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https://londonplanpubliclibrary.info

The London Plan Public Library (LPPL) is an online archive which documents all the documents prepared for the publication of the 2021 London Plan authored by Mayor Sadiq Khan, the Greater London Authority and others, collecting texts produced from 2017 to 2020 during the Consultation and the Examination in Public of the draft new London Plan 2017. The website functions as a document repository, partly a reading room and partly an archive of publications related to the draft plan in December 2017 leading to the formal publication of the final London Plan on 2 March 2021. It gathers documents published between 2017–2020 that were: produced by the Mayor’s office during the Draft Consultation; reviewed for soundness by the third-party Planning Inspector during the Examination in Public; and submitted by respondents during both. This archive reproduces the EIP Library originally posted on the london.gov.uk website, in a new visual format, in order to make an accessible public record. It explores the relationships between documents—and maps relevant paths and connections, but also highlights documentary gaps and missing or broken links. The aim of the library is to provide meaningful opportunities for examining the London Plan at the document level and at the scale of individual but interlinked text.

Libraries collect and provide access to published materials, made widely available. Archives store and preserve public records or historical materials of perceived value for future reading, viewing, study or reference. LPPL works simultaneously as a library (a place to collect and widely access published materials from the London Plan 2021 draft review process) and as an archive (a place to preserve the documents as a historical public record for future readers). It is called a library to borrow from the language used by the GLA, which collects London Plan documents under the umbrella term of EIP Library. Planning documents are generally hard to navigate, but they are especially difficult to find during time-limited consultations and particularly after they complete, as was the acute case with the London Plan. As the last chapter discussed, accessing the corporate memory of the plan relies on creating or circumventing databases, organising and collecting documents, on following links and lists. LPPL’s goal is to make the process of document gathering and hunting and text searching—necessary practices to participate in shaping the London Plan—not only a less painful experience, but a meaningful one to generate new or alternative knowledge.

It theoretically aligns with what Susan Pell, a scholar in archives and public discourse, considers the potential of archives. Where Katarina Sluis sees technological constraints of the digital archive’s claim to be free, limitless space, in another view, Pell sees political opportunities, arguing it is a “free and public space,” which has been strategically used by activists and campaigners to assert authority and claim rights through self-representation. ⁴ Because of struggles for inclusion within institutional archives, marginal groups either “seek to recover hidden histories within the documents,” “collect and care for the documents themselves, away from and outside of official institutions,” or write alternative and counter histories by producing their own archives, “independently created, controlled, and maintained.” ⁵ It’s sometimes called, grassroots archive, independent community-led archive, activist archive, autonomous archive and/or radical archive. Regardless of name, the autonomous, activist archive, her preferred term, offers collectivised forms of knowledge production and spaces of empowerment and self-determination.

For Pell, this kind of archive is an enabling force, a key site of knowledge and political power to subvert the institutional archive’s role as a tool of domination and control. It is a “tool that informs [activists’] social justice struggles” and mobilises knowledge and memories of past struggles for use in contemporary campaigns, thus “bridging the past, present, and future for social movements.” ⁶ We saw this in Chapters 5 and 6 discussions of Southwark Notes Archive Group (SNAG), Just Space and London Tenants Federation and the role of self-represented and self-recorded evidence in planning debates. Functionally, the autonomous archive for these groups is a site of (document) emancipation, freedom to act upon the documents in ways that aren’t limited by difficulties normally encountered when engaging with official documents in official archives, such as the GLA’s institutional archive, the EIP Library.

Pell had studied SNAG’s work drawing from and contributing to the Gentrification Archive of the larger 56a Archive collection housed at 56a InfoShop, an anarchist social centre in the Elephant and Castle area of south London. She found the Gentrification Archive to be prominent in SNAG’s campaigns, playing a significant role in strategic knowledge production and “highlighting that politics includes a struggle over information and the ability to claim authoritative and effective knowledge. This reaffirms that the Archive is much more than a place to put documents in the hope that they find meaning in the future. It can be an open and active repository that feeds into social action and is fed by it.” ⁷ ⊕ Southwark Notes, Archive Material webpage. https://southwardnotes.wordpress.com/archive-resources.

The autonomous archive works as a useful resource, considered by Pell as “one strategy, among others, to challenge and transform hegemonic political power and open up alternative collective possibilities.” ⁸ LPPL was developed in the same autonomous spirit, as one strategy for how to engage with planning documents.

The website is conceived as two spaces running in parallel: 1) a document archive and 2) a research space for this thesis’s writings. The premise of the archive is a reproduction of the GLA’s EIP Library. The homepage introduces the London Plan, what the plan is about and the timeline of its production from draft to final publication. All other webpages form part of the archive; the main library index show all documents with an option for readers to focus on specific documents produced by the mayor, the examination panel, or respondents. The files are re-organised according to the EIP Library’s categories into Mayor’s Documents, EIP Panel Documents, Respondent Documents, and EIP Audio Recordings (from the hearing sessions). All document entries and descriptions are full text or excerpts from existing texts. The information comes direct from what is available on the GLA website, content generated from documents published in the EIP Library then represented in a way that communicates with more clarity. Minor edits removed superfluous repetition of descriptions to clarify the descriptions of those texts, but everywhere else, documents appear as they were original to their publication on london.gov.uk. LPPL creates an index using available data and makes it more accessible. ⊕ Pre-wesite development visualisation of the GLA’s EIP Library on london.gov.uk, showing content by documents’ covers. Graphic illustration by me.

The library index lists the documents by map, gallery, and catalogue list—three different viewing options to create inroads to information that isn’t sufficiently public. First, map view provides a tree-like structure listing of the documents. Second, gallery view provides a visual representation, presenting documents as thumbnail images of each document’s covers, in a similar way to browsing publication titles on online bookshop retailers. Third, catalogue view provides an expandable list of the documents with previews of inside pages and excerpts of their textual content. Documents can be read online or downloaded. There is a search function to search within each collection or the full collection.

The website is designed to be ‘responsive,’ a term in web development to describe the different ways to engage with reading material on different devices. LPPL can be viewed on a desktop computer, a tablet or phone; the content changes visually and adapts to match the format and screen viewing size.

LPPL is an example of alternative interactions with text and documents. It challenges conventions of publishing and implicitly critiques the way that the GLA works with digital and printed documents described in the last two chapters. Their method is not digital in the way that information can exchange in a fluid manner but is still paper bound. LPPL replicates the GLA’s methodology for updating their documents on the website using Drupal as a content management system (CMS). Drupal is open source software which facilitates and automates user-generated content making it easy for people with minimal technical skills to be able to plug into a basic form and upload entries. ⁹ ‘Open source’ is source code that’s freely available for individual and/or collective modification and redistribution. Anyone, arguably, is able to access/change the code. LPPL uses a different CMS based on PHP coding language and designed on the Kirby open source platform. ¹⁰ PHP, or Personal Home Page, is a hypertext preprocessor, handling the steps involved before text is processed and executed. Kirby runs on PHP. Kirby works on a text file system so the website is developed based on text input that can take a list of text documents that then becomes the visual content displayed on screen. Via Kirby’s flexibility for custom editing, the website was designed as a marriage of the way that the GLA manages their online content and the way that I can reproduce the documents and represent the text using a text method of code writing.

In the context of the GLA’s existing ways of making London Plan documents available, LPPL demonstrates the opportunities to address their limits. The GLA’s approach to digital documentation generally treats documents as printed paper put online. The EIP Library provides links to PDFs that can be printed but it does not actually utilise the power, dynamism and interactivity of hypertext and having an online presence. What doesn’t get communicated is what’s behind these links, for example, that some of these documents are more than 600 pages long, nor how the pages relate to each other. LPPL works to give greater visibility to these connections by taking greater advantage of the affordances of hyperlinks. Because everything on the GLA website is presented in a list format, LPPL retains this basic functionality but improves upon it by reorganising the list in a more easily navigable way. Through a method of re-listing but keeping the GLA’s preference for the list format, LPPL provides additional filter and sort options to go from link to link, an enhancement that not only gives more inroads into navigating between documents but also in understanding their relationships. Inside each link, a summary makes immediately available more information about the document content, short-circuiting the need to deep dive to find out more.

The London Plan is framed as a singular body of work, an autonomous title, but it is in actuality a corpus of texts linking to other texts. A document of other documents, it is a compiling of numerous references and reports lent toward a particular shape and understanding of and vision for London. LPPL is designed as a means to access, share and circulate these texts; to look at the EIP Library in many alternative ways. It is modelled after Dušan Barok’s Monoskop, https://monoskop.org, a media library documenting the arts, culture and humanities, which provides alternative ways of accessing published knowledge. Monoskop makes freely available many publications that are not easily found or have limited access and complicated copyright. Some of this thesis’s bibliographic entries was found via Monoskop Created in 2004, originally built as an online platform for texts and media based on the Wiki concept, Monoskop developed further during his doctoral studies and became a way for Barok to keep track of his reading and browsing for his research, solving the issue of immediate access and retrieval. ¹¹ Now, in its current form, Monoskop is an expansive collection of digitised content, “mutually interlinked and searchable,” contributed to by other editors and website users. According to Barok, it is open for everyone to edit: any user can upload their own works or scans.

In a conversation about Monoskop with Annet Dekker, a scholar in archival and information studies, Barok identifies three tropes of organising and navigating written records: class, reference and index. Classifying involves a tree-like structure offering faceted meanings. Referencing consists of citations, hyperlinking, and bibliographies. Indexing includes listing of occurrences of items and/or of an absolute index of all items with capacity for full-text search. LPPL incorporates all three. Documents are classified by categories of where they belong and who they belong to in the EIP Library, by/for whom they’re produced; the mayor, the panel or the respondents. Barok also makes the distinction between orality, writing (printed book), and digital text. Orality has sequence and narrative where meaning is in the words spoken themselves. Writing is written record bound together by references, fixed to paper, where meaning comes from the context created by this mixing and fixing. Digital text, specifically, is text that’s searchable in milliseconds and enabled by the index. Because of its flattening effects, Barok says, “the index transforms the ways in which we come to ‘know’ things,” different from how knowledge in the age of the internet and “its modes of expression are centred on verbal rhetoric.” ¹² Copying and collecting the digital texts in a repository, LPPL transforms the ways in which we can know things about the London Plan, about London planning. It makes the content searchable and places documents next to other documents that may have previously been disparate. Through reproduction, new contexts emerge, producing new meaning.

In one way, by republishing already public documents, meaning making them public again, LPPL contributes to an expanded field of experimental documentary work that artist and writer Nick Thurston is compiling in his book project, Document Practices. ¹³ The mobilisation of textual documents across contexts, in particular for Thurston, presents opportunities to pose critical questions about politics and aesthetics, and through deliberate, creative misuse, gives rise to new legibilities and communities of readership. In another way, LPPL is a practical reimagining of how to access government documents meant for the public domain yet are not easily accessible. Although developed two years before the Internet Archive’s new initiative, Democracy’s Library, was announced in October 2022, LPPL shares the same goal to digitise, catalog, and make findable government materials for public access. ¹⁴

At the end of Barok’s conversation with Dekker, he speaks of the imperative in relation to digital archives “to embrace redundancy, to promote spreading their contents across as many nodes and sites as anyone wishes. We may look at copying not as merely mirroring or making backups, but opening up for possibilities to start new libraries, new platforms, new databases.” ¹⁵ LPPL as such isn’t a mirror or backup of the EIP Library, but through copy and reproduction it seeks to open new possibilities for what a planning document library could be.

LPPL’s design and design philosophy take after Memory of the World (MOW) Public Library, https://library.memoryoftheworld.org, a digital archive created by Marcell Mars and Tom Medak in 2012. Inspired by and building on shadow libraries like Aaaaarg, Library Genesis, Monoskop and UbuWeb, it is “a networked infrastructure of universal access to knowledge” maintained by ‘amateur librarians’. ¹⁶ A shadow library is an online database of “readily available content that is normally obscure or otherwise not readily accessible” because of paywalls, copyright controls and other limitations or protections imposed by the original works’ owners. ¹⁷

MOW Public Library is Mars and Medak’s conception of the ‘public library’, which they define as “a universal access to knowledge for every member of society, catalog and librarian, when everyone is a librarian, library is everywhere.” In their view, the public library “holds the promise of egalitarianism” and deems “equal access to some fundamental resources in society [as] prerequisite for [a] democratic body politic.” The project was initiated at a moment when public libraries were under threat of closure or funding withdrawal in an era of austerity, in which public access was significantly or severely reduced. It was one solution to what they saw as “an endangered institution, doomed to extinction.” ¹⁸ With tools at everyone’s disposal to build their own library, they advocate for a new form of a public library consisting of interconnected private libraries. To date there are 150,000 books catalogued. Titles are shown by book covers or in list form, and are searchable by author, title or tag (keywork or theme). Rooted in MOW’s notion of universal knowledge through aggregate knowledge, LPPL presents the London Plan as the aggregate of documents and document producers.

Cyberfeminism Index, https://cyberfeminismindex.com,  is an online collection of resources for techno-critical works from 1990–2020, that premiered on New Museum’s First Look in 2019, gathered and facilitated by Mindy Seu, a designer and researcher, and developed by Angeline Meitzler. ¹⁹ The index provides digital access to user-submitted entries of projects, sources, references, publications, and other titles related to feminism or by feminist authors, many of which aren’t normally cited in the canon of new media technology history. Seu reframes the politics of bibliographies and archives to be that bibliographies show the politics of the authors or creators. ²⁰ She imagines “the practice of citation as a political act”. ²¹

The Index tells a different story of the internet and the history of media through the lens of those who may have been excluded from its normative discourses or who exist at its peripheries. In an interview with Marie Hoejlund in a Walker Art Center’s Gradient blog titled “Sharing as Survival”, Seu talks about the ‘cacophony’ of voices the Index creates through the use of makers’ own voice; every entry in the Index is described only through excerpts or pull quotes. This, along with the website’s design, non-hierarchical structure, its caring for how things are named and described, and its valuing of cracks, glitches, and leakiness, represent the potential for “ways of revealing and foregrounding the people or events that are often pushed to the margins.” ²²

Cyberfeminism Index presented a useful example of the power of lists and helped inform the thinking behind what LPPL can do through a simple act like listing, or re-listing. Seu writes in the publication Shift Space, on collecting, sharing, and creating the Cyberfeminism Index, “there’s a thoughtfulness to gathering” that invites introspection about “what we are collecting and for whom.” ²³ Through gathering and by re-re-listing the London Plan documents, LPPL gives them new attachments, proximities and adjacencies, revealing text authors who may not have been visible before.

Seu’s use of ‘gatherer’ to describe herself and ‘gathering’ to describe the work of the Index, derives from their use in the book Pleasure Activism, which contained ideas, stories and interviews “gathered and edited” by adrienne maree brown. Seu asserts, “as a container, it is more than just the sum of its parts; the book is the site around which its public forms, and a place in which to gather that public.” If the London Plan is the site around which a public forms, which this thesis has argued, then similar to brown’s book and Seu’s index, the London Plan Public Library is conceptualised as a place in which to gather that public. In a digital world which is according to Aideen Doran “in the process of establishing a new ruling class, a class of governmental institutions and private corporations whose power ultimately resides in a monopoly on information access and transmission,” who gathers and can access the London Plan documents have consequence for what the future of London becomes. Presently, GLA officers are the document gatherers. LPPL would enable others to become co-gatherers and carers.

²⁴

The London Plan Public Library project answers a second part to the question of ‘why’ I am remaking the documents public. In the process of writing this thesis, the website worked doubly as a research space, currently available via a link provided for reviewers and anyone interested in my PhD. LPPL was as much a writing space for me as a researcher trying to contend with these documents as it is intended to be a reading space for others also contending with the documents, a means of engaging with the same content, differently. It was a way for me to think through how to publish a PhD in a slightly alternative form to the printed book thesis, at the same time, helping me to be thoughtful of what I was writing. As I was coding the website, it became a form of writing for the actual thesis because I had to confront similar issues faced by the GLA in designing their EIP Library while designing my version: how to categorise and classify documents, what attention to give to which texts, how to attribute and cite other texts and authors, who are the publics and how will they access it.

Because all documentation related to the London Plan is self-contained on the GLA website as link after link after link, in list after list, it presented a challenge of negotiating and navigating the documents myself as a researcher, as someone who was a participant in the consultation process. Part of the want for creating my own website arose out of a need to automate and generate a way to read these documents, of having the computer help me read it and then making it human readable back out. LPPL is almost entirely auto scripted. Coding and script-writing became a practice for making sense of the density and dispersal of this material and present it in a way that creates more accessible inroads for me as well as others.

The research side of LPPL shows my thesis as chapters laid out and split into different parts. It is an alternative example of thesis writing, referencing and using citation in a live space that could be accessed by others and have an afterlife after thesis submission. It addresses a parallel I observed between engaging with the institution of the GLA and engaging with the institution of UCL. They are both institutions that I have had to try to navigate their bureaucratic systems and that share similar approaches to and understanding of documents and open access. It has raised for me corresponding questions about academic documents: how academic documents circulate and who their publics are. LPPL makes the case for where the thesis lives as opposed to its typical location in the British Library repository, or in the deep links of UCL’s website, not everybody has access to.

In addition to being a critique of the GLA’s document practices, LPPL is also a critique of what is the thesis, which at UCL has historically been a blue perfect-bound print publication usually only read by examiners and other researchers interested in the same topic. LPPL is an opportunity for my thesis to have a larger public life after the PhD, and simultaneously to remain closely connected to its subject of study. Anyone accessing the document library in the future would also have access to my writings on it. Future plans for LPPL are currently under consideration. Possible arrangements for long-term hosting and archival longevity include submission to the Internet Archive’s Democracy Library. For now, it’s a starting point for making my research public.