Ricky Burdett (ed.) London: Europe's global city? Report Original citation: Burdett, Ricky, ed. (2005) London: Europe's global city? Urban Age. This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/33360/ Originally available from Urban Age Available in LSE Research Online: May 2013 © 2005 Urban Age LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. Urban Age is a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities LONDON NEW YORK/FEBRUARY 2005 SHANGHAI/JULY 2005 LONDON/NOVEMBER 2005 MEXICO CITY/FEBRUARY 2006 EUROPE’S JOHANNESBURG/JULY 2006 BERLIN/NOVEMBER 2006 GLOBAL CITY? WWW.URBAN-AGE.NET URBAN AGE CONTACT London Conference Contact T +44 (0)20 7955 7706 M +44 (0)7913 405 764 Cities Programme The London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE United Kingdom T +44 (0)20 7955 7706 [email protected] Alfred Herrhausen Society Deutsche Bank Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin Germany T +49 (0)30 3407 4201 [email protected] www.alfred-herrhausen-gesellschaft.de ISBN 0 7530 1950 7 site of the smaller venues. The scale of the project is massive, and will see what amounts GOVERNING THE to the total reengineering of East London. Depending on how you count the cost, it could be anything from £2 to £4 billion, once UNGOVERNABLE? the games have ended and everything has been tidied up.As far as transport is con- Deyan Sudjic cerned, the flagship will be the Olympic Javelin, a high-speed shuttle running on the cross channel rail track from St. Pancras to the Olympic stadium in just ten minutes. he single most arresting fact personified at the most superficial level by There are promises for an expansion of the about London is that it is the affair of the Mandela statue, and in a East London line, the Docklands Light growing.After decades in much more far reaching way by the eruption Railway and the North London Line, but not which, like every other major of a wall of skyscrapers which have been as yet any clear commitments from the European and North breaching the 305 metre barrier along government about the future of Crossrail. American city, it was haemor- Bishopsgate, encouraged by Livingstone’s Nor are these the only major develop- rhaging people, the victim of enthusiasm for creating Europe’s first skyline ments underway in the city. The area around T the hollowing out doughnut to aspire to the model of Shanghai rather King’s Cross is just beginning to take in the effect, London has turned around. The fore- than Manhattan. How much is the jaw drop- scale of the transformation that is about to casts now point to sustained and substantial ping scale of the capital’s once in a century overtake it. The new St. Pancras station, population increases; much of it through transformation the product of the imposition designed to handle traffic on the high-speed migration. Something remarkable has hap- of a single guiding vision, or would it have link to Paris and Brussels through the chan- pened here.A combination of an ageing pop- taken place without it? nel, is just the first step. The huge glass and ulation beginning to understand that the London has tended to shrug off attempts white steel box awkwardly tacked onto the only source of the young and able-bodied that to tame and direct its growth ever since its back of Victorian St. Pancras will soon form will be needed to care for the baby boomers townsfolk ignored the attempts of Tudor just part of a sprawling development on the in their declining years, and to pay the contri- monarchs to prevent the growth of suburbs site of the railway and canal lands.As one butions needed to fund their pensions will outside its city walls, and its refusal to accept developer labours on a masterplan for a have to be from outside, and of the booming Christopher Wren’s masterplan for its recon- project that will match Canary Wharf in its opportunities for the highly skilled in every- struction after the Great Fire of 1666. Its rush scale, another has already opportunistically thing from banking to the art market, have westward was given a massive, and entirely swooped in to take advantage of the possibili- between them transformed the character unintended boost by the random creation ties offered by a shift in perceptions of the of the city, and its prospects. The transforma- of a heavy bomber aerodrome at Heathrow area that is already taking place. This is no tion is both reflected in, and in part the prod- that later became Europe’s largest airport. longer an area dominated by the drug and sex uct of, a transformed system of city govern- And the Great Lurch East of the 1990s, repre- trade. The Guardian newspaper will be mov- ment for London. sented by the eruption of the Canary Wharf ing into offices here.At White City, a gap in Recently, London’s only remaining financial centre from the site of a derelict the city’s fabric for most of a century is being evening newspaper carried a front page story banana warehouse was equally accidental. filled in by a giant shopping complex. South to the effect that the first directly elected It was the product of the market taking ruth- of the Thames, at Elephant & Castle, the mayor in the city’s history, Ken Livingstone, less advantage of a set of tax incentives and comprehensive approach to planning of the was so exercised by the thought of his legacy planning relaxations, intended to have a quite 1960s is being unpicked on a massive scale. that he intended to run for office for two more different effect and encourage the growth This is a shift that is producing qualitative terms so as to be able to preside over the of small business in the area. as well as quantitative changes. For the rest of opening ceremonies for the Olympics of If one believes that London is a gently the world it provides a unique opportunity to sizes, building typologies and tenure types. Mayor of London since the publication of the 2012. The story does not have to be literally anarchic city that has always grown haphaz- see the tensions and fault lines between plan- The urgency of this agenda transcends the Urban Task Force Report. The redevelopment true to pose real questions about the impact ardly in fits and starts, and it is that quality ning and market forces, between a centralised ACCOMMODATING realm of housing and it has important impli- of large portions of East London in prepara- of the singularly un-British approach to local that is behind its long-term robust good vision and laissez-faire. For Londoners it’s a cations for social integration and for tion for the 2012 Olympic Games is seen government that Livingstone represents.After health, then the interventionism proposed giddying, dizzying ride, which once more puts London’s ability to keep functioning; many as an opportunity to demonstrate the reach two or more decades of drift, and ambiguity, by Livingstone is either irrelevant, or even it in the uncertain territory of a metropolis in GROWTH OR CONFLICT? of the city’s key workers in the fields of health, of design in practice. How much will the London as an urban entity now has a clear counterproductive. In fact, the Mayor has the midst of the kind of change it has not seen transport, policing and education find it Olympic Park, like other regeneration sites focus of power. It is a development that is the produced a blueprint for future development for a century. Housing and urban neighbourhoods increasingly difficult to secure housing within across the city, catalyse a regeneration of the most startling product of Tony Blair’s local that is as prescriptive as anything London has the city. However, this goal is obstructed by derelict areas surrounding it? And what legacy government reforms. They were intended to seen. It remains to be seen how effective it Deyan Sudjic is Dean of the Faculty of Art ingrained preferences for low density neigh- will the Olympic Village create as a model change the face of all the country’s big cities. will be. Certainly London has had large-scale Design and Architecture, Kingston University bourhoods (with house and garden typolo- of socially sustainable housing? Are questions London is the one success story of a reform urban visions in the past. It was Nash’s and co-chair of the Urban Age Advisory Board igh land values, continuous fication can lead to town-cramming and gies) and against multi-family units. Despite worth asking. How to stimulate housing con- that has elsewhere failed to take root. It London that was heroic enough to inspire price hikes and the inability over-development. high land values, there are often insufficient struction and secure affordability, the impor- should have been the most difficult, and the Napoleon III to remodel Paris, just as it was of supply to keep pace with ris- A prevalent argument among those incentives for housebuilders to build more tant roles for the private and social sectors to most unmanageable, and yet it has turned out the London Underground that used to set ing demand have made housing studying the social geography of the city has affordable units.