‘Public’ is a complex term with fluid boundaries, interests, activities, and constituted identities. Geographer Clive Barnett notes that there is an excess of meaning of the word, citing that the printable version of Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on ‘public, adj. and n.’ runs to 40 A4 sheets. ¹ Considering the crucial role of public participation, examination in public (EIP), and publication in the London Plan, little textual space in and around the plan is actually given to define what it means. The word ‘public’ shows up typically in relation to public safety, public transport, and most often as a spatialised concept—public realm and public space. Its use reflects both planner Mark Purcell’s observation of the “deeply ingrained habit in planning” of “thinking of the public as equivalent to the State” and urban geographer Kurt Iveson’s observation of one dominant place-based interpretation of ‘public’ as somewhere geographically locatable. ² Purcell points to examples of when planners say ‘public transportation,’ they mean transportation that is built and operated by the State; ‘public housing,’ they mean housing built and managed by the State; ‘publicly owned’ land to indicate the land owned by the State; ‘public policy’ to mean rules and regulations the State makes; ‘public services’ to indicate services provided by the State; ‘public sector’ to speak about economic activities that are carried out by the State; or ‘public sphere’ to vaguely refer to the activities of the State. ³ Iveson criticises the city’s “almost exclusive association with gathering-spaces and propinquity” (proximity) when it comes to the urban dimensions of public address, “the city as a space of visibility (in particular, as the venue for simultaneous co-presence with strangers).” ⁴ Hence, we see the focus in the mayoral strategy, Public London, on public space as the primary concern for what a public London entails. ⊕ Illustration of ‘public realm’ in the Mayor’s Good Growth Agenda publication, Public London (2016), relating the concept to freedom of access to spaces. ⊕ Mayor of London (2020). Public London Charter Draft. [page excerpt.] The Public London Charter is a supplementary planning guidance prepared in February 2020 and adopted in September 2021 to provide additional details on the London Plan 2021’s policies on public space. ⊕ Slide in GLA’s presentation of Public London Charter consultation event in which ‘public’ is repeated but not defined, having a circular meaning.

Extended encounters with ‘public’ beyond these common understandings are infrequent in policy texts that govern the plan’s development. Whenever it does appear in regard to involvement in shaping the London Plan it tends to be linked broadly to ‘consultation’ and loosely to ‘communication’ but without elaboration on either about their terms and forms, rather having only a stipulation that they happen and that they occur within a certain timeframe. Simply, communication and consultation are to take place without calling out how and with whom: ‘shall publish’, ‘shall make available for inspection’, ‘shall give notice’.

Statutory mentions of ‘public’ relative to communication of the Mayor’s Spatial Development Strategy (SDS), the formal name for the London Plan, connects the notion of public to the notion (or expectation) of access which first appeared in the GLA Act 1999. ⁵ In reference to publicity, ‘newspaper’ was the medium singled out to advertise the plan to Londoners. No amendments to the Act since have sought to expand the media definition to include contemporary means or modes of communication. GLA Act Part VIII 335 on Public Participation, 337 on Publication and 338 on Examination in Public are each one page or less long. The information is duplicated in The Town and Country Planning (London Spatial Development Strategy) Regulations 2000 without further clarification. ⁶ Subsections 325(3)(d)(e) vaguely allude to who is widely included in public participation and to whom the mayor is required to send a copy of his proposed SDS: local authorities, other government agencies and whomever the Mayor at his discretion deems appropriate in the interest of the public sector. Londoners, interestingly, as a class are not explicitly mentioned, and mainly fall under an assumed inclusion in relevant bodies and organisations.

In the most recent 2007 revised GLA Act, there is a reference to “public access to documents” which dates back to Part 5A of the Local Government Act 1972 (Access to Meetings and Documents of Certain Authorities, Committees and Sub-Committees) that has only had a number of minor textual updates over the years. It wasn’t until 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, that there was an amendment requiring allowance for electronic transmission of documents and meetings. Aside from a few short paragraphs in Section 43 of the GLA Act on publicity and availability of strategies, additional guidance is generally lacking. If committed to a deep search, this information may possibly be found in: The Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985, an Act to provide for greater public access to local authority meetings, reports and documents; or in The Mayor of London Order 2008 which has one paragraph section on ‘Access to representation hearings and documents’ where an advert in the newspaper is still referenced.

As with communication (‘publication’), the wording and guidance on consultation (‘public participation’) are dated across the span of decades since the GLA’s establishment and disparate across a mixture of unstandardised local, GLA, and central government statues. The London Plan’s two primary stages of consultation and examination in public have not been critically reviewed, nor has there been a study by the GLA completed on the outcomes of public involvement in previous London Plans. These public processes of participation have remained generally unchanged in format since the first London Plan, despite changes to the planning system.

Public participation via consultation is a legacy concept of an older land-use planning system borne of circumstances different from today. Local planning authorities have to undertake a formal period of public consultation, prior to deciding a planning application, an anachronistic requirement which originated in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 that has since significantly changed. The 1990 Act, a consequential revision, had introduced Section 106, a legal mechanism for negotiating development proposals between local authorities, landowners and developers whereby developers promise to build X public goods (roads, public squares, affordable housing, etc.) contributing towards the cost of public infrastructure, in exchange for permission to build higher or denser. Here, ‘public good’ is open to interpretation, Anna Minton has underscored in her wider research into the privatisation of public life, where goods and services provided in ‘the public interest’, per an altered definition in planning legislation, is “intertwined with economic benefit.” ⁷ For example, Owen Hatherley has criticised, a provision for 50% affordable housing of all developments in the Livingstone plan provides no definition of what ‘affordable’ means and is therefore vulnerable to developer manipulation to game the system in their favour. ⁸ Given the transactional nature of gaining planning approval in this regard, which tend to be private agreements between the developer and the local authority, the role of public consultation is ambiguous and its effectiveness is questionable.

A possible counteract to potential misuse of Section 106 agreements, is a requirement in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 for a Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) in local development so that communities have some part or say in the negotiations. The Act directs the handling of planning applications; however, it has no specific regulation on what precisely ‘community involvement’ entails nor who is part of this community other than “persons who appear to the authority to have an interest in matters relating to development in their area.” It is left up to plan applicants to make a statement about how and who they have involved in preparing their plans. Thus, the power rests with the statement-makers.

Participation in shaping the London Plan is arguably stymied by the complexity of this planning arrangement. There isn’t a requirement of SCI for the development of the London Plan nor any other overarching guidance on public consultation of the plan aside from a mayoral duty to make it happen, which led the Centre for London in 2021 to call on the next Mayor of London to publish a Mayoral Statement of Community Involvement co-produced with Londoners. ⁹ Despite the shortcomings of Statement of Community Involvement, it is still valued as a legal instrument to hold plan-makers to their planning obligations. During the Khan London Plan’s draft consultation that took place in 2018, the latest framework of consultation was the high-level Code of Practice on Consultation (2008, UK Government) while the latest understanding of consultation specific to London was a study by the GLA’s Regeneration Committee on Public Consultation and Its Impact on Regeneration Projects (2016). Prior to this, the last documents dedicated to consultation were ‘Listen Up! Effective Community Consultation’ (1999, Audit Commission), ‘Is the Mayor Listening?’ (2002, London Assembly), and ‘Consulting London: a framework for the core GLA, LDA, LFEPA, MPA and TfL’ (2002, GLA)—all now two decades out of date. Missing from planning legislation today is a specific policy focus on what ‘public’ in public consultation means.

It has been nearly two decades since ‘public’ has been revisited in the GLA Act and in subsequent statues regulating the Mayor’s responsibility for making the plan public. The lack of clear definition and direction, and the persistence of unqualified textual references to ‘the public,’ leaves in place the notion of public that has been historically understood in terms of a singular people, exemplified in Arthur Skeffington’s People and Planning (1969), the report that first gave prominence to public participation in planning. ¹⁰ There is little accounting for how different actors may differently encounter or interact with the London Plan (in email inboxes, microblog newsletters, offices, assembly halls, classrooms, basements and cafés, on social media, via zoom, at international exhibitions), nor for how different actions can be taken in response.

Current policies do not reflect the ways in which ‘public’ as a concept, a practice, or its role has evolved in democratic discourse. Nor do the policies attend to the complex ways the word is presently used and understood across planning and built environment matters, which I have observed them to fall into the general grammatical categories of:

In the context of how to think about public space, Barnett has likewise asked the question ‘what is public’ and has similarly attended to the grammar of ‘public talk’ and “some of the difficulty in trying to nail down a clear and concise definition.” ¹¹ He highlights three ways of thinking of ‘public’: as a noun—something one can be in (the public square); as an adjective—something you can move into (by going public); and as a verb—something one does (publicising, to publish). In addition, there are three main senses of public: openness, collectivity, and representation. Yet, despite this variety, there persists a widespread confusion and conflation of ‘public’ in relation to the London Plan.

In interviews with authors and respondents of the London Plan 2021, a number of them struggled to come up with a precise definition of public when prompted, usually described by interviewees in very broad strokes and characterised in the negative by the absence rather than the presence of distinguishing features. When asked how they use the word public, understand it, or if they even use it in the first place, and if not, then is there something else instead, one GLA officer’s answer was that they don’t really use the word public or publics.

For the GLA, ‘Londoners’ is the stand-in for public. When pressed to expand on the word, ‘the public sector’ and ‘in the public interest’ was how the officer framed his understanding of public and his work for the GLA, set in contrast to working for the private sector and developers, which in his view “is always in the interest of a much narrower subset of people.” ¹² There’s an implied wideness to public in which, in the case of public consultation, “anybody can turn up to”, as opposed to “events that are more narrowly focused for an invited audience.” A different GLA officer, the London Plan manager at the time of the 2017 draft’s development, also references public in relative terms of its relationship to private. The public is “anybody that’s not private” and who is “external to our organization.” ¹³ She sees the role of the GLA in facilitating debates about the London Plan as trying to find the middle ground between the two sides, public and private.

Another interviewee, Peter Murray, the chairman and co-founder of New London Architecture, defines public as “anyone who’s not involved professionally in the built environment.” ¹⁴ He sees the public as distinct from professionals like architects, engineers, and development planners, and describes the work of the NLA as providing accessibility, a public space, to non-professionals to engage in issues around the built environment. Again, like the other two, his definition of public relates to what it is not: non-professionals.

Planning economist Michael Edwards, the co-founder of Just Space, a network of local and London-wide metropolitan groups campaigning on planning issues to improve public participation in planning, also does not use the word ‘public’ or ‘the public interest’ because, for him, it restrictively implies one interest in the singular. Interestingly, despite Just Space’s representation of community organisations and push for community-led solutions to London’s planning, he would rather not use ‘community’ but does find it has its uses, mainly as a placeholder for a collective of citizens (as opposed to a citizen as an individual). ¹⁵ An architect, who is self-described also as a community campaigner, cited a similar preference and usefulness for community over public. ‘The public’ and ‘communities’ were spoken interchangeably in the same sentence talking about engagement in the planning process. ¹⁶ This preference echoes the intentional use in planning policy of the word ‘community’ instead of ‘public’ in ‘Statement of Community Involvement.’ She goes on to identify the problem she finds with public as an overall term.

Public, in her view, is marginal and peripheral, as it “seems to be a reference by a group of people at the centre out to an amorphous mass.” It doesn’t contain the same specificity that community in the broad sense can “as a way of representing collectively the interests of people who are not otherwise represented.” Because public is perceived as being one-way, the architect also prefers the word ‘civic,’ which infers mutual responsibility or mutual interaction.

Similarly, a representative of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) conceptually links the notion of public with ideas of community and stewardship. TCPA makes the case for meaningful public participation through the lens of stewardship to “give communities control over the legacy of their neighbourhoods”, such that “planning can deliver outcomes that benefit all communities and incorporate everyone’s needs and views.” ^{17 18}

In this way, the term public is both nimble and rigid. It is sometimes used interchangeably or notionally as a catchall to mean ‘anybody’, ‘people’, ‘all’ or ‘everyone’, sometimes used specifically to reference Londoners or to invoke community, often deployed to signal an openness or accessibility, external to any particular in-group and thus imply a wide inclusivity. It is at once a generalisation, broad in scope and amorphous in scale and specificity; a static yet charged idea. Definitions are circular and absent of precision: for example, the public sector provides all public services to the public. But what is public in this instance? It’s difficult to know exactly.

What is meant by ‘public’, as the various definitions illustrate, is regularly communicated in relation to what it is not, characterised as the negative of x, ie public as distinct from private, therefore the public sector is opposite to the private sector. Elsewhere, it’s framed in othering terms which splits people further into one side and the other, ie non-professionals, non-planners, non-experts, or what Andy Inch, a participatory planning researcher, calls, ‘ordinary citizens’, a description favoured by many community groups. ¹⁹ Here is a situation where public is understood as a state of negation, non-professional, non-private, non-GLA, yet paradoxically a significant number of participants in the public participation and examination in public processes are professionals, private developers, and GLA representatives.

Such contradictions, variances and gaps aren’t accounted for in the London Plan, nor for how private and public are entangled in London’s contentious development where the distinction between the two is more complicated and nuanced than the familiar ‘us vs them’ dichotomy in well-documented narratives of planning conflict. There lacks a degree of selfreflexivity about what is meant by ‘public’ besides a common, unchallenged definition pertaining to either 1) an out-group audience or 2) an outside, geographic location. Missing is a greater consciousness about, and sensitivity to the politics of public, the in/congruities and in/consistencies of who and what is ex- and included in different public spheres. From Arthur Skeffington’s People and Planning (1969) to the GLC’s The People’s Plan (1984), the public is seen as an undifferentiated mass falling under the broadness of people. The latter publication does contain socialist language that emphasise workers and communities but it still subscribes anyhow to the same concept of public in the 1960’s in which ‘public’ is largely tantamount to ‘people.’ Public participation means people’s participation. Like public, the word ‘people’ is a general or collective consideration and lacks specificity or attachment to particular groups.

The notion of public linked to an idea of collectivity—and collective action—would animate debate in subsequent decades in English politics and planning. ²⁰ According to Iveson, in such a framing, “‘the public’ is ‘the people’ as a social totality,” addressing a universality rather than an individuality. ²¹ Questions about how institutions or corporations, who have different rights than people, also participate in planning, go unaddressed. Consequently, this assumed universality, a taken-for-granted understanding of the meaning of public is accepted at face value, so prevalent that it doesn’t require overt explanation. It poses a significant challenge to understanding the public meant by public participation, examination in public, and publication in the London Plan, leaving in place a notion of ‘all’ that for decades has shadowed the debate about London’s future and who gets to take part in it.

The above has implications for the urban dimensions of public-making and public address, a subject explored in Iveson’s book, Publics and the City, in which he identifies two problems of the traditional conception of ‘public’ that has shaped the modern definition of ‘public space.’ First, ‘publicness’ is conventionally conceived as a spatial concept, a place in physical space, or in Iveson’s term, problematically seen as merely ‘topographical.’ ²² That is, public space is geographically locatable and is distinguishable from private space, for example, the polis or the park, having visible physical boundaries. This is the place-based approach that dominates urban studies, and which characterises a majority of the interviewees’ interpretation of the concept. But as Warner has argued, and Iveson references, “public and private are not always simple enough that one could code them on a map with different colours — pink for private and blue for public … most things are private in one sense and public in another.” ²³

Second, in contrast, ‘publicness’ is conceived as a social concept, wherein public space is any space—not only a physical site—which comes into being through political action and public address, and is therefore procedural. This is the process-based approach that dominates social political theory, where we find Arendt and Habermas’ theories of public, to start. For example, Iveson notes, for Arendt, the public square isn’t a particular place in Athens but wherever/whenever Athenians gather to address each other. From this perspective, if publics have no proper location, then, various kinds of media can be ‘public space.’ ²⁴ ‘Public sphere’ (Habermas’ öffentlichkeit) translates from German as ‘openness’ or ‘publicness’ rather than a distinct spatiality of defined territory or place. Print media, Iveson cites, is the most prominent example of facilitating the formation of publics in the modern period. ²⁵ Habermas’s public is conceptually tied to the printing press, a powerful agent of change and dominant form of knowledge transfer in his modern discursive arena. For a counterpoint, see Public Sphere without a Printing Press: Texts, Reading Networks, and Public Opinion in Venezuela during the Age of Revolutions by Cristina Soriano. Recently, the Internet and networked media have become the de facto facilitator. The problem here, according to Iveson, is that champions of new media and communications technologies go too far to elevate cyberspace above the gathering places in the city as the pre-eminent public space, with techno-utopian claims about rendering the physical city irrelevant. In reaction, defenders of the city overcompensate to assert the primacy, and materiality or realness, of the street over the screen.

In the battle over “the privileged terrain of publicness,” Iveson criticises, the urban form (topographical) and media form (procedural) are set in opposition to each other. ²⁶ Public gets narrowly defined in exclusively topographical (place) or procedural (process) terms, which has dominated thinking about the relationship between publics and the city, when in his view, and I agree, it’s far more complex. In this traditional conception, for example, the public process of inputting into the London Plan is assumed to take place in a public space, in City Hall where the EIP happens. But where things happen—the public spaces—can also include at the keyboard and the screen through which commentors can e-mail their comments, by the home printer where readers are able to share with other readers physical copies of digital documents, inside the post office where respondents can mail their responses, and on the online community forum where communities organise to mobilise and later meet in person.

In his examination of the complexities of different conceptions of ‘public space,’ Iveson advocates for “a much clearer appreciation of the multidimensional nature of the public/private distinctions and its various applications across different realms of social life.” ²⁷ For him, the conventional conceptual vocabulary of public and private constrains fuller understanding of the multiplicity of the meaning of public: 1) when describing actions taking place ‘in public’ or ‘in private’, public and private are understood as different contexts for action with different forms of visibility, ie, what is open, revealed or accessible (public) and what is hidden or withdrawn (private); or 2) when describing actions which are taken by ‘a/the public’ and/or actions taken in the ‘public interest,’ publicness is understood with reference to the collectivity of different forms of agency and interest, ie what is collective versus what is individual. These distinctions fail to acknowledge where the boundaries overlap.

They are further complicated by the normative description or prescription attached to them, ie the expected norms (forms of conduct, how to act/behave appropriately) of a public space versus a private space. Iveson draws attention to the difficulties of making such sharp distinctions between sharing a space or shared interest because of the different ways of being together in contemporary cities, which can include physically and ideologically. ²⁸ For example, for a community consultation meeting broadcasted from City Hall, I can be alone in the privacy of my bedroom while on the zoom call alongside other individuals, who may also possibly be alone in their bedrooms or alternately together with each other at a cafe, an office, or a classroom. The normal boundaries were erased especially during COVID-19, as were the normal behaviours. Normally, attendees to a public meeting would be expected to not go pants-less, but for many on video calls during the pandemic, when public meetings took place online and where only the upper half of bodies viewable, pants became optional. It challenged the norms of visibility and presence associated with appropriate behaviour.

This “multidimensionality and complexity of publicness in the city” is what Iveson is sensitive to in his development of a framework for research into the urban dimensions of public-making. ²⁹ Because of the lack of conceptual clarity in public debates in urban studies about what constitutes ‘publicness,’ at the same time that the spatial vocabulary of critical social theory remains underdeveloped, Iveson argues “that studies of publicness in the ‘polis’ and in ‘print’ have mostly failed to connect.” ³⁰ Such disconnect underpins much of the public discourse that drives the London Plan, in that there is very little discourse about the specificities of public. Here, Iveson would criticise, those involved in making the plan public make “the mistake of thinking urban public address is simply embodied public address which relies on simultaneous co-presence at a given site,” when in fact, “the circulation of different kinds of texts through sites in the city can involve a range of different configurations of embodied presence, and the actions of these bodies are often (if not always) mediated and mediatized in some fashion.” ³¹

By contrast to Iveson’s focus on specifics, the conceptualisation of the public in the London Plan goes in the other direction, where ‘public’ becomes a pursuit of, and equivalence with, ‘all.’ The London Plan 2011 introduced the concept of a ‘plan for all.’ ³² Compelled by the changes to the planning system of the mid 2000s in London and the UK that gave more local power to neighbourhoods “to decide the shape of the places where people live,” Mayor Boris Johnson claimed to take “a new, more consensual approach to planning for London, working with all the agencies and organisations involved in the capital and in neighbouring regions,” that was “based on a clear recognition of the need to plan for all parts of London, and all those who live, work, study or visit here and the need for engagement, involvement and consultation on all sides.” ³³ (emphasis mine) In this one short paragraph part of a chapter providing the context and strategy for Johnson’s plan, the word ‘all’ repeats four times.

The appearance of the word ‘all’, however, is not original to Johnson. It was prominent the decade before in the first Mayor, Ken Livingstone’s, draft London Plan, ⊕ Mayor of London (2002). The Draft London Plan: a Summary. Page excerpt. and in his commitment to inclusive consultation of Londoners in policy development: all voices, all communities. ‘All’ was embedded in the GLA’s thinking early on. ³⁴

For the London Plan 2021, Mayor Sadiq Khan takes it a step further to place the word front and centre in the title of A City for All Londoners (2016), a precursor document to his draft London Plan 2017. ⊕ Mayor of London (2016). A City for All Londoners. Khan’s plan originated as a mayoral vision rooted in the concept of ‘good growth’, which is defined in his plan as development that promotes and delivers a better, more inclusive form of growth “on behalf of all Londoners”, whereby good growth is for “public good” leading to “a more socially integrated and sustainable city,” “to ensure that everyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, is able to share in and make the most of London’s prosperity, culture and economic development.” ³⁵ (emphasis mine) ‘All’ here translates into ‘everyone.’ There is an aspirational quality to this London Plan, subtler in past versions but made explicit in Khan’s edition, that imagines London is for everyone, a plan that “works for everyone,” “where everyone feels welcome,” “that everyone is able to benefit from [a wide range of economic and other opportunities] to ensure that London is a fairer and more equal city,” “allowing everyone to share in and contribute towards the city’s success.” ³⁶ Khan’s good growth agenda circles back to Livingstone’s aim for growth that yields benefits for all. Twenty years later, as a concept, ‘all’ takes on such prominence that the word features prominently on a number of the covers of his other mayoral strategies. ⊕ ⊕ Mayor of London (2018). Mayoral strategies for social integration and culture.

The language used links the idea of a city for all with a plan for all, an aspiration shared outside City Hall. The language of ‘all’ appears in London for All (2015), ⊕ Just Space (2015). London for All! a handbook published by Just Space and New Economics Foundation that criticises London’s model of economic development as responsible for “increasing poverty and inequality, creating a city for the few not for all.” ³⁷ It reappears a year later the next summer in Just Space’s publication of Towards a Community-Led Plan for London (2016). Written by 62 groups and organisations under Just Space’s coordination, it was positioned to be a pre-emptive community-led alternative plan in anticipation of the forthcoming new draft London Plan. It is self-described to be a “document [that] reclaims planning in London as a means to secure a just London for all,” in which Just Space advocates for a fair city that provides “the means for all Londoners to benefit fully from the city’s success.” ³⁸ Quoting from Mayor Johnson’s 2011 plan, the then-current London Plan, they called for the principles of inclusion and fairness to underpin London planning to realise ‘equal life chances for all.’

Just Space was an invited stakeholder to a series of consultations for Khan’s A City for All Londoners, its member groups meeting with the London Plan Team. The timing, just months after Just Space’s alternative plan published, suggests their work has had some influence on the process. ³⁹ The short version of the alternative plan was submitted to the GLA as part of the “Spatial Options” and “Strategic Objectives” being prepared in 2017 by the London Plan team. Some of the text was later included in the draft plan part of the ‘Integrated Impact Assessment’ (IIA), evidence of the coordination between Just Space and the GLA. A similar influence extended to the Public Planning — a Manifesto for London (2020) produced by Collective Community Action with contribution from Just Space part of a larger campaign to ensure that “change in the urban environment benefits all, with the involvement of all.” ⁴⁰ Like Mayor Khan’s rhetoric of a city for all Londoners, it advocates for wide inclusivity in the planning system. The net result is that from both the government and community perspective, there is broad consensus that London should be for all. ⊕ Phineas Harper (@PhinHarper). 2 March 2020. Tweet.

It’s a sensibility that social historian David Henkin, in the preface of his book on City Reading, recognises as being pervasive in modern cities, a perception of connectedness, that “despite differences in class, gender, ethnicity, and education [we] are impersonally and indifferently included in the imagined activities of an abstract group.” ⁴¹ In this case, the abstract group is Londoners engaged in shaping London’s future. Imagination plays a significant role in this conceptualisation of the London public. For Iveson, “public spheres are social imaginaries that are always in the making.” ⁴² The Mayor, for instance, imagines he is addressing all Londoners, but his words in speech or his texts in writing may not actually reach every Londoner. Therefore, the ‘you’ in the draft London Plan, to whom the invitation to comment has been extended, is an imaginary all, an indefinite collective of unspecified individuals, an infinite address.

Swapping in London for New York in Iveson’s example of an imagined public sphere, we can see the problem with an imaginary all: ‘some institutions and groups, such as [Greater London Authority, Mayor of London, London Connects, BusinessLDN, London & Partners, New London Architecture, London Tenants Federation, My Fair London], and so on, seek to establish some connection to ‘the city’ in their very name as well as in their deeds. But the ‘[Londons]’ invoked and addressed by such a wide variety of actors in a range of contexts are not necessarily the same. While the [Londons] performed into being here share the same name, and they may intersect or overlap, they might also be radically different and incongruent with different kinds of boundaries and connections to other places. ‘[London]’, then, has no essential unity, coherence or totality.” ⁴³ There are over 140 commentators to the 2017 draft London Plan with ‘London’ in their name. Not all of these Londons are the same. In claiming to act on behalf of ‘London’ (the city) or Londoners (the public), they are advancing particular, not universal, values and interests.

Each group invokes different and potentially competing visions of ‘the city’ as a collective subject. According to Iveson, these could include urban imaginaries of shared values (e.g. community or common good) orshared interests(e.g. the state vs the market, the public city vs the capitalist city) or shared fates (e.g. ‘the cosmopolis,’ a cosmopolitan civic culture having heterogeneous values and interests, binding city dwellers together into a polity). ⁴⁴ Yet, London as ‘the city’ is imagined as a proxy for ‘the public,’ the social entity with universal interests and values. Instead of a heterogenous public sphere, the London Plan sees the public as a homogenous all.

The keyword is ‘all’, and who and what is implicated by the term. If not specific groups, then what is meant by ‘all’? Who is the London Plan intended for, who is it made available to, and who gets involved in its draft writing? If ‘all’ is taken to mean the whole quantity or widest extent of a particular group or thing, the ‘all’ of the London Plan are Londoners in the Mayor’s ambition to create a city for all Londoners, one echoed by the community perspective. ‘All’ is a sweeping umbrella term that infers and sets up a certain expectation of broad inclusivity, providing wide cover. It gives the impression that every Londoner can participate in London’s planning, an abstract ambition and impractical if not impossible to deliver on. In a city of over 8 million people, practically speaking, not every Londoner can or does. Yet, couched in the language of all within the London Plan, a participatory imaginary exists in which public participation in shaping the plan involves (or should involve) all Londoners, open to all. It imagines a singular, universal public who shows up and gets involved, an imagination that dates back 50 years to mid-century ideas about ‘the public’ as described in the introduction.

In the case of the London Plan, the common world of which Hannah Arendt defines the public realm is a discursive space to speak and act on the draft plan together. Participation is enacted through the ability to talk (“have a say”) about the plan’s content, to be able to express an opinion about the policies and to debate them in an open forum seen and heard by all. The public here is open and visible, constituting a collective with the capacity for individuals to appear and discuss in text form, online, and in person at City Hall, townhalls, in workshops, consultation meetings, etc. In this common world all Londoners, ‘everyone’, in principle has equal footing and freedom to take part and share their views about the Mayor’s vision for the future of London.

Habermas and Arendt’s mid-century notion of public maintains a strong holdover on the London Plan. Today, the success of London is portrayed as a common, shared responsibility of Habermas’ single public sphere. As envisioned by Mayor Khan in the foreword of the London Plan 2021, “to shape our city for the better, built around the needs, health and wellbeing of all Londoners […] we need everyone to do their bit, including boroughs, developers, land owners, existing residents, architects and, of course, the Government.” ⁴⁵ The list-style lumping together of these different groups treats everyone as alike, absent of differentiation, a united indiscriminate mass without regard for particulars. It places ‘existing residents’ on the same level as boroughs, developers and land owners irrespective of how residents won’t have the same means, tools, resources nor access to participate in such a city-shaping.

This sameness is akin to what communications scholar Robert Asen considers to be the neoliberal public. “Against contemporary scholarship and practice that emphasizes fluidity, diversity, and transformation,” the neoliberal public “asserts its own universality, claiming that market relations represent an intrinsic, common orientation to public engagement and that markets treat everyone the same.” ⁴⁶ For Asen, the neoliberal public flattens difference and sees public as consisting of “atomistic individuals” in equal competition with one another in “a singular and universal sphere of activity.” ⁴⁷ Thus, all Londoners, whether they be boroughs, developers, land owners, residents or architects, shall have the same chance to have their say in London’s future.

The conceptualisation of Londoners as this universal, neoliberal public is connected to the global city discussion in the previous chapter and the need of the GLA to accommodate the market and the state. Neoliberalism has been a particular form of economic and political organisation with which London has had to contend since the Thatcher administration’s national politics of privatisation. With neoliberalism, as opposed to the laissez-faire attitude and minimal state intervention of classical liberalism, the state has a hand in organising the market economy, sets the conditions of competition and cheerleads for the success of the free market. 1980s under Thatcher saw governmental faith in the market knowing what’s best for itself, with a little nudging from government in the “right” direction. Journalist Stephen Metcalf highlighted in a 2017 The Guardian podcast that,

Mark Purcell calls this way of thinking the ‘neoliberal project.’ ⁴⁸ He defines it as the pursuit of ideological hegemony, that is, a political project to establish neoliberal interests as the same thing as the general interests of society, such as making ideas about free market reign, a ‘business-friendly’ climate, and less state intervention and regulation, part of the dominant ‘common-sense’ seen to be “a necessary (and even the only) value in decision-making.” ⁴⁹ It seeks to establish a particular interest, here capital, as a universal one. Overall, “neoliberalism seeks to establish a particular commonsense notion that competitiveness is not only ‘the way it is’, but also a good thing, an ethic that will help generate wealth and ensure happiness.” ⁵⁰

But competition in neoliberalism’s “marketplace of ideas” has led to mass inequality, destruction, and the alienation of rights. As with any competition, there are winners and losers. For geographer David Harvey, “the idea that the market is about fair competition is increasingly negated by the facts of extraordinary monopoly, centralization, and internationalization on the part of corporate and financial powers.” ⁵¹ Tony Blair’s New Labour government in the late 1990s introduced a ‘third way’ as an attempted compromise. In response to the Conservative Party’s privatisation of public lands in the last decade-plus, his politics was located somewhere in the middle of a free market and a welfare state that tries to reconcile economic policies with social policies. ⁵² For some economists and political theorists, however, his policies, neither left nor right, made things worse. ⁵³ Critics called Blair’s interpretation and implementation of the Third Way, sociologist Anthony Giddens’s theory of social democracy, as nothing more than an extension of neoliberalism of past Conservative governments. ⁵⁴

In trying to have it both ways, Blair appealed to the global financial elite while he promoted social capital in communities to keep the socialists happy. However, in political scientist Eunice Goes’s analysis, he didn’t actually tackle the conditions of inequality, only endorsed “the politics of community” (a ‘politics of “us” rather than “me”’) and used the ideology of a socially cohesive community, ideas of duty and ethical responsibility defended by communitarism, “to water down the party’s commitment to equality.” ⁵⁵ To his critics, Blair’s premiership was a decade of unchecked growth, which Owen Hatherley has noted played a part in the financial collapse of 2008 and exacerbated the rise in inequality, contradicting socialist aims. ⁵⁶ Hatherley cites as an example, under New Labour, Thatcher-initiated Canary Wharf succeeded, the unregulated American-style skyscraper Enterprise Zone in which laissez-faire capitalism was supported by massive government investment in public transport and post-industrial clean up.

In reaction to the financial crisis, the next Conservative government, a coalition helmed by David Cameron, clung to austerity with massive cuts to the state purse and social spending, controversially, having neoliberal undercurrents with the state’s return to efficiency. ⁵⁷ By 2016, Cameron’s last year in office and the year Sadiq Khan first became Mayor of London, austerity and neoliberalism had been bitterly debated. Metcalf noted the International Monetary Fund questioning neoliberalism’s benefits and calling out the ‘neoliberal agenda’ for its adverse impacts on world economies. ⁵⁸ Purcell, going further in his criticism, argues that neoliberalisation, the process by which neoliberalism has become increasingly hegemonic, “has had a corrosive impact on cities and urban life,” particularly on democracy. ⁵⁹ He outlines four democratic deficits of neoliberalisation: ⁶⁰

1. The tension between social inequality and political equality: Because the logic of neoliberalisation rewards winners and punishes losers, according to numerous longitudinal studies of equality indexes, “virtually everywhere it has produced rapidly rising material inequality.”

2. The increasing control of capital over social life: Because local and state governments must compete with other governments that they fear will offer corporations more competitive incentives to relocate their businesses, “capital is able to shape significantly the policy choices of governments,” and therefore significantly disempower the mass of people represented by government in setting the agenda for their local area. Neoliberalisation transfers power from democratic citizens to corporations.

3. Policy decisions are made by bodies unaccountable (at least in a meaningful way) to democratic citizens: The state has increasingly privatised and semi-privatised its functions by contracting out services and by developing quasi-public bodies to carry out the functions of government, in which “these new authorities are not subject to any kind of direct democratic oversight.” In neoliberalism’s agenda to ‘outsource’ governance, there is a shift from formal, accountable government to informal, unaccountable governance.

4. Cities cannot offer its citizens meaningful options: The ideological emphasis on competitiveness “has narrowed the options available to governments and the people they represent. […] [Because] the neoliberal claim is that competition is a question of life and death,” in turn, “[c]ities feel they must be competitive or die. Citizens might have formal decision-making power, but their range of decisions can become so narrow as to not really be decisions at all.”

These deficits aren’t helped by the ways in which, per Purcell, planners normatively approach democracy and, per Iveson, perceive the public as a social totality. Similarly, urban planner Vanessa Watson has expressed concerns about the aggressive promotion of neoliberal values and the complicity of planning processes in advancing them. “In a context of deepening social difference and an increasingly hegemonic market rationality,” she questions “the faith in consensus-seeking processes as a sole informant of decision-making,” “as a central decision-making tool” in planning, and that are based on “often universalizing and homogenizing assumptions about societies.” ⁶¹ The debate about neoliberalism is ongoing today, but arguably, decades of the ‘neoliberal agenda’ or the ‘neoliberal project’ as described here, in effect, embedded the prevalent idea of the universal market, the economic form of Habermas’s public sphere where supposedly all can participate in shaping it to come to a consensus of a common good for all. Hence, in Khan’s London Plan residents are lumped in with developers and Government as part of the ‘all’ to shape the city. But it is an imagined universality. Just as appearing in the public sphere is an unequal privilege, the freedom to participate in the marketplace is asymmetrical for those for whom showing up is difficult. In seeing neoliberalism as “profoundly undemocratic in nature,” Harvey stresses that “the gap between rhetoric (for the benefit of all) and realization (for the benefit of a small ruling class) increases over space and time.” ⁶²

‘All’ is a useful empty container—common, singular, universal—vague enough to be filled with anything yet not beholden to any one thing, person or group. Such conceptualisation of the singularity of the public is problematic, however, because it frames the relationship of public to the London Plan in a binary way, all or not-all. While the generalisation and perceived expansiveness of ‘all’ give an impression of non-exclusion and togetherness, it entangles with conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere and is challenged by contemporary notions of public, most of which emphasises specificity and situatedness. As the following sections will show, it conflicts with new theories of ‘public’ that have emerged in the last thirty years in response to the unitary model, attentive to variances in visibility, acknowledgment, and power dynamics, which eschews unity, insists on plurality and asserts difference. Chapter 3 will further elaborate on how the premise of a singular, universal, neoliberal public—indifferent to differences—directly impacts public participation, a shaky ground upon which the London Plan’s legitimacy as public-informed policy arguably rests.

It is important to recognise, rhetorical theorist Daniel Brouwer suggests, “human actors participate in multiple publics.” ⁶³ The bigger picture of participating in London’s strategic planning and in the London Plan is complex, much more complicated than how plan creators, contributors, and commenters alike imagine the input of one public, all Londoners. It is complicated by the presence of many publics and not just the existence of ‘the public’ and an encompassing all. First, not everyone gets involved because not everyone is aware the invitation exists in the first place since “many Londoners won’t know about or have come across the London Plan.” ⁶⁴ Second, the publics of the London Plan who do participate are diverse, porous, characterised by various privileges, protections, and a variety of inclusions and exclusions, composed of changing groups. They are not neatly bounded as to include all Londoners and cannot be easily defined as everyone equal and free in their ability to appear, debate and deliberate. Responses to the London Plan vary in intention, motivation, agency, speaking capacity and desired outcomes.

Public consultation events for the draft London Plan 2017 focused on subregions, business, boroughs, and community. The GLA grouping the plan respondents into categories of: authorities outside London (53 respondents), business (359), campaign groups (133), community groups (134), government and agencies (76), individuals (957), London boroughs (40), professional bodies (72), and set responses (12). Going by this sorting of over 1,800 respondents, each group is their own public coming together in the open in their common world (city halls, town centres, lecture rooms, offices, and the internet) and working within circumscribed communicative practices (via speech, post, blogs, and emails). Per contemporary notions of public, the groups can be further split into two typical categories, one dominant (who dominate discourse) and the other counterpublic (who resist against such dominance).

On the former, there is the institutional ‘official’ public which includes London Boroughs, authorities outside London, and government and agencies like the London Assembly, the Secretary of State and Central Government, who operate at varying scales of geography, accountability, authority, political persuasions, and financial obligations and recourses. There is the ‘private’ public—businesses big and small, land owners, housebuilders, and the larger property development industry, including sponsors and financiers, who invest in and have substantial economic stakes in London’s building, the latter set of whom have, according to planner Bob Colenutt, an outsized role in shaping and gaming Government planning and housing policy which drives the majority of London’s new building. ⁶⁵ There is also the ‘expert’ public—professional bodies, built environment practitioners, planners, designers, architects, academics and researchers whose expertise the GLA relies upon to use as evidence to inform policy text. These three publics have a close relationship with the GLA and the Mayor of London and frequently work in direct coordination to shape and advance the Mayor’s agenda. They are the established, recognised, and acknowledged public that dominates the debate on and direction of London’s urban change.

Then there is the ‘community’ public—local people, campaigners, and activists who not only have a vested interest in London’s building but who see themselves as ‘the real London’ with tacit knowledge grounded in lived experiences, a counterpublic promoting an alternative expertise for the Mayor to also take into account. My Fair London, for example, is a group of ‘ordinary Londoners’ that “campaigns to make London a fairer city, a city where people trust each other, where families can thrive, where people come together.” ⁶⁶ Embedded in their name is advocacy for personal ownership and belonging. Deeming London to not be a fair city, their stated goal is to make it fairer for ordinary Londoners.

The same goes for Just Space’s network of community groups aiming to achieve spatial justice by raising the voices of Londoners. Members work together at the local (grassroots) level to influence planning policy at the regional, borough and neighbourhood levels. ⁶⁷ Just Space tackles what they perceive to be London’s entrenched inequality, focused on changing the city for the better through directed efforts at influencing the Mayor’s policies and ‘co-production’ with ordinary Londoners of the places they live in order to ‘reclaim our spaces.’ ⁶⁸ In their view there is an overrepresentation of developer-led interests and underrepresentation of community-led planning that is just and fair for everyone. Just Space questions the Mayor’s definition of ‘all Londoners’ and asks the term be more explicitly defined in the London Plan to include migrants and others from excluded and vulnerable groups who have never been considered part of the global city economy. ⁶⁹

In 2014, Just Space directly addressed the polemic relationship between the local and the global at an event they facilitated called, Debating London’s economy: can the global city be a city for all? Implicit in the discussion’s framing is an acceptance of the global city as a near fait accompli and, based on the programming schedule, the task for communities is to find and assert their place in it—and for policymakers to recognise their valuable contributions—because while the global city as a concept isn’t questioned, it is deemed not a city for all. Organised by the Just Space Economy and Planning (JSEP) group, the event was summarised as the coming together of a diverse group of citizens, politicians, trade unionists, entrepreneurs, academics and activists “gathered to explore whether and how London can reconcile its global ambitions with the needs of Londoners,” communicated as if they are separate, opposing issues. ⁷⁰ One session was centred on “making space for London’s diverse economy,” which sought to speak up for and on behalf of small businesses and asked if there is space for alternative migrant and ethnic economies. Again, implicit in the framing is that there is currently no room or not much space for otherness.

The debate, by the organisers and participants’ language use, is oriented as an us vs them problem. From that adversarial perspective, Just Space is part of the excluded public jettisoning for greater acknowledgment, visibility, equality, inclusion and say, in competition with the dominant public, who they criticise as global-oriented groups such as the City of London business consortiums. Having grown from its initial involvement in the Further Alterations to the London Plan in 2007, Just Space’s ongoing participation in consultations is to counteract that dominance with greater diversity of local groups, interests and forms of knowledge. Of the draft plan 2017, Just Space’s Robin Brown argues that only 14 of 188 pre-consultation engagement meetings were with community groups while only 13 out of 97 consultation events were open to the public, highlighting the “structural failures with consultations, particularly with marginalised groups.” ⁷¹ Per the usual narrative centred on simplistic binary opposition, London’s planning is rife with such tensions between a dominant public communicating about the city’s future and a counterpublic proposing, contesting and competing with alternatives.

Complicating this relationship, however, is that competition sometimes necessarily turns into collaboration. In strategic efforts to pool resources, community groups, especially Just Space, team up with academics, researchers, and other formalised experts belonging to acknowledged institutions, to adapt ‘expert’ practices in order to strengthen their arguments and positioning. In its decade-plus history Just Space has had continuous links to University College London, including Department of Geography, The Bartlett School of Planning (BSP), Development Planning Unit, Engineering Exchange and Urban Lab, and has engaged in research collaboration between community/activist groups and university staff and students on housing and planning issues. ⁷² The JSEP group was convened by Myfanwy Taylor as part of her PhD research. Just Space’s work similarly continues to be bolstered by research contributions from students across the university’s network. ⁷³

One of its most prolific advocates is co-founder Michael Edwards (BSP), a now retired Professor who dedicates his spare time to communicating the work of Just Space and remains the editor at large and main administrator of their active online blog. He got into campaigning with the Greater London Development Plan (1976) and has been involved in campaigning in the last twenty years since the formation of the GLA. ⁷⁴ Together with Jennifer Robinson (BSP), another prominent Just Space contributor, Edwards co-convened a collaborative course between Just Space and BSP on Community Participation in City Strategies. What is conventionally presumed to be the fringe activities of marginalised communities, gets centred in the classroom, moved from the margins.

Just Space’s input into the draft plan 2017 was supported by staff and students at UCL, lending the community response institutional legitimacy. Many of Just Space’s gatherings to support community groups engaging in the consultations happened on campus and inside UCL’s walls. This collaboration between academia and activism is an increasingly common case of a counterpublic working with a dominant public, which blurs the conventional lines of who dominates debate if one debater is subsumed under another. It can also happen the other way around, where academia relies on data output by organisations like London Tenants Federation, a member of the Just Space network, to supplement research that then informs mayoral housing policies. Partnering in this way, universities bolster their knowledge capital and gain soft power to legitimise outputs as grounded in practice, strengthening their impact outside academia.

Here, there isn’t a neat division between who is dominant and who is counter. What is one and what is the other can’t be exactly portioned out. According to Robert Asen, the relationship between public and counterpublic shifts depending on changes in vantage points and perceived advantages to negotiations of power. “A public may appear as mainstream or marginal,” he writes. ⁷⁵ Within a counterpublic, there is a diversity of viewpoints and power holders, where one subgroup may appeal to the wider public if it’s to their advantage. This is the case with Just Space positioning itself as “a community-based voice for London planning,” focusing on “minority interests” and working with marginalised groups such as gypsies and travellers. ⁷⁶ Although Just Space coordinator Richard Lee describes its membership in terms of, “everyone who comes has the motivation to counter the domination by developers and by public authorities of planning decisions,” Just Space is not a community counterpublic in the marginalised sense. ⁷⁷ It has become mainstream to the extent that the GLA perceives their participation as sufficient inclusion of the community perspective in the London Plan. ⁷⁸ Addressing the question of consultation and engagement raised during the draft plan 2017 EIP, the Mayor identified Just Space as the primary community group the GLA engaged with in the preparation of evidence and the formulation of policy. Just Space’s name repeatedly appeared in the list of consultees at consultation events. Of the meetings held with campaign groups, most of those were with Just Space. Few of the other 170+ community and campaign groups who commented on the plan were mentioned by name to have been consulted.

On appearance alone, Just Space was invited and present for every one of the 98 public examination sessions in 2018, they were one of the most visible organisations, more than any other in attendance. Given their visibility at City Hall and in the textual responses to the draft, arguably, Just Space is a dominant public. Through a clever tactic of hot-seating during the Examination in Public (EIP) process, Just Space was able to overcome access restrictions to the by-invitation-only hearings to allow more members from their network to participate in as many sessions as possible. ⁷⁹ For the purpose of having a seat at the table, the groups they represent were swappable. With only one microphone to share, there were strategy meetings between sessions on who would speak and when. Just Space effectively was the dominant voice of communities through which other community voices were filtered. Hayes Community Forum, Westway 23 (North Kensington Community), Ubuele Initiative, Latin Elephant, and Regents Network, to name just a few, each shared the microphone assigned to Just Space. It’s a position they are not keen on, self-conscious of their outsized role given to play to represent all community voices and, according to Michael Edwards, refuse to be “the casting agency” for consultation organisers. ⁸⁰

Another complication for where to draw the public line is that the dominant public and the counterpublic in total make up only half the number of the respondents to the draft plan. The other half, the nearly 1,000 individual respondents, don’t fall into either category but have personal stakes in the reach of the London Plan in their backyards. They espouse a different view on privacy and individual rights that does not comport with the finance-oriented private public, but while their concerns may better align with those of the community public, they are perhaps too hyperlocal to link up to the latter group.

Notably, as individuals, they are unable to compete with the organisational powers of institutions, private industries or campaign and community groups. Since individual concerns tend to centre on discrete issues which may not have broader strategic impact on the rest of London, such comments on the draft weren’t taken up by the panel of plan inspectors to the next stage of evaluation during the EIP. Failing to meet the criteria of material consideration of all of London, individuals end up being a partial public that only partially participates. But whether it’s partial or full participation, the list of respondents bears to mind the idea of one public versus multiple publics; the public of the London Plan is neither singular nor universal. There is more than one. The public(s) that accepts the Mayor’s invitation to have a say on the London Plan is not a singular mass of all Londoners. Instead, it’s a plurality of publics, some dominant and others counter, sometimes existing in opposition to, and sometimes operating in collaboration with, each other.

Common practice has been to separate inputters into planning debates into two circles—one consisting of professionals and the institutional, ie academics, government officers, planners, designers, and private developers, and the other of non-professionals and non-institutional, ie local residents, community activists and organisers. As the above has shown, however, it isn’t easy to categorise these various publics in binary, oppositional terms of one versus another, dominant versus counterpublic. Like a Venn diagram, the circles sometimes overlap more than they are distinct. In a significant way, combined, they make one larger circle of those with something to say about London’s future. It points to a unique circularity that exists in the London Plan: that ideas about London have circulated from within the same pool of knowledge producers.

Contributions to the London Plan have come from a small catchment of producers, collectors and circulators. Take for instance, scholarship on the London Plan and academic input into London planning has come predominantly from two schools: London School of Economics (LSE) and UCL School of Planning. Both institutions were originally involved in the 1957 Royal Commission on London government to consider the possible reform of ‘Greater London’, chaired by Sir Edwin Herbert. LSE’s Greater London Group and the Centre for Urban Studies at UCL, in competition, provided Herbert with evidence and expert analysis for his reports. ⁸¹ In an influential pamphlet published in 1961, William Robson, an LSE academic and founder of the Greater London Group, made his views public about the Royal Commission report which steered support toward LSE’s proposal of government structure over UCL’s version. ⁸² Robson’s notion of a greater London became the basis for the eventual creation of the Greater London Council (GLC). The seeds of his academic work and others from the two groups would eventually establish the area also covered today by the GLA. The valuing of their expertise paved the way for the evidence-based approach the Greater London Development Plans and the London Plan would be written.

In one form or another, directly through commissioned contributions and/or indirectly through critical writings and participation in public inquiries, LSE and UCL have been involved in every London Plan. For the 2021 London Plan, LSE had produced 26 research reports for consideration in policy, and according to a booklet summary of their participation in the plan’s formulation, has taken part in ten public sessions and wrote blog posts about the discussions; commented on the draft plan and the related housing strategy at consultation stage and submitted written evidence on several fundamental issues that the plan addresses; held five roundtables for participants and knowledgeable specialists, publishing summaries of the discussions and conclusions on the web, and hosted a final event on what the EiP has achieved and ‘where next.’ ⁸³ UCL’s participation has been mainly through the School of Planning and the collaboration between the Department Planning Unit and Just Space, in addition to research contributions by UCL Urban Laboratory. UCL staff and students had volunteered their time to assist Just Space in their representation of the grassroots community viewpoint.

Like their academic peers, the government planner circle is small. Since the first London Plan, there has been a continuity of contributors. John Lett and Nicky Gavron are two names that appear in the contributors’ credits of each document’s colophon. Both have been involved in London strategic planning since before the GLA was formed, leading LPAC’s work in the 1990s that preceded and was carried forward in the first London Plan. John Lett was assistant chief planner at LPAC and has been a lead planner on the GLA strategic planning team since its formation, head of the London Plan until his retirement in 2016. Nicky Gavron is a current member of the London Assembly and the Planning Committee. Previously the chair of LPAC, she has been with the GLA since its inception and was the former Deputy Mayor under Ken Livingstone during the eight years of his mayorship. Their long-term, two decades-plus of involvement reveal one of several major connections hinting at the close-loop nature of knowledge production and circulation in London planning. The issue with this kind of consistency is that there is little room for different types of conversations to take place.

The threads of connection and continuity are even more entangled when we cast a wider net of who has direct and/or indirect influence on the London Plan. In Richard Rogers’ 2005 report, Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance, a follow-up to his work on Towards an Urban Renaissance (1999) which had influenced Towards the London Plan: Initial Proposals for the Mayor’s Spatial Development Strategy by Greater London Authority, the colophon notes that, “Design and Production, Wordsearch”.  Wordsearch is a property communications company founded in the early 1980s by Peter Murray. Self-described as a “creative property branding, real estate marketing” company, Wordsearch spearheaded the nascent property marketing sector and has tremendous sway in communicating the perspectives of developers. ⁸⁴ Wordsearch is global, with ten offices spread across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. They have been responsible for the branding of major projects such as One Manhattan Square, One World Trade Center and the retail section in the Empire State Building (all in New York) as well as for the Shangri-La Hotel at The Shard and The Shard in London. ⁸⁵

Peter Murray is a member of the Mayor’s Design Advisory Group (MDAG). Working with GLA and NLA, MDAG produced a series of reports titled, Mayor’s Good Growth Agendas (2016), in the lead up to the drafting of the new London Plan. Murray was editor and a contributing writer. He is also the co-founder of Blueprint magazine, the influential publication for architects and designers which was not coincidentally backed by Rogers when it was initially launched 40 years ago. ⊕ Blueprint magazine, December 1984–January 1985. Source: dezeen.com Blueprint has been a mainstay of architecture and design discourse in London and internationally, and for a period, leading it. By putting architects’ faces on the covers, Murray suggests, Blueprint gave rise to the concept of the starchitect, luminaries of the design world such as Rogers, and made many architects celebrity household names. ⁸⁶

Murray’s contribution to Rogers’ report and, in turn, Rogers support of Murray’s magazine, perfectly captures the smallness of the London architecture world. Blueprint’s first office was at 25 Cramer Street in Marylebone which housed creatives like Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic, Rowan Moore, and David Chipperfield. ⁸⁷ Burdett set up The Architecture Foundation (1991) and directed the Venice Biennale (2006). He was a member of the Urban Task Force led by Rogers that authored Toward an Urban Renaissance; an architectural adviser to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006; the Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics; and is currently Professor of Urban Studies at the LSE and runs the LSE Cities programme. Sudjic was co-founder and editor of Blueprint, later editor of Domus, another well-known design publication; was also a director of the Venice Biennale (2002) and director of the Design Museum from 2006 until 2020. Moore is an architecture critic at the Observer, was formerly Director of the Architecture Foundation, architecture critic of the Evening Standard and editor of Blueprint magazine. Rogers and Chipperfield are two of the industry’s most celebrated architects, their resumes too long to recite but whose architectural imprint in London is undeniable. Rogers, notably, is the architect behind London’s compact city form today.

From the experience with Wordsearch and Blueprint, Peter Murray would go on to establish the professional network New London Architecture in 2005 and build on these relationships with the market and the city makers. Consolidated in 2019, key building environment brands under the NLA umbrella include the London Festival of Architecture, the world’s biggest annual architecture festival; The City Centre, an exhibition and event space to learn about and debate the built environment of the Square Mile (the City of London); the London Real Estate Forum, an annual thought-leadership conference on investment and development of cities; and London at MIPIM (in French, Le Marché International des Professionnels de L’immobilier), a major annual international gathering in Cannes, France about the state of the real estate market, attended by developers, consultants and local authorities.

The NLA’s reach is wide. It is responsible for a number of public events and publications related to London’s urban change part of its broad programme and has been a central source of knowledge ‘convergence’ for the London Plan, per Murray’s term. ⁸⁸ NLA’s research insights such as the annually produced Tall Building Survey have been particularly impactful in shaping the policy discourse of the plan. ⊕ ⊕ NLA publications. Source: https://nla.london The figures and analysis of the tall buildings pipeline contained therein is data upon which the plan bases its development projections. NLA is also very active and influential in public conversations about the capital’s growth through a sustained media presence. In recent years, they have hosted the Big Debate, a major public relations event for the London Plan to ask questions of the capital’s future and to discuss how the city will evolve and develop. ⁸⁹ NLA’s public programme is extensively marketed and attracts leading decision-makers and professionals across government, property, planning and design. ⁹⁰ Events are sponsored and championed by property lobbyists such as Argent, CBRE, British Land, British Property Federation and London First.

Cumulatively, from writing and publishing about architecture and urbanism in London, to steering the policies that make building possible, to communicating and promoting such plans, it is a very small circle. Some of the most significant publications that have influenced the London Plan’s development over its 20-year history were produced by such a concentrated group of knowledge circulators within circles of concentrated knowledge. ⁹¹

Urban studies scholar Katherine Brookfield uses the term ‘familiar faces’ to describe this kind of concentration of those few that traditionally participate in planning decisions. In Brookfield’s study of neighbourhood planning, she found participation to be “concentrated amongst a few, relatively advantaged communities, and relatively advantaged interests within those communities,” and involving a certain ‘type’ of individual and area. ⁹² However, for me, ‘familiar’ infers an intimacy or collegiality in conflict with the oft contentious nature of planning debates and doesn’t capture their intensity. The more common moniker to better reflect the divisiveness is the ‘usual suspects,’ a pseudonym for certain participants, typically stylised in quotation to indicate their notoriety for disruption. Planner Yasminah Beebeejaun points to its used in planning to mean those “most vociferous and well-organised participants [who] often object to planning decisions,” “who participate but find their contributions unwelcome or questioned as partisan,” as opposed to the ‘hard to reach,’ “the majority [who] fail to make their viewpoints known,” particularly, “a range of groups who are under-represented in all areas of policy-making and politics.” ⁹³

Who makes up the ‘usual’ in ‘usual suspects,’ however, is up for contention. Beebeejaun’s description gives prominence to objectioners, perceived to be specific communities known for their NIMBYism, but for Just Space, the opposite is true. There are not enough communities represented in contrast to the many who are in agreement with development plans. In a summary of that 2014 debate organised by Just Space on the global city and London’s economy, they write that the event “demonstrated the need for policy-makers to look beyond the ‘usual suspects’ — developers, financial services and big business — for the evidence, experience and ideas they will need to make London a city for all.” ⁹⁴ The ‘usual suspects,’ in how Just Space uses the term, implicates those whose interests and frequent presence are well known. It’s an imbalance that’s also recognised by the Mayor. In a Mayor’s Question Time meeting addressing details of the new London Plan, London Assembly Member Siân Berry asked the Mayor, “how are you going to involve Londoners from the ground up in making a new strategy for small sites in London?” Included in Mayor Khan’s answer was his desire in his community-led approach “to avoid the usual suspects.” ⁹⁵ In this case, he means to promote ‘small builders,’ those not part of the usual such as the big builders, the typical developers, or in Just Space’s term, ‘big business.’

Case in point, many of the same actors involved in inputting into the plan’s development have long been advocates for London’s development, campaigning to and sometimes on behalf of the Mayor and the GLA. For example, in 2016, NLA produced the publication Reinventing the London Plan from a design charette on the capital’s future, in which many familiar faces and names appear. ⁹⁶ ⊕ ⊕ NLA & Arup (2016). Re-inventing the London Plan. p10 excerpt. Source: nla.london Findings from the sessions took the form of a report with policy recommendations for the next London Mayor. The list of charette attendees noted in the report is a who’s who of the built environment profession. The event was facilitated by ARUP, a British multinational professional services firm headquartered in London providing global advisory, design, planning, engineering, and architectural consulting services. Typical of NLA activities, the event sponsors included other big names in the development sector with high stakes in what direction such debates take.

London & Partners is one of NLA’s principal partners that fund the organisation. London & Partners has been a key player in the development of London and of London business since 2011, supported by the Mayor of London. As the Mayor’s promotional agency, their interests have been well represented throughout the London Plan and account for a significant amount of behind-the-scenes influence. In addition to communicating London’s offer to the world, their work forms part of The Mayor’s Economic Development Strategy for London, helping the Mayor to deliver his International Business Programme and Business Growth Programme. ⁹⁷

Another frequent partner and collaborator is London First, one of the prominent representative bodies involved in the pre-consultation process feeding into the draft publication of the London Plan 2021 and then fed heavily into the draft plan’s post-publication EIP process, making 24 appearances at the hearings, one of the top three participants on the participants list. ⁹⁸ London First was involved in the establishment of the Greater London Authority back in 2000 and set up to encourage business leaders to promote London. The London Portal was created in 2005 as “a business case for Government funding that will enable the portal to be public sector-led, with delivery and support provided by the private sector.” ⁹⁹ It was one of the achievements of London Connects, an organisation jointly owned by the GLA and London Councils and worked with the London Development Agency and London First. London Connects and London Development Agency disbanded in 2009 and 2010 respectively, but London First and London & Partners continue to operate to this day. London First has since rebranded to BusinessLDN in summer 2022, a name change to directly reflect their work and trade priority. ¹⁰⁰

Incidentally, showing a level of self-awareness, the NLA/ARUP report included a “call for the next iteration of the London Plan to try to engage more widely than ‘the usual suspects’,” based on “some consensus that more stakeholders — Londoners — need a voice in the development of a shared vision for London.” ¹⁰¹ But, if the ‘usual suspects’ is understood as over-representation relative to under-voiced, then Just Space, in this interpretation, must also include themselves in the same category of suspects as the NLA usually given voice. They join other stakeholders, such as the Home Builders Federation, CPRE, London Government Association, boroughs and the City, who frequently appear.

Just Space first took part informally in the examination in public of the Mayor’s 2007 Alterations to the 2004 London Plan. Since then, their formal presence has been stalwart at London Plan consultations, workshops, debates, and EIP hearings. Not only with the London Plan, by their own admission, they are active across all spatial scales of London—neighbourhood, borough and London-wide strategic levels. ¹⁰² After coming together initially to challenge the perceived domination of the planning process by property development interests in order to close the gap between policy and practice of community participation in democratic engagement, in turn as discussed, they have come to dominate the ‘community’ perspective.

In its short history, Just Space has gone from challenging the status quo (the existing state of affairs) to arguably becoming the status quo. ¹⁰³ Just Space was the only community group present in early discussions of the mayoral development corporation’s (LLDC) local plan for Olympic Park, then chosen by planning officers to facilitate community engagement with the LLDC. In coordination with London Tenants Federation, the London Social Forum—the informal network that pre-dated Just Space’s formation—mounted a public conference at City Hall in 2005 on ‘Alternative futures for London’, arising out of critiques pressed in the first EIP in 2003. ¹⁰⁴ Over the next 15 years, Just Space worked to challenge the processes of the plan and succeeded to get more community voices seen and heard in front of policymakers, invited to provide early comments of proposals for the new London Plan in 2009 and 2016. By 2018, Just Space was tapped to spearhead the event for community consultation on the draft London Plan on behalf of the GLA, given space at City Hall for a community-led discussion where they facilitated the Q&A with officers and ran topic-focused workshops to address various parts of the plan.

In 2022, Just Space was the community network singled out in a session convened by the London Assembly Planning & Regeneration Committee on the Future of Planning in London. ¹⁰⁵ While the meeting agenda noted the Committee was “delighted to host a diverse range of London’s voices [to consider] how approaches to planning can address inequalities and reflect the needs of diverse Londoners,” the process was entirely reliant on Just Space’s coordination, “subsequently, Just Space has collaborated with the Chair to suggest guests for the meeting, ideas for discussion, and to collaboratively develop the framework for the committee meeting.” ¹⁰⁶ In effect, Just Space’s journey has transformed from advocating for widening communities’ involvement in ‘alternative futures for London’ in 2005 to becoming the ‘future of (community) planning in London’ in 2022. So, in spite of criticism about developer domination and the hegemonic class of participants, Just Space has become the checkbox the GLA ticks for community inclusion in their plan-making, effectively dominating one side of the debate about London’s future.

Jennifer Robinson has argued that “both conventional planning theory and practitioners too easily dismiss this community mobilisation as involving ‘the usual suspects’ or representing a narrow interest base,” and refutes the criticism, taking the large-scale development in Old Oak as a case study to show that Just Space’s diverse composition of “those involved did not conform to the ‘usual suspects’ stereotype.” ¹⁰⁷ She cites that “participants in the network came from different ethnic backgrounds, included those busy raising young families, working class and professionals, newcomers as well as people who had lived in and been active in residents’ associations in the area for decades.” While I agree with Robinson’s caution against stereotyping, my one challenge to this view of participatory diversity is that the participants participate through Just Space and an organisational structure “where decisions are made on the basis of consensus.” ¹⁰⁸ With Just Space’s standing invitation to GLA consultations, their tactics of hot-seating and microphone-sharing have proven useful for hearing from the uninvited. But, given the politics of voices, where disagreements abound and some speakers may be more vocal than others, there is a danger here of a single organisation representing the diverse voices, views and experiences of many. Rather than seek out these voices themselves, the GLA has essentially, exclusively, outsourced the task to Just Space.

The irony of the calls made by NLA and Just Space for planning in London to look beyond the usual suspects, a sentiment echoed by the Mayor, is that NLA and Just Space both belong to this group, vociferous, well-organised, and partisan, neither of whom are hard to reach. I interpret ‘usual suspects’ here not only to refer to serial participants familiar with and within London planning, but to note also their suspicion of each other, who are suspect of the motives of others, having an animus, distrust or misgiving towards their interests. In my interviews with NLA and Just Space, when mentioning one with the other, there was polite acknowledgment but a perceptible undertone of, “ah them,” to imply both familiarity and suspicion. It’s then followed by a dismissive silence. As such, the usual suspects framing is problematic, the antagonistic labelling does not move the conversation along. Like Robinson, I take issue with ‘usual suspects’ to the extent that it’s not a helpful term to describe the complexities and nuances in the ways that participants participate. It may be more productive if they saw each other as partaking in the same publicness, in how they speak to, and among, each other, thus forming a specific public.

But while the NLA and Just Space may arguably be part of a mutual public, sharing some similarities, it is important to note that their usual inclusion in planning processes is not the same as their equal or equitable participation. To borrow Vanessa Watson’s term, there are certainly ‘deep differences’ between Just Space, NLA, the Home Builders Federation, CPRE, London Government Association, boroughs and the City. These ‘usual suspects’ are differentiated by the degrees of their “marginalisation or empowerment,” per Watson, such differences are “inextricably linked to issues of power.” ¹⁰⁹ They don’t share the same privileges. One of the most significant difference is in how they show up and the relationship to power associated with each group’s visibility.

What is revealing about who repeatedly shows up in and around the London Plan is the asymmetry in visibility, of where and when publics appear. In The Politics of Numbers poem, Dhiren Borisa reflects on visibility and who has the privilege to show up, asking who can afford visibility? ¹¹⁰ In Delhi’s queer context showing up does not automatically equate to having rights, and for some LGBTQ+ people, to be visible means death. With the London Plan, the answer is that some cannot afford the means or time to be present because activities happen during work hours and take place at sites with limited access. Yet, others, like developers, can afford to not show up and still be over-represented.

The NLA’s Big Debate is one of the major events associated with the London Plan, engaging Londoners before and after the draft plan’s publication. ¹¹¹ Like the draft, the programme extends an invitation to have your say: “have your say on the future shape of the capital at this major free debate on the next London Plan, organised in partnership with leading London associations”. ¹¹² At a crowd count of 1,000, and having aired live on the day and also available for online viewing, the event is one of the most visible, well-attended, and well-publicised. In the Mayor’s view, forums like this one evidence how the GLA undertook “wide-ranging and extensive engagement and collaboration”. ¹¹³ But the reference to “in partnership with leading London associations” is a slight of hand to mean companies like British Land, one of the largest property development and investment companies in the UK and a major sponsor of the night. The panel of speakers included those from professional and property worlds, but no official community or voluntary sector representation. ⊕ The Big Debate (January 2018) panel of speakers

On first look, the debate visually signposts to an active citizenry of a healthy participatory democracy, an effective means of having a say. On a closer second look, the composition of participants in the photos hints at an absence. Images of the crowd show a noticeably white audience, a demographic of what geographer Katherine Brookfield calls “familiar faces,” the usual suspects who traditionally participate in planning decisions, and allude to who is not having a say, as much as who is. ¹¹⁴

Just Space and other community organisations like the London Forum of Amenity and Civic Societies were in attendance as audience members, their participation was through listening to the debate and if lucky, squeezing in a question to the panellists. Michael Bach of London Forum, in an interview by the NLA at the end of the 2017 Big Debate, said, “I don’t think there are many occasions where the community gets to grips with the London Plan. Getting in early is important. The problem with the London Plan is that it only has one draft and that’s it.” ¹¹⁵ The remark is similar to the comment London Forum formally made later at an EIP hearing on consultation, “that the London Plan is a one shot plan which means you can’t change anything after you have produced a draft plan thus little will be changed from this examination as major changes would have to go back into consultation again.” ¹¹⁶ Because of the perceived limited opportunity to input, attendance is important to communities’ participation—that they have to, in the “struggle for recognition,” become a familiar face. ¹¹⁷

This tension between presence and absence is reflected in the photo of City Hall promoted on the GLA’s webpage of the Examination in Public for the draft London Plan 2017. Like the Big Debate, the fullness of the crowd in attendance communicates active civic engagement. In contradiction, a photo taken at an EIP hearing on affordable housing shows the near emptiness of the same room, often the case throughout the EIP process, calling into question how many people actually have their say, how many people are left out of or are not captured in the frame.

Conceptually, to examine in public means to act in the open, to be seen. An examination in public is a spatial activity. The EIP happens in the Chamber at City Hall; in this building, this room. It is site specific, having a particular spatial condition. Public here is an adjective describing the environmental quality, situatedness of the examination, its configured setting, whereby ‘public’ can be interpreted as the scene or background. The visual elements include transparent glass, an oblong table seating various actors as objectors, defendants and judge, and a gallery of witnesses in an arena-like space watching the debate, all against a backdrop of the Thames and the city beyond. These cues amount to what Brandon LaBelle calls, the scene of appearance. ¹¹⁸

The setup of the EIP presents democracy in plain view, using the architecture of the Norman Foster designed all-glass City Hall as an over-simplified signifier of democratic oversight. City Hall moved in 2021 to Newham in a building called the Crystal. In a display of literal transparency of the Chamber, it brings the processes of democracy—dialogue and debate—out into the open in the Habermasian sense of public sphere as political theatre all can see. For LaBelle, the emphasis on exposure and visibility, however, is limiting and exclusionary in consideration of other types of publics for whom being seen is not the same as being heard, addressed, or acknowledged. In his examination of the cultures of protest, he identifies publics that move in and out of or around the edges of fixtures of power, marked rather by their invisibility and non-presence. Not everyone is able to show themselves, or if they do, not in the same way and not by the same agreement.

The contrast in attendance between the Big Debate and the EIP hearings illustrates the difficulty of defining a public and evaluating public participation in terms of appearance alone. The NLA is able to be visually dominant in one arena (the Big Debate) and have the freedom to be absent in another (the EIP); conversely, Just Space’s presence is dominant in the latter but formally absent in the former, even though they showed up in person. Just Space must be attentive and visible in ways that the NLA can afford not to be. These events perform visibility but don’t tell us much about what goes on behind the scenes of who writes, reads, and comments on the London Plan. Nor do they communicate that a significant amount of debate occurs amongst the GLA themselves, the Mayor’s team consulting with the London Assembly in Planning Committee Meetings. ⊕ ⊕ London Assembly Planning Committee Meeting on the draft London Plan, livestream (23 January 2020) Source: london.gov.uk The meetings are livestreamed and open to the general public, but little viewership on screen and in person. The high number in attendance at the Big Debate and marketed on the GLA’s website do not capture the low count of people attending these and other public events. Headcount at a sub-regional London Plan event in Brent (17 Jan 2018) for input into the London’s plan impact on west London, numbered approximately 40 people.

According to Michael Edwards, developers have the advantage of salaried representatives participating in the London Plan, working (invisibly) through lobbying behind the scenes but then ‘the suits’ show up en masse when their interests are challenged. ¹¹⁹ London First, represented by programme director for planning Sarah Bevan, were at nearly every meeting, and listed 24 times on the EIP participants list out of 33 sessions. On their website in the description of their planning and development activities, London First are not shy about their direct involvement in London’s strategic planning: ¹²⁰

A regular contributor to NLA in conversations with the GLA, Sarah Bevan and London First work closely with the GLA, sharing research and partnering through public private collaborations. ¹²¹ See also The London Data Commission (2020) where London First, other business leaders and key government figures, explored how to improve public private data-sharing. This data is used by the Mayor and GLA to inform planning policy. The close relationship demonstrates their capacity to have dedicated staff and financial resources to influence debates, a stark imbalance compared to communities’ ‘one-shot’ at participation in the London Plan. For an idea of the scale of resource imbalance, London First’s response to the draft was 1,024 pages, Just Space was 131 pages. One of the few EIP sessions London First did not attend was the hearing on Matter 6 Consultation and Engagement on whether the GLA had met the appropriate consultation test and made adequate provisions for public participation relevant to legislation. On the question about the plan’s adequacy of consultation and engagement, only the boroughs and community groups responded. Well-engaged and consulted on in other non-public ways, developers raised no issue about the adequacy of their involvement in the plan.

The EIP is ‘a staged form of publicness,’ in which, according to Iveson, “publics are imagined in theatrical terms: the public spaces of the city are envisaged as a stage from which speakers/performers can address an audience assembled before them.” ¹²² The problem with the EIP’s setup as an in public performance is that ‘staging’, as Iveson points out, has a double meaning in which the staging of public events may be calculated to manipulate audiences. In this instance, some EIP sessions were broadcasted live, screened to a wider audience who could not be there on the day. If not manipulated, viewers are certainly made to believe that the EIP is widely accessible, in person and on screen. The EIP is visually presented as an unmediated opportunity for publics to show up in person and be directly heard in a shared ‘public space,’ giving the appearance of open dialogue. However, as discussed above, there is a behind-the-scene (backstage) process that screens such public appearances. ‘Screening’, Iveson notes, too “has a double meaning – to screen can be to ‘screen out’, and this is suggestive of the inequality of access that permeates media spaces.” ¹²³ In this sense, the EIP is also a screened form of publicness. The Inspector screens out who can speak/perform in each EIP session through pre-selection of invited participants. On their agenda is a list of sanctioned publics who can present themselves in front of the audience. Thus, on paper, there is a closeness of public participation that the assumed openness of the stage obscures.

I agree with Iveson, “our imagination of the public city must be finely attuned to the different ‘modes of visibility’ that are formative of different ways of being public, rather than directly equating being public with being seen (or unseen) in public.” ¹²⁴ Because, as architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina points out, to be seen “no longer has much to do with a public space, in the traditional sense of a public forum, a square, or the crowd that gathers around a speaker in such a place, but with the audience that each medium of publication reaches, independent of the place this audience might actually be occupying.” ¹²⁵

Iveson suggests that, “our imaginations of the public city must recognize that: (a) the city is not (just) a ‘stage’ for theatrical forms of public address, but is mobilized for different forms of public address which often involve combinations of co-present and mediated interaction; (b) the visibility associated with being ‘in public’ is simultaneously a resource and an impediment for public-making, and different forms of publicness mobilize different combinations of visibility and invisibility in response to this tension; (c) the ‘public city’ is a product of the particular political labours which seek to make particular publics, rather than the product of a shared commitment to a normative ideal of city life as the ‘being-together of strangers’.” ¹²⁶ In a ‘heterogenous public sphere’, according to Iveson, new forms of non-hierarchical interaction across differences take place. ¹²⁷ Thus, we can’t judge the value of public participation by the norms of visibility.

The concept of public has been historically linked to visibility, but it is the act of attention involved in showing up that is enough to create an addressable public, according to Michael Warner. As he sees it, “a public is constituted through mere attention,” and goes on to argue that “because a public exists only by virtue of address, it must predicate some degree of attention, however notional, from its members.” ¹²⁸ For Warner, publics start at the moment of attention, continues to be through renewed attention, and ceases to exist once attention is no longer needed. Intensive attention is needed to read and review the London Plan. It demands and divides attention. The draft consultation focuses efforts on reading and writing, while the examination in public on listening and writing. The Mayor and GLA’s attention are on administration and governance; the examination panel on compliance and soundness; and plan respondents on being read and heard. The experience for some participants is that there’s too much attention over there, not enough attention over here. What and who is paid attention is unevenly distributed.

Catherine D’Ignazio, a scholar in feminist technology and data justice, talks about how we are living in the attention economy (informational capitalism) in which individual attention is traded for ad dollars, but in addition to money, “aggregated attention also becomes material to sculpt, to architect, to network and collectivize.” ¹²⁹ Attention is both a collective as well as a scarce resource that requires careful consideration and allocation. Although there were many consultation events and meetings, by Just Space’s estimation, disproportionate attention was paid to property development interests in comparison to community interests: “the participation of voluntary sector and community groups has been a fraction of the contribution that could be made.” ¹³⁰ It thus falls on those unattended to, to pay more attention.

‘Attend’ means to be present at, to care for, while ‘attention’ means awareness or consideration, to take notice / care / interest. On behalf of those unable to attend, Just Space has to pay close, intensive attention to the proceedings of the EIP to ensure what they have to say gets heard. In attempts to be present, they attend almost every session and engage volunteers to transcribe meetings and to pore over texts. They must be attentive in both meanings, attending at and attention to. They must be visible to be audible. New London Architecture, on the other hand, supported and funded by the nation’s biggest development names, can turn their attention elsewhere than on the hearings and the specific texts of the London Plan to influence the strategic direction of London’s planning. The NLA can hold a number of public events at their headquarters at the Building Centre in central London and run festivals and conferences across the city, most of which are free to the wider public but sponsored by the same people whose best interests are in steering the conversation in specific directions.

According to Iveson, universal accessibility isn’t the only criterion to assess the value of an urban site as a venue of publicness or public address: “any assessment of the usefulness of a given site to serve as a venue of public address can only be made from the vantage point of a particular public — as such, our assessment of sites will depend on what it is we might want to say, to whom we might want to say it, how we might want to say it, the circumstances in which we might want to connect with others, and our ability to imagine and exploit the opportunities afforded by a given site.” ¹³¹ For example, he elaborates, the marginalised, in attempts to overcome the limits of the normalised public sphere, create new discursive scenes with different possibilities for public address. They construct a shared social space, a horizon of experience in social philosopher Oskar Negt and filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s term, by imagining a horizon of strangers to whom public address may circulate more broadly. ¹³² This ‘counterpublic horizon’ is an expanded public sphere where strangers seek to address particular strangers who are fellow like-minded participants or to widen reach to other strangers. ¹³³ Just Space creates this horizon by engaging with the former in order to achieve the latter. As such, in many ways, they have to be everywhere to get anywhere.

There is a marked asymmetry in presence and attendance—the less a public shows up textually in the London Plan, the more they need to show up in person at the consultation meetings and hearings; the greater attention they have to pay. The less they are in the text, the more they have to pay attention to the text. It speaks to a close relationship between need and attention, interest and intent, that psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written about: “the attention we have to give to being paid attention, and the attention we have to give to what is worth paying attention to.” ¹³⁴ These are the calculations that Just Space must make, weighing what, where and to whom they should be attentive, in ways that the NLA and London First don’t have to consider. Just Space has less freedom to not attend.

For Iveson, counterpublics make alternative calculations for where they may be heard and where they may broaden the circumstances under which they may speak, challenging socio-spatial norms, contesting and re-shaping the expectations sustained in a particular place, or avoiding that place altogether to make space for a different form of address and scene of circulation. ¹³⁵ For Just Space, they must also calculate where and when they are a counter and a dominant public. In as much as the space of the public sphere according to LaBelle “is never so simple, or free of inequalities, power struggles, prejudices, imposed silences and deep absences or vacancies,” the call for the public participation of all in the London Plan is neither simple nor open. ¹³⁶ The notion of wide inclusivity attached to and implied by ‘public’ papers over how getting involved in the activities related to the London Plan is, in effect, through narrowness of participation to address deep differences and which is dependent on the deepest of attention.

A publishing experiment I conducted analysing the London Plan 2021, WORD COUNT: the London Plan and the Textually Absent, brings some of the above observations and criticisms to the fore. It reveals cracks in the public facade, a ‘city for all’ is a rhetoric of ‘a plan for all’ and not in reality. One of the themes that is strong throughout the plan is the vision the Mayor has for London of a strong and inclusive community. From skimming through the draft plan, there are numerous mentions of inclusivity and the importance of having an inclusive London, a signal of London’s ‘allure’ as a postcolonial, culturally diverse city, what sociologist Michael Keith calls the cosmopolitan city, “the cosmopolitan as both an ethically progressive way of being and an aspirational goal of becoming.” ¹³⁷ shows a reproduction of the 500-page document highlighting every word and every mention of ‘inclusive’, ‘diverse’ or ‘community’ while omitting all other words. What it visualises is that despite over hundreds of mentions of inclusivity in the draft plan, actual references or any deliberate call out to a specific community, for example, the LGBTQ community or Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) communities, were minuscule in comparison, rendering them effectively invisible. Throughout five hundred pages, there was only four mentions of those specific diverse groups. The pages containing the mentions were coloured black, leaving only four black pages and everything else white.

This mini publishing project demonstrates that the London Plan, in one literal sense, is a white document. Beneath the rhetoric, there is a gap in what the texts say on the one hand about a future of London for everyone and what the same texts contradict on the other hand about who that may include. Despite the Mayor’s ambitions and the plan’s aspiration for an inclusive London for all, arguably the publication itself represents a lack of that inclusivity. There is a paradoxical reason policy documents tend to traffic in generalities rather than specificities, a GLA officer informed in an interview, nuances behind why the GLA can’t call out specific groups. The ambiguity and imprecision are intentional: it is so that all is included, no one is excluded. However, exclusion in the name of inclusion—a way of accommodating different groups by not singling out any particular one—is a tricky balance that can be troublesome in conceptualising the public who shapes London and who would benefit from London’s development.

The tension between generalities and specifics, between universality and particulars, shows up in communications from the London Plan team. There is a desire to include every Londoner in the planning of the city. As a member signed up to Talk London, City Hall’s online community “set up in July 2012 so that City Hall could hear from Londoners about big issues that matter to them,” I regularly receive emails asking for my input into Mayoral activities, policies and proposals. ¹³⁸ In one email from the GLA and the Talk London team, I am told that “no one sees London like you do Chi” and that my “experience of the city is totally unique,” giving the impression that my input is highly valued. ¹³⁹ ⊕ Email. Mia at Talk London (2023). No One Sees London Like You Do Chi. But it is difficult to see how my unique experience and view would square up against the unique experiences and views of others when “City Hall’s planning team wants every Londoner to have a chance to say how our city should change and grow.” Despite innumerable prompts to “have your say on big issues and help shape our plans and policies” and “make London better together,” the names and ideas of many Londoners, specifically minority groups, are textually absent in the London Plan, supposedly the most crucial publication produced by the Mayor and the GLA effecting the city’s future. Yet, notably missing from its pages are those very experiences and views. As a communication design example, WORD COUNT visually revealed for me where the larger rhetoric of a public London, constituting all and every Londoner, doesn’t match up in print. By underscoring the invisibility associated with inclusivity, it sheds light on the problem of seeing the London Plan as a public document for all.

The London Plan has a public problem. A lot is asked of the term ‘public’. It does heavy work. An onus to do and be many things. The trouble with ‘public’, or the use of public in the London Plan, is its universality and the lack of specificity about what ‘public’ means; who and what it contains or expresses. Sadiq Khan’s London Plan envisions a city for all and makes genuine gestures to pursue a more equal, diverse, and inclusive future of London. But there is an inherent contradiction to conceiving public as ‘the public’, a singularity of all Londoners, that runs counter to the plurality of publics—and their complicated relationships with each other—each with something to say about how the city should develop. Calls for participation in London planning are abundant: an open invitation for all to get involved, but of those who actually do participate in shaping the London Plan, they characterise a highly engaged though ultimately specific public of the usual suspects.

Publics are conventionally marked by their open visibility or adjacency and proximity to power—their agency and capacity for action—in a binary distinction between a dominant and a counterpublic. There are limitations to thinking about the publics of the London Plan in such adversarial terms because of the nuances to when and where a public dominates. The familiar, circular flows of knowledge among the usual suspects that inform the London Plan’s development, show a messier situation than an adversarial developers-vs-communities dynamic or a rhetoric of all in which debate over London’s future has been typically framed. The term ‘usual suspects’ is itself problematic to describe the familiar faces that appear, given the different privileges in visibility and attendance. What it does helpfully point to instead are the particularist habits of certain groups against the universalist conceptualisation of ‘the public’ that dominates planning. The repeat calls to look beyond the usual suspects show that there isn’t a public of ‘all’, rather it’s imagined.

This imaginary is at the root of some of the London Plan’s challenges, reflecting what several planning theorists have criticised as the problematic universalist practice of planning enforcing common-world views against the particularist views, values, and knowledges of those it seeks to serve. There is a lot of tension created by the misalignment of the GLA’s aim of participation in the name of universalist public interest (singular) with the particularist interests (plural) of different publics (plural). The next chapter, Public Participation, illustrates how such narrow imagination of ‘the public’ leads to a pyrrhic pursuit of public participation in the attempt to widen the definition of all.