The above statement was made in the introduction of a 2017 budgetary note by the Assistant Director of Planning, Juliemma McLoughlin, on spending needs for the anticipated publication of the draft London Plan for consultation that fall. ¹ “Hefty” refers to something considerable or substantial in size, weight and amount. In this regard, the London Plan 2021 is indeed hefty. Its final published version is available as both a print publication (2,000 hard copies, charged at £50 each) and a free to download digital document in portable document format (PDF). ² All documents related to and prepared in support of the plan, including the documents submitted by respondents during the draft review, are also PDFs. They are available, viewable and downloadable on the GLA website within the Examination in Public (EIP) Library. ³ There are over 3,600 digital documents in total, ranging from background documents including evidence reports, to consultation responses including written statements accepted by the review panel.

The London Plan is hefty in another, major, way—it is a heavy lift for GLA officers to manage the plan’s production and distribution. To better understand the design and function of the London Plan as a corporate report discussed in Chapter 5, we need to examine the GLA’s document practices—the process by which documents are created, edited, shared and circulated. The London Plan was first produced in the 2000s in the context of new information and communications technology (ICT) use. The formal shift in the late twentieth century to electronic paper prompted by new technologies such as personal computing (media devices for individual use) and the Internet, altered mass communication and the conditions of its control. This transformation of ICT impacted the way government workers work and has placed hefty administrative demands on GLA officers, effecting how the wider public interacts with documents.

A 2014 report by the Local Government Association on digital innovation in local government described the 1970s to the 1990s as an era in which “councils for the first time made extensive and routine use of technology” and how “technology has always played a vital role in the way local government manages its business.” ⁴ The personal computer was declared the machine of the year by Time magazine in a cover story in 1983, that by the millions, had “beeped its way into offices, schools, and homes,” ushering in the “information revolution” and “bringing with it the promise of dramatic changes in the way people live and work.” ⁵ ⊕ TIME (1983). The Computer Moves In. Source: https://content.time.com/time/covers 1983 was also the year that introduced Microsoft Word, the word processor. Since Word’s debut nearly forty years ago, it has become the standard-bearer word processing software, expanding the definition of ‘document’ such that the colloquial term ‘doc’, originally denoting the .doc name extension of the application’s native file format, became a shorthand that persists to this day. ‘Doc’ today refers to any number of electronic text documents, whether one means, ‘Word doc’, or a different application, the now popular, ‘Google doc’. Word’s ubiquity impacted what office workers used and know how to use.

The emergence of desktop publishing in the mid-1980s as a page layout application for personal computers, was another game changer. In particular, Lisa Gitelman notes in her book, Paper Knowledge, “[it] offered new, less expensive tools to those already involved in page design, printing, and publishing while it also significantly opened the field to newcomers—amateurs—as personal computers ‘moved in’ to homes and to offices,” effectively giving corporations and institutions the “tools to produce pages and tools to reproduce them,” and augmenting in-house document production and reproduction capabilities. ⁶

What had formerly been drawn by hand, in Stephen Eskilson’s account of graphic design history, could now be reproduced on the computer through ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) applications, “lower[ing] the overhead for designers [in which] small businesses could produce professional results without needing large staffs.” ⁷ Desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXpress introduced a graphical way to create and edit complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG interface. ^{8 9} Livingstone’s 2004 London Plan PDF document lists QuarkXPress as the software application. InDesign’s release in 1999, as the successor to PageMaker, marked another significant shift in which its bundling into an ‘Creative Suite’ by parent company Adobe that included Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat, would put page-making, photography, illustration, and page-reading at computer users’ fingertips. ¹⁰ This would allow a small business to have dedicated design and marketing teams folded within their operations.

The transition to new media and emergent digital technology changed the traditional dominant role of (printed) paper as an enabling agent of bureaucracy, i.e. paperwork, or what Ben Kafka terms the “bureaucratic medium”. ¹¹ By Gitelman’s account, documents have been transformed by the digital. ¹² The digital has changed how we think of documents. The new hardware and software increased the technical capacity of government workers to execute day-to-day administrative tasks and had direct relevance to and impact on the ‘writing’ of government documents. In the mid-80s, what is written is what is electronically feasible via keyboard, mouse and screen, “now [that] the typewriter is giving way to the word processor, and every office thus becomes part of a network.” ¹³ From this time, knowledge production and distribution were possible to the extent of the government worker’s computer skills and/or proficiency with software.

In the 1934 essay, The Author as Producer, on the changing communications environment of the early twentieth century (e.g. radio, film, photography, cinema, etc), Walter Benjamin writes about the role of the author transforming in relation to mass media and mass production’s destabilisation of the traditional boundaries between reading and writing, authoring and editing. He reoriented the concept of authorship toward ‘means of production’, giving importance to how a work is produced and distributed. He called for authors to be producers, pushing to also turn readers into collaborators. ¹⁴ Ellen Lupton’s 1998 essay, The Designer as Producer, draws on Benjamin’s thesis to call on designers to be producers of meaning through a closer relationship to the production process by getting involved in the physical activities of mechanical reproduction (pasting, lettering, typesetting) normally outside the intellectual realm of design. ¹⁵

Andrew Blauvelt’s 2012 essay, As If—Design and Its Producers, traces Benjamin and Lupton’s lines of thinking, along with others, to review the media changes that led to the upturning of the conventional hierarchies of print and publishing. In the same vein that the ‘desktop’ revolution and WYSIWG publishing systems gave designers new agency, it would give GLA officers the design tools to simultaneously be authors, designers, editors, and producers.

GLA officers indicate that writing the plan involves a dedicated London Plan team of 10-12 policy writers individually working on separate Word documents that are later assembled in InDesign and published as PDFs onto the London Plan website. ¹⁶  The London Plan 2021 digital file confirms Adobe InDesign 15.1 was the application used to produce it. The officers accounts signal that the plan’s development happened incrementally by bits and bytes in a pipeline from Word to InDesign to PDF. Reading the plan, by extension, involves information management, navigation and negotiation of vast arrays of these PDFs. Copying and pasting, pushing text around and collecting documents, are all computer functions. One GLA officer remarks, part of his workflow is facilitated or limited by the availability of tools at hand, “you match what you do with the ease of the technology.” ¹⁷ Another officer’s account echoed the difficulty working with InDesign, “we just can’t cope with it.” His experience points to the effect of the computer’s penetration into the office world and what is made available at hand to the computer user.

The comfort and convenience of at-hand technology is important context to keep in mind. GLA’s approach to publication of the London Plan is still anchored in a paper-based concept of publishing, not entirely comfortable yet with digital documentation nor the affordances of screen-based communication and circulation. The London Plan is designed in book format, the PDF is A4 size, ready for print. It is not, arguably, designed for the screen, as the following discussion about PDF will show.

The ultimate WYSIWYG app that altered information and workflows, is the portable document format, or PDF. In the 1990s, in the fledgling Internet Age, the PDF emerged as an ideal business solution for how to view visual and textual material (‘content’) anywhere, on any device. It was an efficient way to deliver print-based documents between different computer applications and systems. Developed in 1991 by John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems, and based on his vision of a networked office espoused in a white paper called the Camelot Project, PDF addressed a specific problem for companies and corporations at the time—there was no universal way to communicate and view printed information electronically. ¹⁸ His solution, eventually marketed under the name Acrobat to indicate its nimbleness and great feats, would not only change corporate communications and “the fundamental way people work” to become the most commonly used document format for business applications, as Warnock had envisioned, but the PDF over the next thirty years would also change the way information gets exchanged and reaches a diversity of people for a wide range of use cases.

What industries badly needed, Warnock had identified in the white paper, was a universal way to communicate documents across a wide variety of machine configurations, operating systems and communication networks. These documents should be viewable on any display and should be printable on any modern printers. If this problem of document universality could be solved, Warnock posited, then the fundamental way people work will change.

His realised vision, Gitelman describes in a discussion on ‘Near Print and Beyond Paper’, makes “the visual elements of documents—layout, letterforms, figures, and so on—portable across platforms and devices,” and became “the de facto standard for printable documents on the web” and “part of and party to the knowledge work [done] with documents.” ¹⁹ With pages having the likeness of print, and themselves being printable, the PDF digitised the medium of paper and facilitated the transmission and distribution of information via computer networks. The format realised Warnock’s ambition for software tools to “capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machines.” ²⁰ PDF collapses manufacture and dissemination, and also permits readers to be document collaborators, fulfilling Benjamin’s concept of authorship.

In a YouTube video presenting a historical overview of the PDF in 2013, Gary Spencer of Wiley Publishing traced the evolution of the PDF format and described how it initially became part of professional desktop publishing, embedded into publishers’ print workflow and widely adopted as a standard format for delivering final page layouts for print. ²¹ It was also an ideal way to deliver print-based content to end users. At a basic level, PDF is a container with the versatility to be a tax form, an invoice, a doctoral thesis, a manuscript, presentation slides or any variety and combination of text, image and data. PDF can display the content of this writing regardless of what text processing application was originally used to create it, whether that be Microsoft Word, Mac Pages, Google Docs, or Open Office, ranging from software as complicated as the page layout app Adobe InDesign or as simple as the ornament-less .txt file.

The PDF gained mass appeal in 2000s after Adobe ironed out the early quirks that had made take-up slow in the beginning. Readers valued the flexibility to access the exact same content no matter what screen they viewed it on and without the need for special proprietary software or hardware used by the document creator. They only need a PDF reader called Acrobat Reader which would eventually be freely distributed and come already installed on every new computer and electronic device. The addition of an ‘e-sign’ (electronic signature) feature in 1999 had expanded the PDF’s function for official and legal business, making it a viable form of contract recognised by EU and UK law. Electronic Communications Act 2000, EU Regulation (No 910/2014) in 2014 and UK eIDAS in 2018. It became an official standard in 2008 internationally recognised by the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). Because of its fit into existing publishing workflows in addition to its nimble functionality for everyday and official use, and its user-friendly anywhere-ness, the PDF became “king of digital documents”. ²²

Three decades on, it continues to be a marquee Adobe product, one of its best sellers, despite competition from other comparable digital technology developments. In 2018, on the 25th anniversary of PDF’s formal launch, Adobe claimed “Acrobat has long since become the lingua franca for exchanging digital documents,” citing some 200 billion PDFs were opened in that year alone and more than 100 million people use Acrobat every day. ²³ In a 2020 blog post about PDF’s role in democratising digital literacy, Adobe further assert its importance as the ubiquitous file format which “the whole world relies on […] to communicate, connect, and absorb information.” ²⁴

There are media affordances and limitations of PDF that have use implications for how the London Plan comes together and how GLA officers work within a new digital world of ‘paperless’ document production and electronic communication. One of the distinct features of a PDF, Spencer points out, is that it is “almost always an exact replica of the print version,” the same reproduced on screen as on paper, an assurance of fidelity of content. Gitelman has written about the PDF precisely as a ‘page image,’ underlining its direct relationship to paper as an onscreen picture of what it would identically look like on paper, stable across platforms and devices. ²⁵ She suggests that page images—PDFs, microforms, photocopies, and facsimiles—are stable carriers of form and content, preserving not only the alphanumeric data but also the form of the document, including layout and typographic design. Because PDF has a WYSIWYG interface, everyone thus, having a copy of it, can be “on the same page.”

However, this exactness, its stability and fixity, has one obvious disadvantage. In the view of Phil Jones, a former Director of Digital Publishing Innovation at Digital Science, the PDF is “painfully static, as a digital version of a published page, PDFs weren’t designed to be editable.” ²⁶ Its static quality and closeness to paper is a principal marker of its DNA. According to Bernd Wild of PDF Association, “PDF has always stood for ‘electronic paper’, i.e. it is essentially a static document format for the visualization of textual and graphical content, even though more and more dynamic properties have been added in the course of development.” ²⁷ Recent improvements have enhanced the ability to comment on a document in an overlaid way of marking up content, enabling annotation with tools to highlight, strikethrough, and make insertions that mimic traditional pen-and-paper proofreading practices, but the core content stays untouched. Files generally cannot be modified. Historically, PDFs are viewable, annotatable, printable but not editable. While newer versions of PDF software do provide some editing tools, they tend to be limited to professional use or the technically proficient.

Web technology developed in tandem with PDF in 2000s, in which the nascent internet page offered better interaction with and editability of content that in a PDF had limited functionality. Still, it could not compete with nor stem the PDF’s rise in use and widespread adoption. The PDF persisted in ubiquity and popularity because of its other defining signature feature; it’s portable, Jones highlights. ²⁸

PDFs are ‘immutable mobiles’ in Bruno Latour’s terms, they do not change as they move, retaining “optical consistency.” ²⁹ Identical in copy, the same PDF can be read on a phone as it can be on a desktop computer or as a printout. This is advantageous for office workers, particularly government administrators, who must manage a substantial volume of paperwork. For instance, colleagues are able to communicate inter-office or across departments (in different locations), looking at the same document, without having to leave their desks, thus easing workflows.

Not only government workers, but other knowledge workers also value the PDF’s portability. The reader preference for PDF is reflected in Spencer’s observation of scholarly research habits; a majority of Wiley users choose PDF over HTML a majority of the time, in spite of significant usability improvements, rich deep linking for enhanced references, and supporting information in their HMTL full-text ‘smart’ articles. HTML, or hypertext markup language, is the internet protocol for how a webpage is visually rendered online. Scholars prefer PDFs because they are easy to share with co-authors and collaborators and work well off-line, untied to any one computer or an internet connection. Even the arrival of the iPad in 2010 and similar tablets or smart phones that ushered in a new content-enriched screen reading experience, has not been able to unseat the mighty PDF. A comment under Spencer’s Youtube video sums up Spencer and Jones’ shared observations succinctly, “people like printed texts.”

Despite the PDF coming about from Warnock’s early idea of what continues to be the corporate dream of a ‘paperless office’, it has never managed to lose its connection to paper. Gitelman notes that the history of PDF has been partly the history of paper and paperwork. In another account of the history of PDF, Laurens Leurs, a publishing historian, remarks that the use of computers and digital technology has only led to an increase in the use of paper. ^{30 31} According to The Economist, worldwide use of office paper more than doubled from 1980 to 2000. The PDF’s evolution as a digital product is in fact a continuum of print and photocopy technology and rooted in their ideas of reproduction. PDF evolved from Adobe’s Postscript, a filetype used for prepress printing, and John Warnock, it should be noted, worked for Xerox before starting Adobe. ³² As electronically available and digitally preserved printed text, PDF straddles the line of legacy ‘old’ media and ‘new’ media and does not fall neatly into either category thus far able to evade obsolescence prompted by new technology. Lisa Gitelman questions the newness of new media in Always Already New, a follow-up of her cultural history of media, New Media 1740-1915, that “reminds us all new media were once new.” She considers media instead in terms of continuity and as “a history of history”; context is key. For the purposes of clarity, the distinction between old and new media made here is the degree to which users and publics are directly involved in the medium.

With legacy media, such as radio, television and newspapers, the receiver is passive and does not interact directly with the content. It is one-directional communication whereas new media, such as the Internet and computer technology, are marked by their purported interactivity. Like a newspaper, PDF can be read but not fundamentally altered. Adobe’s ‘interactive PDF’ is a PDF with weblink buttons added to take readers to online content. Although it incorporates rich media like video and audio, it’s not possible to edit them, and remains a container. Unlike a newspaper, however, readers are able to zoom in and out of a PDF document, conveniently copy and paste text to repurpose elsewhere, and export as a different file format for further content engagement, then disseminate wherever (by print or electronically) to whomever (a co-worker one desk over or a collaborator a world away), all with a few clicks of a mouse button. Additional bells and whistles like previously mentioned hyperlinks, digital signatures and the inclusion of rich media have, according to Wild, “turned the originally static format more and more into a flexible document format that can be used as information carrier in complex workflows.” ³³

Being equally a fixed container and a flexible carrier, PDF sits snugly between the print and digital publishing worlds, ostensibly offering the best of both. PDF’s persistence and longevity are owed largely to its unique affordances as portable paper—ease of transmission in a familiar form—and also as digital preservation. The PDF’s paper-likeness (ability to have a duplicate printed copy) contributes to what Spencer deems the staying power of the PDF format, and why scholarly publishing particularly has not evolved beyond it. The PDF’s portability led Jones to ponder if we will ever really move on. Having fully embraced it, it is unlikely that governments will either. PDFing has become embedded in office culture and integrated into existing work habits. For example, there are 200,000 PDFs on GOV.UK, with tens of thousands of new ones published each month, while for the GLA, there are tens of thousands of PDFs on london.gov.uk, their most ubiquitous format of communication. ³⁴ Entangled in the information infrastructure of so many institutions, the PDF isn’t going away any time soon. Archivists from the US Library of Congress asserted in 2020 that the PDF is here to stay. As both a collector and a creator of PDF files, they contend with many millions of PDF files in their collections and the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration. The British Library has made similar assertions about PDF’s longevity.

Simultaneously that the PDF has been suitable to augment government work, it has also helped to democratised publishing, facilitating non-institutional, non-commercial or non-business use, and has made self-documenting, personal use possible. As we saw in the last chapter, self-publishing increases access to and participation in public debates and consultation processes like the London Plan. Publication of alternative plans and evidence reports, previously discussed, has been mainly possible because of PDF. Just Space’s community-led alternative Plan, for example, was conceptualised as a tabloid newspaper, imitating the medium’s visual language. The 24-page A3 document was developed by graphic designer Dan Adams using InDesign CS6. ³⁵ Besides a limited run of print copies launched in February 2016, it was distributed as a free PDF and, five years on, continues to have a digital afterlife on Just Space’s website. ³⁶

In contrast to old media like newsprint, however, the PDF is interactive in the sense it gives creators the means to self-publish and disseminate and gives readers the options to re-publish and re-distribute, in this instance collapsing the complicated print process that’s typically involved in producing and sharing a traditional broadsheet en masse. Newspaper Club is an example software, with PDF, that “gives you the tools to turn whatever you want into newsprint, quickly and easily.” There is greater user agency and immediacy in what one can do with a PDF over what is individually feasible to produce with a lithograph press and offset printing. PDF as digital newsletter is useful and has long reach for local campaigners trying to organise and mobilise support around a contested planning issue. They can type up their discontent in a Word document, save as PDF, then disseminate via email to their networks, all outside of or beyond formal organisations and official channels. Without having to go to press (though the option to print is still there) in order to distribute, it offers a cost-saving flexibility to participate using the same methods as institutions, upending institutional monopoly on the means of knowledge production.

Nearly every document the GLA produces and receives is a PDF. Even if some don’t start out as PDF, ie the original file may be a Microsoft Word document, they will eventually end up as one. To understand why PDF has been prominent in GLA governance, we need to go back to 1999 to consider policy changes in line with technological ones. The transformation of governance through new media was identified at the national level, recognising opportunities and challenges coterminous with personal computing, word processing, desktop publishing and the emerging Internet. The Public Record Office (PRO), with the Central Computing and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), produced a UK government guidance on the Functional Requirements for Electronic Records Management Systems. In it, they acknowledged that “the use of information and communication technology is transforming the way work is carried out in government organisations, leading to a much greater dependency on electronic records.” ³⁷ The growing reliance on ICT reoriented what it means to document and the methods to do so, and altered the philosophy as to why. In such a transition to a fuller electronic environment, the PRO guidance lodged “a general concern about the ability of government to manage and preserve those electronic records that are needed to support policy-making, casework and the delivery of services, and to meet accountability and archival obligations.” ³⁸

Significantly, the technological shift set in motion a new electronic purpose of paperwork and aligned government documenting practices with corporate documenting practices. The PRO guidance makes the connection obvious. Its introduction outlines that, similar to the private sector in which all organisations need to keep records of business decisions and transactions to meet the demands of corporate accountability, the government sector also has public accountability requirements as well as the need to comply with public records legislation. Intended as a “benchmark and a toolkit,” the guidance provides technical standards and best practices of working with documents and records in light of the available software, hardware and network environment. ³⁹ Critical emphasis was placed on the evidentiary function of documents, as facilitated by new electronic technology, to fulfil the government’s business needs.

The language used by the Public Record Office illustrates the government’s administrative orientation toward corporate goals for accountability that were touched upon in the last chapter. The purpose of documenting, in the government’s view, is linked to the aim of recording and exploiting information, doubly for present business operation and for future access of, and retrieval from, ‘the corporate memory’. This is spelled out plainly using similar language in the GLA’s Records Management Policy. First implemented in 2004, and doubled in content and directives by 2016, it sets out detailed procedures for record management with specific provisions outlined in a retention and disposal schedule. ^{40 41}

GLA records, for instance, must be retained for the duration of the current mayoral term and for the duration of the subsequent mayoral term. All GLA staff are responsible for documenting their work and retaining records covering the vast majority of information created by business areas across the GLA as part of their day-to-day activities, such as work on policies, proposals, strategies and projects, and matters relating to corporate governance and management of the authority.

A former GLA officer, who worked with two different London Mayors over ten years, described the practice of governance in her experience in similar purposeful terms, as being “a record-keeping practice,” the goal being to have a traceable account of what each Mayor was up to. Indeed, production of documents is listed as one of the general functions and procedure of the GLA as set out in the GLA Act 1999. The definition of document here parallels that of the PRO guidance whereby the words ‘document’, ‘record’, and ‘information’ all interrelate. ⁴²

Record keeping is an implicit, if not explicit, mode of working expectant of the Mayor’s Office, including publicity of his strategies as one of the general duties of the Mayor. ⁴³ Per the Town & Country Planning Regulations 2000, a core responsibility is a mayoral duty to make documents—mayoral policies and strategies—available for public inspection, such that there is a public record. ⁴⁴ There is a formal emphasis on visibility and legibility, and the goal is to evidence each mayoral office’s activities so that relevant parties and interest groups can hold them to account about promises and proposals; a need to create a paper trail that others can follow in some clear, observable way.

The GLA, formed in early 2000, emerged in the context of the 1999 Public Record Office guidance’s publication, around the same time the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 also came into effect, the latter replacing parts of the Public Records Act 1958-67 that related to access to records and public rights to information. The GLA Records Management Policy was created to support corporate governance and to facilitate compliance with the FOIA. Therefore, documentation is a critical function of the authority’s operation:

The policy is rather specific about what is considered a record and/or worth keeping as a record, drawing a subtle but important distinction between record and document in terms of their relationship to business activity. Oriented toward the business of government, the policy is informed by at least seventeen pieces of legislation, regulations, standards and codes of practice with requirements for record keeping, ranging from equality to tax considerations. It includes the Lord Chancellor’s Code of Practice on Management of Records in section 46 of FOIA, introduced in 2005 to provided guidance to public authorities on the keeping, management and destruction of records. ⁴⁵

That same year, the Cabinet Office produced, Transformational Government Enabled by Technology, a strategy on how to use technology to transform government services. It identified the need to design public services around citizens and businesses to ensure streamlined, effective delivery. Moving away from a historical dependency of government services on form-filling and face-to-face meetings, focus shifted to the telephone, internet and mobile channels for preferred delivery of information, one of the goals being to “[give] citizens online access to their records and data held by government, mirroring existing rights and reducing the cost of handling simple enquiries.” ⁴⁶ A 2021 memorandum of understanding on information sharing between the FOIA’s regulator, the Information Commissioner, and The National Archives’ Chief Executive, in their capacity as the Keeper of Public Records, further reflected the synchronisation of government business in the public record interest. ⁴⁷

Threaded together, the documentation pressures the GLA is under are multi-fold and multi-audience: a) to meet the needs of citizens and businesses for basic organisational purposes and day to day authority functioning and b) to meet statutory requirements of the Information Commissioner and The National Archives for digital continuity and preservation. There is an institutional remit and an operational imperative to leave a large digital footprint. It’s a monumental ask. Shepherd, Stevenson and Flinn’s 2010 study on the effect of freedom of information on records management in English local government highlighted the challenges government officers face in complying with the FOIA’s promotion of transparency and openness in fulfilling their corporate responsibility of records management, knowledge and information management and information governance. ⁴⁸ Record keeping and document filing, the authors note, have been hampered in part by the legacy ‘paper-based mindset’ of authorities and the inconsistencies of policies in place, including a lack of implementation, retention and disposal procedures.

This is where the portable document format comes in, suited to the GLA’s government business of record keeping. Because office workers—especially GLA officers—generate and must interact with large amounts of data and have to handle a lot of paperwork for that purpose, the convenience of PDF made document exchange easier and more manageable. PDFs have been in use since the GLA’s formation. The early documents were created with PDFMaker 4.05 for Microsoft Word 97 and produced by Acrobat Distiller for Windows using the application Microsoft Word 8.0, the metadata from documents from 2001 reveal. Coupled with desktop publishing, e.g. software suites like Microsoft Office or Adobe Systems, PDFs made in-house production of reports, papers, newsletters and brochures possible without needing to go to a costly outside publisher or printer. Referenceable, traceable and retrievable, PDFs became the standard form of communication and documentation taken up by the GLA, enabling them to simultaneously produce public records and “manage records within a single corporate framework” per the Records Management Policy. The London Plan fits within this governance picture of information technology and evidence-oriented documentation facilitated by PDF, used to produce, document and record a body of evidence to substantiate the plan. Consequently, as part of the GLA’s workflow, the London Plan is a visible and legible accounting (historical and corporate record) of Mayoral output and public input on London’s future.

As essential as the portable document format has been to the London Plan’s document production and dissemination, PDF is also central to another important London Plan activity, editing and related acts of citing, tracking and revising. A review of the editing process of the London Plan 2021 below offers fuller insights into the use and impact of digital technology on its publication, bringing to light the media limitations discussed thus far and raising questions about the relationship between authority and authorship.

The modern meaning of the term ‘editor’ is quite different from the ancient definition, according to Anne Callahan in the book, On Notes from the History of Ed–, which provides an ‘historico-exemplary account’ of editing and/or the editor as a profession, activity and term. ⁴⁹ ‘Historico-exemplary account’ is Callahan’s term to mean the document visually exemplifies the historical subject, assembled with found text and other visual forms. In Alexandrian time, Callahan describes, it refers to a copyist, a faithful recorder, who produces and proliferates a recognised, standard, authoritative text, ie edition of the manuscript. Today, an editor is more alike to someone concerned with textual arrangement and meaning, whose movement of the former can alter the latter, slightly or significantly.

Technological developments of the print industry then the digital age, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, facilitated greater authorial involvement in the means of production, including proofreading, to evolve the text in successive draft stages. Callahan points out new tools and techniques make it easier to make changes to printed text, transforming the role of editor beyond manuscript transcriber. Instead of exact copies, editing now means performing changes to the original text, often in relation to version control as part of an iterative process. The authority of the text does not necessarily rest with the author but lies in the authority of the editor to make changes to the text. ⁵⁰

While most understand the work of an editor to be something obscure or esoteric that occurs behind the scenes of a publication, there is a more direct public relationship. Editors ‘put forth’ and re-publish. Callahan notes the editor’s elevated role critical to the publication status of a work. Yet, in contradiction, the distinction she makes between editing and revising re-roots editing to a mundane task of seeming less significance. Editing is less invasive and less laborious than revising, involving spelling, grammar, mechanics, word-usage, and other local changes, while full scale revising involves changes to composition that may include new sections of text or even a substantially new try at a document, Callahan writes. Editing is about refining resulting in a cosmetic transformation; revising is about redefining resulting in a meaning transformation. The differences relate to compositional procedure, the labour of rewriting, and deep attachment and commitment to words.

In the above regard, the London Plans can be considered city editions—editions of what the future of the city should look like—and by extension, the Mayors are the editors in chief, higher up the hierarchy among a multiplicity of other editors. They take original text (evidence produced by others) and rearrange it in meaningful ways to put forth a vision (or version) of the capital. Khan’s London Plan alters Johnson’s London Plan which altered Livingstone’s London Plan. Each is a successive textual interpretation of what London can become, stemming from an editorial effort by the sitting Mayor and his team to effect change. Empowered with the digital editing tools of the 20th and 21st century, the draft consultation and examination in public are public processes intended to be revising exercises, opportunities for revisions to and new insertions of text into the London Plan.

However, the opportunity to participate in revising the plan, to change its composition, is promised, but in practice, the exercise is constrained toediting, to make cosmetic changes. Examination in public, rather, is editing in public. ‘Editors’, including GLA officers, the Inspector Panel, and invited public respondents, gather around a table at City Hall to comb through text block by text block. Each hearing session is effectively also an editing session. They debate areas of interest and flag others for later review and revision. Editors arrive ready with binders and reams of supporting text. In theory, in the open, participants can have a go at transforming London’s future development through a textual transformation. But ultimately, the inspectors have the discretion to accept, reject or ignore the suggested edits and the Mayor has the final editing word, since he has the statutory option to reject any and/or all recommended changes.

On closer examination of the practice of editing engaged by the GLA and offered to plan respondents, the contradictions pile up. Despite the labour of rewriting and respondents’ deep attachment and commitment to words, the composition of the London Plan stays largely the same. Keeping up with the changes across plans, or even within a single plan, wanting to add one’s own words to it/them, compels a lengthy involvement in word tracking and attempts at text alterations in which the end impact is more cosmetic than compositional. There is no substantive change to the composition. Following the plan’s journey from first draft to final publication, the comings and goings in-between, gives the impression of change, but there is an intractability and staticity to the London Plan that circles back to the staticity of PDF as a medium. The text handling of the document, or rather its textual performance, shows the corporate memory again at play, the need to preserve as-is.

In word processing, ‘Track Changes’ is a command for editing and review, a way to amend an original document that keeps a visible record of revisions to text and formatting. It allows multiple users to collaborate on a document without losing the context of the original. Popularised by the word processing program, Microsoft Word, the function to see the revision history of a file is now a mainstay feature of various digital writing applications (Google Docs, Pages, OpenOffice etc.). ⁵¹ In Word, the changes are noted in a number of different ways, through colour-coded strikethroughs, underlines, and comment bubbles signposting to content that has been edited, deleted, added, or moved. Word has an option to display ‘all markup’ for a detailed view of the changes, revealing a story of the paths taken from original to changed version. It involves an expansion of the margins of the document page (an increase of the empty space to right of the text) to make room for displaying the annotations.

Tracked change editing is widely used by the GLA and local authorities in developing and communicating their plans. Publishing ‘track change’ versions for reference purposes has become a common practice part of the plan-making process. These tracked documents—showing all markup—aim to give a transparent picture of a plan’s development, in accordance with regulations that require authorities to publish their draft plans so local communities and stakeholders can keep track of progress and stay informed. ⁵² See Regulation 19 of the Town and Country Planning Act (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012; the Greater London Authority Acts 1999 and 2007. The consultation stage provides a formal opportunity for interested parties to review the plan or planning framework before submission and adoption. In an objective of transparency, publicly available versions of plans, from draft to final, highlight the changes made as a result of the public consultation. In obvious ways, ‘track change’ is a memory device: a tool to remember what came before, a means to capture a revision history of the written text. Another form of the corporate record.

For the London Plan 2021, track changes were used by the GLA to both manage documentation of the new plan and communicate the changes to the public as the draft developed. The Draft London Plan – Showing Minor Suggested Changes (July 2018), Draft New London Plan Further Suggested Changes, and Draft New London Plan Further Suggested Changes (July 2019), are amended versions of the plan, which logged changes proposed by the Mayor in consideration of public statements made during consultation of the draft (December 2017 to March 2018) and of the matters and issues raised at the Examination in Public sessions (January to May 2019); a tracked version of the Intend to Publish London Plan (December 2019), the final draft before formal publication, shows changes in response to the Inspectors’ recommendations following completion of the EIP. All of these ‘tracked change’ iterations also have a ‘clean version’ that omits the markups.

Distinctly, the GLA here adapts a different approach to showing their markups, presented in PDF rather than offered as the Word document of the text’s original production. ‘Suggested changes’ are instead documented in a pared-down reproduction of the plan, which retains the essential page structure wherein paragraphs are identified by an ordered number list, but formatted without the folio and running head, illustrations and diagrams, or colour-coded policy boxes of the original. Red and emboldened text are used to indicate where changes have been made. In turn, the margins have been reduced to be narrower for a wider paragraph width, effectively leaving out of view the larger narrative surrounding the revised text.

Details of the modifications are itemised in separate, supporting documents with tables listing each suggested change, who it is in response to, and the reason for it. The amendments are further identified through bold emphasis, strikethrough, and colour: minor suggested change text; original text deletion, minor suggested changes; new text; deleted original plan text; and deleted minor suggested change text. In total, they are a manual visual capture of Word’s ‘tracked change’ function, not the actual changes recorded by the software.

This form of documentation and annotation, on the one hand, is a goodwill gesture to provide detailed insights into the ways the plan has evolved and the extent to which the text has been shaped by public input; demonstrating how the plan takes account of the comments received during the consultation process and the recommendations of the panel that conducted the EIP. The edits present a snapshot of progress, open for public scrutiny, giving visibility to the labour and textual negotiations and rearrangements that happen out of public view. Visually, they communicate the London Plan as a live document, dynamic and changing, continually tended and updated.

However, the tracked changes are only an appearance of change because they don’t do what they look on the surface to be doing. This is another instance of cosmetic editing but not real revising. The alterations are made to be cosmetically obvious to draw attention to the differences between draft iterations, however, they do not disclose meaningful rationale beyond citing ‘factual correction,’ ‘consistency,’ ‘clarification,’ and ‘readability’, the category options available in the ‘reasons’ column of the change table. For example, in the section on Building good growth and inclusive communities, paragraph 1.1.1, the sentence changes from, “Planning for Good Growth means planning for these communities” to “Planning for Good Growth means planning with these communities.” The word ‘for’ is struck through and replaced with, ‘with’. It is a minor but extremely significant change of preposition, implying co-production and active public participation; however, little context is provided as to why the change is implemented and scant information about how to plan with communities. In the Table of Changes, there is no listed respondent for whom and in response to whom the change was made, only the reason for change being, “readability and consistency with other GLA strategies” (also not specified). The red-coloured words are part of a performative publishing act—a public gesture—that is an aesthetic signal of change (something is happening) without indication or substantiative evidence of the motivations or context driving the changes.

Understanding what is different from one draft to the next relies heavily on inference and demands deep attention (deep attachment and commitment to words) from a reader to read between the lines, requiring extensive cross referencing of documents, analysis and comparison, and almost pedantic verification to grasp the variations. A sequence of intensive reading is needed to grapple with the differences: a literal flipping back and forth of pages to reference between the revised plan, the original and the public representations to find dis/parity. For the average reader unfamiliar with planning parlance and procedures, the information overload overwhelms and requires extreme diligence and concentrated effort to follow the paper trail. Even then, the changes, like the one above, hint at significance but generally remain a shorthand, impenetrable to others who are not directly involved in the plan’s writing and editing process. Even for GLA officers, this process is equally labour intensive as they must keep track of their own writing activities, which are often at the mercy of time and data management shortfalls. They must manually copy the changes made in Word over to PDF.

While Tracked Changes makes for a compelling proposition, in practice, it sends out more noise than signal. In this way of being publicly available yet not entirely accessible, the text arguably performs publicness but narrows public participation. Review of the drafts, from original to revised, is an arduous endeavour demanding studious examination typically only taken up by planners, scholars, or the truly text-committed, who are able to convincingly fact-check the changes for soundness and compliance, therefore marginalising many Londoners from the pages. ⊕ Printout of the draft London Plan PDF comparing the GLA’s ‘tracked changes’ in The Draft London Plan – Showing Minor Suggested Changes (July 2018), in relation to editorial changes suggested by public comments that were not incorporated and pushed outside the page’s margins. Produced by participants during a workshop I facilitated on 20 May 2019 on how to co-read the London Plan. This project adapts a similar co-editing methodology used to question the writing process of the King’s Cross entry page on Wikipedia. ‘Authoring the neighbourhood’ was a collaboration I undertook with graphic designer Rebecca Ross in 2013 to ask larger questions of the authority/authorship of texts about a place. ⊕ Textual responses from participants during the Queering the London Plan workshop on 23 February 2018 I co-facilitated as part of UCL Urban Lab and Planning Out’s outreach to the LGBTQ+ community for their input into the draft London Plan 2017.

⊕ These graphic-textual interventions form part of my design work analysing the London Plan and other related publications. Alongside analog tools marking up the pages, I used software tools, Adobe Illustrator and inDesign, to visually analyse the plan’s texts beyond a conventional close reading of its content. Figure 5 shows markings performed by participants in workshops I ran to co-read the London Plan together. Those group exercises facilitated material engagement with the texts and opened up new ways to interpret their meaning. Figure 6 tracks revisions to the plan versions to reveal where editorial changes took place and which policy areas were given priority, underscoring for me the relative unchanged nature of the document. The interventions illustrate an alternative approach to interacting with source material—using the conventions of editing in a creative way to generate more information.

The public performance further plays out in the word choice of the amended document’s title, Suggested Changes, and in material conditions of the PDF file format. The filename picks up on the lexicon and collaboration functionality offered by Word, in which document changes are presented as suggestions that can be reviewed, accepted or rejected, and then removed or made permanent, by multiple users who are granted access permission. The function from Word implies a certain malleability to the plan, that the content is not fixed but rather still shapable, semi-finished by which its status of completion is dependent upon approval by other collaborators. The wording frames the plan as a live, working document and an ongoing invitation for input. The promise of interactivity of this type of purportedly open document, however, is somewhat misleading when considering the limited nature of collaboration it entails, given that the ‘tracked change’ version is an uneditable PDF. To whom are the GLA suggesting the changes? Who are the collaborators able to reject and accept the changes? How does one reject and accept? Because the public does not have actual file access to the GLA’s Word document from where the text is original produced, rejecting or accepting changes is not directly actionable.

The production and editing capabilities—the ability to act and make a change—rest with GLA officers. For instance, a GLA officer recounts, during the 2018 EIP process they were producing at speed the changes to text for that day, based on the feedback of the hearing sessions, and “were so rushed and fraught that we didn’t have time to think about recording all of that properly.” ⁵³ Instead, they “just take the text, stick it in an email, do the track changes there because you’ve got to get it off, you’ve got to get it signed off, and then produce [and] worry about fixing it and retrofitting it all back into the plan later.” ⁵⁴ A main part of their job is to retrace the day’s paper/digital trail to be put back into the master document, whose control remains in their hands. The sequence of activities happens outside of public view.

The document is made publicly available as a reproduced PDF, stripped of any revision histories or editing capabilities associated with the Microsoft Word application. The public copy is essentially a screenshot, a static ‘page image’ to borrow Gitelman’s term to describe onscreen pictures of pages, a visual impression/reproduction but not the actual pages themselves. It is a digital copy of the changes capturing the appearance of change. ⁵⁵ The avenue for responding (rejecting or accepting) necessarily has to happen elsewhere through another forum and by other media means (via email and letters sent to the Mayor’s office perhaps). The reading public, in this regard, is not one of the document’s collaborators. The .pdf file format of the document reinforces both the GLA’s authorship and authority because, as Gitelman points out in her media history of documents, PDF technology is hierarchical. She argues, “PDF and PDF-reader applications are designed to insulate reading from authoring,” separating “those who create files from those who merely read them–with a PDF reader application.” ⁵⁶ The GLA’s authorial power lies in its retention of editorial power. Where a digital format like .doc is flexible, .pdf is in fact fixed.

The tracked changes as such have an evidentiary purpose and a communicative function as visual documentation of modifications, giving non-editors and non-collaborators a macro view of minor changes without actual opportunity of interacting with the revised text or the full benefit of understanding the granular implications. It reveals but equally obscures the behind-the-scenes editorial processes. Although the tracked change version provides a certain degree of clarity (“we made this change based on your comments”), its cleaned-up appearance at once obfuscates the complexity of the plan’s transformation while its uneditability limits public engagement and capacity to respond to or understand the breadth of the changes. So, it’s a cause for celebration when participants have been able to change a word here or there. Sian Berry, London Assembly Member, Green Party, characterises the input from her party’s involvement in the plan as an incremental achievement.

While for others, like Just Space, “some small gains in wording” is a cause for lament. In a blog post news update in January 2021 on the final London Plan going to the printers, Just Space decried, “[t]his London Plan was a bad one for the London of 2016 when it was being written […] The Plan we are now faced with is even worse.” Despite the network’s years of input into the public processes to shape the London Plan 2021, and the editorial effort to effect textual changes, they express severe disappointment in the final outcome. Ultimately, a few words changed is not enough. This was echoed by Andrew Boff, London Assembly member, GLA Conservatives, and co-chair of the GLA Planning Committee, in his criticism of the London Plan during his speech at the end of the February 06 London Assembly plenary session on publishing the draft London Plan.

Although Boff is politically positioned as an Assembly Member to critique the Labour Mayor and the London Plan process, his remark hints at a reality of its consultation that isn’t of wide public knowledge. Making fundamental changes to the London Plan is not actually the goal of the GLA during the public processes, one officer revealed. ⁵⁷ Their focus is on verification and ensuring legitimacy of the texts already put forward, the priority is on publishing the Mayor’s edition. According to the officer, there can’t be fundamental changes because of the way the system is set up. They have to be minor, because fundamentally changing something in the plan requires going back out to consult on it. There isn’t the time nor staffing resource to do so.

Whereas participants may view the EIP as an opportunity to debate the policies, in her view, the GLA sees it functionally as the Inspector Panel using the examination to probe their understanding of the draft and of matters they have identified as important so they can come to a conclusion about the plan’s soundness. It leads to a misunderstanding in which “public stakeholders think it’s a chance to debate the topic; it’s not, it’s a chance to debate it within the context of whatever the inspector needs to understand. It’s not an open debate to the questions, but sometimes quite focused.” ⁵⁸ Because the whole process is “geared around the inspectors’ requirements,” the examination in public is, in actuality, an “exercise to clarify,” rather than the opportunity to exert policy influence over the plan’s final form that organisations like Just Space have perceived (or maybe hoped) it to be.

Given the EIP’s pseudo-editing process, it is also not surprising to see very little substantive changes to the London Plan 2021 from draft to final. In a graphic analysis of the text changes between the first draft and the interim Intend to Publish version, minor editorial changes compete with changes in response to the inspector’s recommendations, with deletions generally outstripping insertions. ⊕ ⊕ Intend to Publish London Plan 2021. Colour coded to illustrate distribution of content (policy areas). For example, less space is dedicated to social infrastructure than to housing. Graphic illustrations by me. The bulk of the changes are minor, little new text is composed. Most significant edits occurred in the housing section, which is a visual reflection of the kind of intense debate around housing that is driving a lot of London’s planning. Tracking the changes reveal a fundamental fixity to the plan.

According to Michael Edwards, little has changed from the start to the end of the process yet, paradoxically, he notes, there are significant differences. ⁵⁹ For example, he cites the real estate industry led by London First succeeded to downgrade Good Growth principles from policies to objectives on the argument that “policies would incumber the legal framework for decision making”. ^{60 61} Edward’s insight echoes a similar observation I made about the word switch, which London First had identified as an important win for them to get the panel’s approval. Objectives, however, have no formal status in planning law and therefore reduces their impact, having less weight and no legal force. It falls on decision-makers’ discretion rather than duty to meet the objectives. With the Inspectors Panel’s acceptance of London First’s proposed edit, the work and words put forward to define what good growth means for communities, may have been for nought if they are unenforceable.

This editorial change trumps LTF’s hard-won one that sought to redefine good growth as the need to address a variety of equality issues beyond just ‘spatial inequality.’ Without enforcement, there’s also no legislative mandate for “planning with communities,” as the other mentioned text edit had appeared to promise. It highlights an asymmetry of editing power, reinforcing the performativity of tracking changes.

There is also something problematic about calling the final version of the plan, the Clean Version. As a policy document, rightfully for legibility and clarity purposes, the GLA wants to present a complete edition without the messy mark-ups. However, if a hidden goal is that the published London Plan is seen as an outcome of a meaningful debate about how London should take shape, the reason for bothering with public consultation in the first place, then in the name of neatness, the GLA risks making the plan too clean. Art historian and graphic designer Martha Scotford makes a distinction between neat history and messy history: where neat history focuses on mainstream activities, messy history focuses on alternative approaches and activities. ⁶² Scotford was concerned with expanding the view of the role of women in graphic design, who have been excluded from conventional graphic design history literature. The sanitised edition of the London Plan represents the victors of the editorial struggle. Future readers of the London Plan 2021 won’t know about the fight over words between “for” and “with” or “policies” and “priorities” that took place. They will have assumed that this final clean version is the one agreed upon by all involved.

This chapter has considered the means and meaning of production of the London Plan as an electronic document in fulfilment of the business of government, produced by available technology which emerged from the digital environment of the late 1990s, particularly the portable document format. While the ubiquity of PDF use today is true for many government bodies, for the GLA specifically, being only twenty years old and having grown with the arc of the digital age, the dominance of PDF is plain—and has consequence for the communication and document design of the London Plan.

The aim of government documentation is to record, manage and preserve an organisation’s corporate memory. The London Plan is foremost an evidentiary document—a product of GLA and mayoral business activities in fulfilment of statutory obligations of public accountability. In line with Gitelman’s definition of document from the Introduction, as the last chapter has shown, the plan has a clear know-show (evidence-reporting) function. It’s informative and is proof of x and y. The correlation to evidence is reflected in the GLA Records Management Policy’s definition of document that connects with the concept of record based on the requirements of Freedom of Information Act and other related regulations of public rights to information. The content, form and format of the london_plan_2021.pdf is related to its functional end use as a public record—a historical record and a corporate record—made available for public inspection. Thus, its annual report look is partly an outcome of the media history affecting government administration and record-keeping work practices.

Word processing, desktop publishing, and digital documenting, powered by the personal computer and enabled by an internet connection, is central to the writing, reading and editing of the London Plan. At a cost-prohibitive price of £50 per print copy, with only a limited print run of 2,000 copies, the free to download PDF electronic document is the primary site of engagement with the plan and not the print/paper publication. ⁶³ As portable paper, it can be read anywhere, downloaded, saved, shared and/or printed. Those responding to the draft plan produce their own PDFs in an effort to have their words be included in the final text.

The use of new technology has in some ways afforded mass communication of and mass participation in the London Plan’s development. But it has also highlighted some of the structural barriers baked into the GLA’s corporate functioning. Their stringent requirements to have an electronic record of business activity, complicate their aims to be open and public about plan-making. PDF gives the impression of change through a textual performance, but the practicalities of the system set up for consultation and examination in public, render the published edits as mere public gesture. Tracked changes give the appearance of transparency when, in the administrative reality of governance, much of the textual work happens with clicks and keyboard strokes out of public view. Despite some better words, some small gains in wording, little fundamentally changes. The London Plan remains, very much, a static document—a paper after-image of the GLA’s corporate memory.

The next chapter, Public_HTML, examines the volatility of that corporate memory against the public memory of the London Plan as memorialised online on the GLA website, following around the documents’ movements and relocations across screens and between webpages. It outlines the difficulty of maintain a public record relative to the temporal and durational quality of the plan’s public life. The ever-changing status of publication, whether a document is published or ‘unpublished,’ has significant impact on when and where we encounter the London Plan.