This viewpoint was also communicated to Londoners in a summary document by the Mayor introducing the first London Plan, in which a pull-out quote of the leaflet emphasises in large red font, “the draft London Plan envisages a dynamic and economically vibrant London, where growth yields benefits for all.” ²³ ⊕ Mayor of London (2002) The Draft London Plan: A Summary. Page excerpt.

Livingstone positioned London as a “command and control” centre, using the plan to “predict and provide” for growth, equity and sustainable development, his three flagship priorities. “Command and control,’ is language of Sassen’s global city concept. The plan re-established the concept of Opportunity Areas, first featured in 1943, designated sites across the city that show significant capacity for growth and development, and that are at the centre of controversial land-use debates today. Notably, his plan shifted development eastward away from the west, focused on growing and investing in east London and other deprived areas to drive physical and social renewal. Rogers’ follow-up 2005 report, Towards a Stronger Urban Renaissance, independently published, further promoted the identification and development of growth areas.

Over a decade later, Boris Johnson’s London Plan 2016 embedded the words directly into the chapter titles, from “a growing population”, “a growing and ever changing economy”, to “ensuring infrastructure to support growth,” “planning for growth”, and “strategic guidance and future growth potential”. ²⁴ Where Livingstone’s eye was on inner London, Johnson’s gaze was outward to the suburbs and the economy of outer boroughs, promising more autonomy for boroughs and less pressure for residential densification. Still, it picked up on the threads of growth in Livingstone’s plan.

Sadiq Khan’s London Plan 2021 is premised on the objectives of ‘Good Growth’, a policy agenda initiated under Johnson and launched shortly before Khan’s 2016 election, then developed into his Good Growth by Design programme. ²⁵ ⊕ Greater London Authority and Mayor’s Design Advisory Group (2016) Growing London. One of four agenda essays, Growing London laid out concerns of “what London will look and feel like as it grows physically to accommodate a population of ten million and rising.” ²⁶ The opening line of the publication unequivocally states, “London is growing.” Khan’s plan continues the theme of growth, but not just growth at any cost, it has to be good growth, which he defines as development that promotes and delivers a better, more inclusive form of growth on behalf of all Londoners, leading to a more socially integrated and sustainable city. ²⁷

At a public event in March 2016 in preparation for the forthcoming new plan, the opening session was called, “Accommodating Growth.” ²⁸ Along with a dedicated workshop later held in November, it set the terms of the capital’s change in relation to a rise in population, households, employment, and migration, and tied questions of what makes a “successful city” to sustainable scenarios and options for “accommodating growth.” Likewise, presentation slides for an October consultation event, A City for All Londoners, framed the future of London in terms of “Challenges for Growth” and, in response, seeks to find “Partners for Growth”. ²⁹ ⊕ ⊕ Greater London Authority (2016) Accommodating Growth, New London Plan Event 8 March 2016.

The importance and prevalence of growth is clear. There is a consistency to its ubiquity in the plans. Words ‘grow/growth’ frequently appear in each iteration of the London Plan; they pop up 321 times in 2004, 396 times in 2008, 273 times in 2011, 343 times in 2016, and 427 times in 2021.

Descriptors attached to growth variously include sizeable, substantial, sustainable, phenomenal, and inevitable, among others. Of note, they mirror the hyperbolic language used by the development industry and the private sector that equally problematises and privileges growth. Exhibitions like New London Architecture’s 2014 London’s Growing Up! and its companion publication of the same name, put a spotlight on the scale of London’s urban change in relation to the number of tall buildings that have risen in the previous decade. ³⁰ ⊕ New London Architecture (2014) London’s Growing Up! The NLA is a privately funded organisation self-described as an independent forum for discussion, debate and information about architecture, planning and development in London. Produced by NLA in collaboration with real estate consultancy GL Hearn, the insight study marked the start of the Tall Buildings Survey, a report hence published annually and sponsored by the nation’s leading land development companies, that has driven the debate about London’s changing skyline and “exponential growth.” ³¹ It has fed key evidence into the policies of the London Plan aimed at meeting London’s inside-the-green-belt growth demands.

The study quantified the need to build more, a mass of data NLA believed would steer the debate on London’s development and “have a positive impact on the quality of buildings that will enhance our skyline in the future”: ³²

But the study doesn’t meaningfully engage with the question about what makes ‘a better city’: better how and for whom? ‘Better’ seems to be a reference to form and aesthetics in one instance. A survey conducted by NLA and Ipsos MORI on public perceptions about tall buildings asked Londoners whether tall buildings “have made London look better”. The problem of growth becomes the pursuit of growth, meaning the challenges associated with a growing London is taken up as a challenge—a developers’ competition—to grow London.

The emphasis on growth in Hall and Rogers’ writings echoed by three mayors in three London Plans, and pushed by industry, underscores the interdependent relationship between talk of growth and talk of London’s future. Such scalar and temporal emphasis makes plain what the London Plan is about: growth. The difference from version to version is how to go about that growth, how each Mayor has responded. Livingstone promoted growth as part of his global city agenda, Johnson accommodated it so long as it minimised impact on the suburbs, and Khan supports it as a vehicle to achieve his social goals. Whether the city grows vertically in form, as in an increase in density (building tall) per Rogers’ compact city vision of contained growth within London’s boundaries, or horizontally, a lateral expansion into the wider region per Hall’s view and possibly beyond the green belt, the purpose is that London grows.

While the subject of growth has pushed and pulled the direction of London’s planning in the past twenty years, the persistent shadow of growth rhetoric has particular significance for public involvement in the city’s development. It pre-sets the participation brief from the get-go. A focus on growth constrains input to be a discussion about growing London, as opposed to say, housing London or living in London, in a variety or plurality of ways and means that are not solely growth oriented. This throws up an early hurdle to any ambition of wider participation that, again, an invitation such as ‘have your say’ on the future of London, implies and promises. It immediately side-lines those in the ‘no-growth’ camp, namely environmentalist groups focused on conservation, but also community groups for whom addressing inequalities and issues related to climate, social and spatial justice, and equitable access to current housing supply for example, are bigger priorities than building new.

For instance, Bowie remarks, the interests of the environmental lobby who argued for a no growth option in 2004 were marginalised by the alliance between the Mayor and the business lobby who were full steam ahead in their conviction of the growth need. What Bowie identifies as the conflict between growth and the environmental agenda became hidden under Livingstone’s persuasive selling of Rogers’ compact city arguments about the positive environmental benefits of high density living which would leave the Green Belt alone and reuse previously developed land to build homes and places of work. This satisfied concerns expressed by environmental organisations like Campaign for the Protection of Rural England about development on protected open space and gave them wider cover to buy into the growth rhetoric. ³³ Bowie notes that CPRE was amongst Livingstone’s strongest supporters, “for whom densification of London was the best way to protect the Green Belt.” Livingstone succeeded to suppress debate about the negative environmental impacts, like noise and pollution, which he and Rogers believed to be resolvable through urban design.

Bowie points out, participant responses to the 2004 London Plan consultation were categorized by the GLA as Support, Objection, or Comment. There is not an avenue to propose alternative strategies or to take the view that growth is but only one answer among many possible others. Thus, ideas about quality of life, care and stewardship of existing assets, or about soft infrastructure, are secondary in favour of a pro-development ‘build more’ agenda. More buildings, more homes. In every plan, new housing supply criteria (higher targets) are set. The consequence is a binary debate where progress (development-oriented hard infrastructure) and protection (stewardship-based soft infrastructure) are placed on opposing sides. Narratives of progress compete with narratives of care. While some mayors and some boroughs show more sensitivity than others in pursuing an integrated approach where the two aren’t mutually exclusive, taking into account the social as well as the spatial dimensions, the glue that binds them all is nonetheless a desire to see London grow.

Engaging with the London Plan entails taking some kind of position in regard to growth, whether as begrudged acceptance or a fuller embrace of it. For example, even while making an argument to look ‘beyond the compact city’ growth model, in Bowie’s 2017 paper of the same title, his advocacy for sustainable development and social justice remains entwined with, and framed by, growth. He reviews alternative development options and argues that, ³⁴

Even when the London Assembly criticizes the ‘Up or Out’ binary as a false choice in a 2016 report in regard to London’s sustainable development, the question that still drives them is, “how should London grow?” offering options (different typologies and locations) for London’s growth outside of the compact city and green belt approaches. ⊕ London Assembly Planning Committee (2016) Up or Out: a false choice. Options for London’s Growth. The Assembly’s Planning Committee, who authored the report with members from across the political spectrum, and whose role is to scrutinise the detail of the London Plan and the Mayor’s use of planning powers, is wholly committed to “leading the debate about London’s growth.” ³⁵ So, the Mayor’s scrutinisers are in lockstep with the Mayor on the importance of growth.

The growth debate doesn’t seem to be abating any time soon. In a May 2022 research paper on the role of spatial development strategies, Lichfields, a UK planning and development consultancy, found that the London Plan has a critical role in leading growth in London. From the view of London Boroughs, it reports, “[t]he London Plan has been successful in delivering overall growth with the GLA offering positive challenge to the Boroughs in encouraging more progressive planning outcomes. For example, it was generally agreed that the London Plan had beneficially driven densities in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” ³⁶ The London Plan is seen overall to be a more successful route for growth than prior alternative approaches, the Greater London Development Plan, London Planning Advisory Committee and Regional Policy Guidance.

On all sides, growth is the presumptive starting and ending points, the predicate upon which the city’s success is hitched, be it sustainable, equitable, good, exponential or any other qualifying adjectives. Growth is not questioned. There exists a lack of interrogation about the forces that motivate and mobilise its primacy, a striking omission in which, not only is growth deemed inevitable and irresistible, but it’s also uncritically the default perspective. Urban change is seen through the lens of urban growth. Change is equated with growth, which is framed as a problem to be solved. What is up for debate is the direction and/or distribution of growth, but there is no critical inquiry into growth itself. Instead, the fight is over how much growth, where, what type, and occasionally, to whose benefit. Little comparative attention is given to why growth at all.

Such a close yet unquestioned relationship of growth to the London Plan precludes the type of participation asked and afforded to inputting into it, limits the forms of participation that can realistically take place, and leads to mismatched expectations (mis-expectation) among participants and to tensions between plan-makers and respondents. To interact with the London Plan is to contend with each Mayor’s interpretation of growth, their take on London’s growth problem, and the restrictions in-place for what he or she can do about it. Per economist Stephen Syrett, the limited competencies and finance of the Mayor and the GLA, in regard to operating within a pro-market economic growth model, also limit their scope for significant progress in tackling social inequalities and deprivation. ³⁷ There’s little room for ideas about London’s future not pinged to the city’s growth, constraining public debate and kerbing what is possible to change in the plan. It reflects the not-always apparent asterisk(s) placed next to ‘have your say’ calls that underwrites the oft-contentious nature of public consultation in general and is responsible for some of the inertia attached to and criticised of public participation in planning. This is key to keep in mind when considering Khan’s edition of the London Plan because implicit in getting involved with his plan is a conditional footnote to his prompt for participation: have your say *about London’s (good) growth.

Inseparable from and intersecting with the debate surrounding growth is another prevalent ‘g’ word: global. In a 2019 National Geographic magazine feature, addressing an international readership, the popular American publication perpetuated a driving narrative of London: London’s status and success on the world stage. “London is bigger and richer than ever,” @NatGeo twitter had claimed promoting the US article, entitled ‘London’s building boom: how decades of growth transformed it into the preeminent global city.’ The claim repeats in the caption of the opening image with the Shard, purporting that “three decades of growth reinvented the urban landscape in London—and transformed it into the preeminent global city.” ³⁸ It reinforces the link between the city’s growth and its ‘global city’ moniker, in the sense of geographic and economic centrality, that has been widely promoted by governments at all levels and studied by academics. Here, London is not only seen as a centre of global economic activities like its peers New York and Tokyo, it is perceived to be the centre of international finance and capital.

An alternative title for the article in the UK online edition is, ‘How London Became the Centre of the World.’ Though the title is a reference to British-mapped global time zones and London’s self-placed prime meridian position at the literal centre of the world where east meets west, the hyperbole implies, impossibly, that everything in the world revolves around London. Article writer Laura Parker suggests London’s offering as a transport, tech, and cultural hub is a big contributing factor to “the sweep of Britain’s connectivity to the world beyond,” with English as the global language linking London to places like Asia thus giving it an advantage over other European competitors. Attached to this assertion of its global pre-eminence, however, she cites, are expressed anxieties about being able to “stay on top,” a prevalent concern amid London’s growing pains and Brexit, Britain’s departure from the European Union, which was only looming at the time of the article’s writing. The COVID-19 world-wide pandemic had yet to be part of the anxiety calculus but would arrive short months after the article’s publication and change cities all over the world, impacting the economic health of global cities—imperilling London’s prized centrality.

The economic drive to stay on top has propelled much of London’s development and rationalised the London Plan as the policy vehicle to remain globally competitive. From the outset in 2000, Bowie writes, just as the establishment of the GLA as a regional authority for London was based on an ongoing recognition that strategic governance arrangements were necessary for a global city, the London Plan was an extension of that international outlook. The initial framework set by LPAC in the lead-up to the GLA’s formation, “explicitly embraced economic growth based on the role of London as an international financial centre.” ³⁹ Sociologists Fran Tonkiss and Jamie Keddie draw a short bridge between the market and the plan, analysing how London urban policy in those early GLA days was oriented towards the market to drive private investment for public welfare. ⁴⁰ The positioning of local government to take an entrepreneurial stance served to amplify London’s financial attraction, of which Ian Gordon has made the explicit connection between ‘capital needs, capital growth and global city rhetoric’ established by Mayor Livingstone that associates London’s growth with its global city role. ⁴¹

In geographer Doreen Massey’s account of London as a world city, in a chapter titled ‘Grounding the Global’, she describes how, in Livingstone’s London Plan, “having established a general context in which London is in the grip of wider forces, the global dominance of the City as a financial centre is presented as a simple achievement.” ⁴² Competition is perceived as necessary—albeit fraught with anxiety—and that growth is the predicate upon which London merits or sustains its global standing. She contends that “London and the South-East are just accepted as having to grow, as being unable to resist the global forces that heap upon them ever increasing wealth (for some) and economic activity (of a particular kind).” ⁴³ Not only is growth inevitable and irresistible per Bowie’s description, it is simply accepted, and with this comes the undeniable global aspect of it: growth that is in the service of London as a global city, in order to compete on the scale of Paris, New York, or Tokyo, and increasingly, as highlighted in the National Geographic article, other cities in Africa and Asia experiencing mega-growth. Massey notes,

London’s global prosperity is explicitly and inextricably tied to London’s growth, indicating some kind of self-serving reciprocity is at play. Drawing from Bowie and Massey’s writings, the case for London’s growth may be alternately summarised as a circular rationalisation: London’s growth has come about because it is a global city, but in order to “stay on top” as a global city, London has to grow. One way to grow has been to trade on London’s ‘world city’ status drawing in global migration and global investments. Newcomers and new investors alike are attracted to what Massey critiques as the geographical imagination of London’s identity of place related to its ethnic and cultural diversity, for example, Livingstone’s claims that “London is the whole world in one city” and that “it is the future of our world.” ⁴⁴ Livingstone’s London Plan was set up in this context of London seeing itself in relation to the rest of the world as its global centre.

His vision succeeded to the extent that, two decades later, National Geographic featured London exclusively in a special single-topic issue, “A World on the Move,” focused on human migration in the 21st century and the plight of refugees around the globe. London was the sole city given singular attention amongst wider perspectives on movement patterns across geo-political borders. This singularity suggests a framed view of London as the convergence point for the global mass. The framing is reinforced by the article’s opening image. The Shard building, funded by foreign money, is photographed centred in an aerial shot of a densely built-up London overlooking the Thames. The glass building comes to a sharp point. With the article title set atop, there’s a textual-visual implication that the ‘centre of the world’ peaks here.

Problematically, such uncritical framing of London’s centrality misses out on the complexities of the relationship between nation and city, and containment and movement, that sociologist Suzanne Hall has analysed associated with “the contemporary city as an arrival point in a world-wide web of flows.” ⁴⁵ Because, where there is an assumed centre, there are also margins. Against the backdrop of the pursuit of London for global glory are frictions stemming from what it means locally for Londoners if purportedly the world is coming into London. A significant detail glossed over in the article is that the Shard is located in Southwark, a borough that has been a centre of a different kind—one of intense debate about London’s urban change and if/how that includes the margins. ⁴⁶ The Southwark Notes Archive Group has been fighting developments like the Shard for decades.

Hall defines London’s ‘urban margins’ as “locales that are physically proximate to but culturally distant from its symbolically dominant and prestigious landscapes on which the narrative of a ‘world-class’ city is conferred; they are places where the cultures and divisions of class, race and ethnicity are densely inscribed, as are the aspirations and innovations practised within its emerging urban multicultures.” ⁴⁷ She contends that there are historic areas of poverty within the city, of deep and advanced marginalisation, correlating with ethnic diversity in these locales, therefore, “local worlds in the urban margins are spaces where much is at stake, places in which the less mobile—elderly, young, poor, newcomer—are often highly invested.” ⁴⁸ These tensions between worlds, local and global, have certain implications for the London Plan and broad consequences for how much say Londoners have in local planning.

Gordon notes that Livingstone’s vision in his London Plan refers specifically to London as a ‘world city’ with a view of long term growth as needing to be ‘diverse.’ He questions if the ideas are compatible, unclear if ‘world city’ refers to a place that genuinely serves the world or to a focus on development of particular ‘global’ activities. ⁴⁹ Arguably, the ambiguity between the terms, world city and global city, is intentional, so that London can have it both ways.

A centralised view of London’s place in the world places acute pressure on a decentralised planning system that puts planning powers into local hands. New Labour’s communitarism in the mid-90s, based partly on Tony Blair’s political philosophy that “individuals prosper in a strong and active community of citizens,” initiated a changeover in governance structure in the 2000s—the devolution of government in which planning power transferred from central government to local authorities and local communities. ⁵⁰ This was then followed by the Conservative Party’s formal introduction of localism in 2010s abolishing regional spatial strategies (2011 Localism Act and 2017 Neighbourhood Planning Act). Localism, per the government’s claim, aimed to give the people more voice and influence and greater empowerment in what happens to their local area.

Urban planner Stephen Connelly suggests these reforms “initiate[d] a radically decentralised, neighbourhood-based and people-driven process of ‘open-source planning.’” ⁵¹ It also changed the nature of the London Plan, according to Nancy Holman. Whereas Livingstone’s plan was centralised and strategic with clear directives of where growth in the city should occur, Johnson’s diffused approach to let boroughs individually decide followed the national trend of government decentralisation of planning. ⁵² The new set up created a situation ripe with tension where local people are asked for ideas of how they would like their area to be developed, in conflict with the private developments that the global flow of investment brings in, producing what Massey calls, ‘a geographical imaginary’ that pits local vs global. ⁵³

An example of this binary which risks over-simplification is Anna Minton’s conceptualisation of the London problem in her book Big Capital (2017) examining the housing crisis in London, in which she asks: who is London for? ⁵⁴ Minton frames the crisis as a battle between the needs of global capital versus the needs of ordinary people, an extension of the struggles for ‘ground control’ in urban planning amidst state-led gentrification, and the privatisation and financialisaton of our cities identified almost a decade earlier in her 2009 book. ⁵⁵ In detailing the loss of housing as a public good, the narrative places the ordinary on one side and big market forces on the other while advocating for neighbourhood democracy, grassroots participation in local decisions, and reforms to planning to even the playing field to give everyone a fair and just chance at affording a home and life in London. Minton has outright stated, in a paper of the same title, that “‘regeneration’ [the process of planned urban renewal] is too often an unfair fight between local people and global finance.” ⁵⁶ In her research and testimonies in local government debates on London’s urban change, Minton gives what she describes as a ‘competing narrative’ about the ways that Londoners are excluded from the process.

In seeing London through the lens of unfairness between the local and the global, Minton repeats a familiar narrative about market forces versus marginal voices that features prominently in debates on the London Plan. The London Plan is a site of contention between these two perceived polemics, participation in the plan’s formulation is a tug-o-war between the local and the global, whereby the local, predominantly through community networks, must ‘defend’ against the global and its forces of (locally unwanted) change. But as Massey argues, “London is no place in which ‘the local’ can be simply defended against the global.” ⁵⁷ She challenges the dominant geographical imaginary that opposes one against the other, where global is seen as located elsewhere, something bad, abstract, as the producer and the aggressor, and local as anchored in place, something good and authentic, as the product and the victim.

Quoting anthropologist Arturo Escobar on the perceived passivity and victimhood of the local, Massey highlights the prevalent association of global with “space, capital, history and agency while the local, conversely, is linked to place, labor and tradition—as well as with women, minorities, the poor and, one might add, local cultures.” ⁵⁸ In contrast, she makes the argument that London is not a simple story of “the relation between ‘local place’ and globalisation [that] imagine[s] local places as products of globalisation (‘the global production of the local’). […] For London is one of those places in which capitalist globalisation, with its deregulation, privatisation, ‘liberalisation’, is produced. Here we have also ‘the local production of the global.’” ⁵⁹ In her view, the London Plan fails to acknowledge the global role of London in producing the global effects to which it has to respond—in being a cause of what happens in the wider world. For Massey, London is “a heartland of the production, command and propagation of what we have come to call neoliberal globalisation.” ⁶⁰ As an example, as Owen Hatherley argues in his book on London’s municipal governance, greater inequality was a consequence of Livingstone’s approach to growth and distribution, that “London actually became more, rather than less unequal during Livingstone’s second incarnation,” and quoting Massey, emphasised how much the “exuberant, champagne swilling” “London success and the poverty are intimately related.” ⁶¹

Bowie has also been critical of the local and global binary that has led to and continues to exacerbate London’s inequality, underscoring a Mayor’s potential complicity in generating more of it. He highlights the tensions that a growth-oriented, global city outlook raises in which economic ambition is incongruent with social needs and aspirations. ⁶²

The London Plan is the policy document meant to ensure London stays on top on the world stage and keeps its elite pole position in the global economy, at the same time not forget about the occupants locally impacted by its policies. It has been put in a difficult spot to contend with such seemingly polar forces and be nimble enough to respond to these two scales and stake out a happy ground where the local and global meet. But there are nuances to local planning in a global city—how the local produces the global and co-generates disparity—that makes it a complex process.

An added complexity is timescale. The London Plan is about the future, but its development and outlook are distinctly grounded in the present and the past, based on current projections and historical trends, on what has come before to anticipate what will come next. But no one could have anticipated COVID-19.

A decade after Gordon and Travers questioned how to plan the ungovernable, the scale and speed of change wrought by COVID-19 prompts consideration of how to plan for the unplannable. COVID-19 had brought in an urgency—and an accelerated urban transformation—that a structurally rigid (and slow) UK planning system is arguably not well equipped to respond to. In our COVID-19 era, what is the role of a plan that appears every four years and forecasts urban change over a 20+ year period when a pandemic had essentially, irrevocably changed the world within 2–3 months? The plan nominally takes a few years to prepare, another year or more to undergo public review and third-party scrutiny before it is published, the extended schedule sometimes adding up to the full length of a mayoral term, or even exceeding it, as it did in Mayor Khan’s case.

Khan’s draft plan was initially slated for publication before December 2019 in advance of the local elections in May 2020, but a protracted back and forth between the Labour-led Mayoral office and the Conservative central government had delayed the process, then the pandemic delayed the elections altogether, pushing publication of the final plan back an entire year. Khan stayed on as Mayor one year longer than his original term. As such, for over five years, the London Plan that stayed current was a legacy of Boris Johnson’s tenure, last updated in 2016. By the time the London Plan 2021 went to print in March 2021, London as with the rest of the world had already changed in incalculable and yet to be calculated ways.

In the published London Plan, many chapters now are already out of step with urban issues the pandemic made acute, for example, the need to reassess the design and spatial development patterns of town centres and central activities zones, transport nodes, streets and the public realm, in order to mitigate hotbeds for outbreaks in densely populated city cores. Policies on safety, security and resilience to emergency and digital connectivity infrastructure presently account for less than two pages each in the 500-page document. With the en masse shift to online living and working, which was inaugurated by lockdowns and has stuck around after re-opening, there is greater impetus not only to reconsider communications technologies policy to address capacity, but also to ensure digital democracy. Because not everyone has internet access, the need was identified during community meetings while in lockdown of the particular importance to “safeguard the public voice in planning” and lower barriers to participation amid adapted consultation practices of “engagement at distance.” Generally, equitable access to broadband, democratic processes, health, food, housing, education, social and economic opportunity warrants thoughtful re-examination.

COVID-19 puts the London Plan’s use, relevance and timing into perspective, and throws it under new light, sharpening already existing criticisms about its onerous process and raising further questions about its suitability as a forward-looking document to reflect present-needed change. The pandemic has reshaped the city and set it on a still unknown but decidedly different path than the one intensely debated over pre-virus. The plan is predicated on interpreting past trends that have now been knocked off their trajectories by the ‘new normal.’ Many policies hinged on projected population and continued urban growth, which are based on historical data and driven by a specific understanding of density, sustainability and the movement of goods and people, that the outbreak has completely turned on its head. Post-virus, what happens to a plan that bets on a future that is no longer viable and had depended on doing things ‘business as usual’? What becomes of a plan made from and for another time and through a normative process? How does, and how can, planning work when the unplannable happens?

Even without a world re-defining pandemic, the London Plan is still beholden to a production timescale that is asynchronous with today’s pace of urban and political change. Between draft and final print of Khan’s plan, former Mayor Boris Johnson had become British Prime Minister, then later resigned. Since Mayor Khan’s first election in May 2016, until the time of this writing in 2022, there have been five Prime Ministers: David Cameron, Elizabeth May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak. The political upheavals impact London’s relationship with central government, how much money London receives to do the things the Mayor wants to achieve in the London Plan. Brexit is here now after taking coincidentally nearly as long as the London Plan to negotiate and implement. While its consequences are not yet knowable, they will certainly have implications for London’s economy and global standing as the city and the country re-evaluate their relationships to Europe and the rest of the world. Then there are the emerging crises—the energy and cost of living crises related to the war in Ukraine—exacerbating the ongoing climate and housing crises.

While no plan can ‘command and control’ nor ‘predict or provide’ for change of such magnitude as war or of such global and historic scale wrought by COVID-19, time remains a consequential variable. Taking four to five years for drafting and reviewing the plan risks rendering the final plan obsolete upon debut. To address this time slip, after publication, the GLA go to immediate work on supplementary planning guidances (SPG), which go into more granular detail on certain plan policies. Although the function of SPGs is to provide further information on how the London Plan should be implemented and are material considerations in planning decisions that must be taken into account alongside the plan, they are also a means for the GLA to update outdated items. However, it’s a case of the GLA chasing its own tail because each SPG is subject to individual public consultation, adding more time to the process. Simultaneously, work on the next London Plan begins; before the current one is even implemented, the cycle starts anew. As central government rethinks the future of planning, seeking to reform (and speed up) the English planning system with new rules and ways of doing things, the future written about in London Plan 2021 is already the past. ⁶³ In 2022, the new plan is already old news.

Such is the context framing the London Plan and the headwinds it faces: the challenges of local planning in a global city (self-positioned at the centre of the world) that has a growth problem and a precarious government structure. The London Plan is not only a document for strategic city-wide planning but also, crucially, a strategic document for leveraging more power for a weak governance centre, negotiating around a decentralised planning system, and selling London’s credentials as a world city of diverse cultural capital and a global city of financial capital importance.

Lichfields’ insight report had recommended that the process for producing and examining a spatial development strategy be clear, focused, and short. However, such a call for streamlining and brevity is a difficult ask of the London Plan given the challenging scope and scale, as well as the two kinds of fixation the city and those involved in shaping it have on its development: pro-growth and pro-global. Clarity and focus would imply agreement, and while there exists broad consensus about London’s growth, there can be no unanimity when local development based on equity has been in perpetual tension with global city development based on competition. Further, the persistence of the dominant imaginaries of local and global, with which Massey and others have taken issue, guarantees that the London Plan would never be a short strategy because both sides must back up claims that one vision of the city’s future is better than the other; a task that, as subsequent chapters will show, would entail a tremendous amount of documentation. It reveals the complexity of the London Plan and the contradiction of having a defined function and role—narrowed in place by the particulars of governance, growth, and global histories—while giving the impression that the document is wide open for public input and debate.

Given the political climate and the institutional arrangement with which today’s London and the London Plan first came into being, the next chapter, Public Imagination, will consider the trouble with ‘public’ in the pursuit of an imagined ‘public London’ in which all Londoners have a say in the future of the city.