Communication
Part—Two

Part Two focuses on communication; how and what the London Plan communicates. It examines the document design of the London Plan 2021 in light of the plan’s history as a corporate product—a marketing brochure and an annual report—in tension and conflict with the ‘public’ imperatives driving its publication, understanding it as a contested site of textual production in service of the corporate memory. Chapters 4 & 5 look at the physical properties, graphical arrangements, and media form/ats of the London Plan, in consideration of the materiality of text, the array of texts and countertexts within and around the plan, participants’ publishing activities, their writing and reading practices, and material inputs and outputs.

Chapter 4
    Keywords: Marketing Branding Publicity
    Chapters 4 looks at the public of public relations and publicity and the public narrative drive behind the London Plan. The issues brought up in Chapters 1 and 2 about the structural and conceptual constraints placed on the London Plan’s publicness, are shown in this chapter to influence who the plan addresses, which is mainly the neoliberal public discussed in Chapter 3, the one with purchasing power. In 1943, the County of London Plan was published widely across London, communicated in print, …
Chapter 5
    Keywords: publishing branding media design annual reports
    Chapter 5 addresses the public in publication as part of the Mayor’s statutory duty to publish the London Plan. This chapter highlights the tensions inherent between the needs of a corporation and the aspirations for public input, outlined in previous chapters, and draws out the common practice amongst plan-makers and plan-commenters alike to achieve their goals through the production of data- and evidence-based publications. By statutory regulations, the Mayor of London must make a copy of his …