Planning the Unplannable: what next for the still unpublished London Plan post-Covid 19?
On the day London was due to go to the polls to elect a Mayor and new Assembly, researcher Chi Nguyen asks what becomes of the London Plan in a post-Covid 19 era.
7th May would have marked election day in London, with polls open for Mayor and the Assembly, the sixth such occasion in the twenty years since the position was created and Greater London Authority (GLA) formed. On 8th May, a new Mayor would have been announced or — as had largely been predicted — the current Mayor, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, would have kept his job for another four years.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, the situation has dramatically changed. The UK is in lockdown, and instead, 7th May marks the date when ‘stay at home’ measures are due to expire and under review to be eased. Election day has now been pushed back one year until May 2021. Most Londoners are presently shuttered in their homes. Khan stays on for another twelve months and remains Mayor in the interim as he, like many other political and metropolitan leaders, grapples locally to manage an unprecedented global crisis that has led to a global pausing. As London looks to un-pause, where we go from here hangs in the balance.
Normally, interrogating and guiding the future of London lies with the London Plan. It is “one of the most crucial documents for our city,” a major piece of policy produced by every new Mayor of London which outlines their vision for the city’s future based on a projected, as well as desired, direction of change. As with Boris Johnson (now Prime Minister) and Ken Livingstone before him, when Sadiq Khan came to power in 2016, his primary charge was to draft and publish a London Plan, providing a blueprint in his view for how the capital will take shape over the next twenty years. The policies set forth inform the city’s spatial and infrastructural development. Khan’s draft version provides particular guidance on the concept of ‘good growth’, which is defined in his plan as development that promotes and delivers a better, more inclusive form of growth on behalf of all Londoners, leading to a more socially integrated and sustainable city.
Even before the novel coronavirus, the mayor’s new draft London Plan was being called into question, with conflicted opinions among local authorities, public bodies, professional, private and community interests over the definition of ‘good growth’, playing a tug-of-war of who gets a say in that growth, if the pursuit of growth is appropriate at all. From a communities perspective, Just Space, the network of community organisations, had called on the London Assembly to reject the plan on grounds that it “will further deepen inequalities in the city and fall badly short on environment,” urging the accountability arm of City Hall not to adopt the draft. (It subsequently did.) At the same time, developers had unsurprisingly asked, “does the plan go far enough,” making a case for more development.
On 13th March, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Conservative MP Robert Jenrick, published a scolding letter of rebuke in response to the Mayor’s Intend to Publish version of the plan. It deemed his plan too complex and not pro-development enough, inconsistent with national policy and inadequate for meeting London’s housing needs. After having taken five months and two delays to consider the plan’s merits, Jenrick sent it back with strongly worded directives for amendments to be made in order to gain sign-off, the Secretary’s approval being the last hurdle before publication. The Mayor’s reply shows no love lost between the two tiers of government, criticising the Secretary’s “heavy-handed” tactics to “run roughshod” over his efforts to finalise the plan, and “making no apologies” for a plan which seeks “to deliver for Londoners and to deliver on pledges from the mayor’s manifesto.”
A long-term strategy, the London Plan covers mayoral priorities, which for Khan include issues relating to design, the environment, transport, economy, housing, heritage and culture, and social, green, natural and sustainable infrastructure — all of which Covid-19 has radically changed in a very short time. London has changed in an instant, in a way that no one had anticipated. The ‘Great Pause’ has caused massive disruption to normal, affecting all aspects of life ranging in order of magnitude from the everyday to the economy. By the end of last month, much of the world has experienced some form of a standstill. As nations stutter to reopen, May and June and the rest of summer here in the UK will prove critical months for figuring out a path forward, for considering possible futures and how to carry on. A question tacitly on everyone’s minds is: what next?
No plan could have predicted the global scale of the coronavirus outbreak and the swift shutdown of countries and cities in response. Its impact on densely populated areas has been especially profound, and in London’s case, has put further strain on metropolitan systems and infrastructures already under tremendous pressure from the housing and climate crises. ‘Physical distancing’ has hollowed out the city, made ghost towns of boroughs and neighbourhoods, and put livelihoods on the line. Covid-19 is acutely making visible existing disparities and inequalities that led to black, Asian and minority ethnic communities being disproportionately affected, doubly by the health and economic crisis. Notably, ‘stay at home’ measures have had significant consequences for urban inhabitants for a majority of whom physical distancing is nearly impossible. It sets the vulnerable and the underprivileged living and/or working under insecure and precarious conditions at further disadvantage and further risk of inequality, as Catalina Ortiz and Camillo Boano have recently described, highlighting the need for rethinking infrastructures of care in terms of the relationship between housing and urbanism as pivotal to a healthy recovery. Cleaner air, due to a lack of traffic and human-generated pollution, seems to be one of the few (inadvertent) positives, but it has undoubtedly brought debates about the relationship between the natural and built environments to the fore.
Ten years ago, in a special issue of City, Culture and Society on London’s transformation 2000–2010, Tony Travers and Ian Gordon wrote about the difficulty of governing London in relation to its complexity, diversity and variety as a metropole. In the context of Doug Yates’ (1977) original thesis about the governance challenge typically facing major cities like Yates’ New York, they argued that London is likewise an ‘ungovernable’ city, at least in strategic planning terms. In their paper, they examined the role of the London Plan — a city-wide policy document for future growth — and questioned how the processes of strategic planning in London could be used as an effective means of steering change in a functional urban region spanning 150 miles across.
A decade later in 2020, at the scale and speed of change wrought by Covid-19, the question of how to govern the ungovernable invites consideration of: how to plan for the unplannable?
Covid-19 has ushered in an urgency — and an accelerated urban transformation — that a structurally rigid (and slow) UK planning system is arguably not well equipped to respond to. In Khan’s still unpublished London Plan, many chapters are already out of step with the need to reassess the design and spatial development patterns of town centres and central activities zones, transport nodes, streets and the public realm, in order to mitigate hotbeds for outbreaks. Policies on safety, security and resilience to emergency and digital connectivity infrastructure presently account for less than two pages each in the 500-page document. With the en masse shift to online living, there is greater impetus not only to reconsider communications technologies policy to address capacity, but also to ensure digital democracy, particularly important to “safeguard the public voice in planning” and lower barriers to participation amid adapted consultation practices of “engagement at distance.” Generally, equitable access to broadband, democratic processes, health, food, housing, education, social and economic opportunity warrants thoughtful re-examination.
In our Covid-19 era, what then is the role of a plan that appears every four years and forecasts urban change over a 20+ year period when a pandemic has essentially, irrevocably changed the world within 2–3 months? The plan nominally takes a few years to write, another year or more to undergo public review and third-party scrutiny before it is published, the extended schedule sometimes adding up to the full length of a mayoral term. Khan’s draft plan was originally slated for publication before December, but a protracted back and forth between the Labour-led Mayoral office and the Conservative central government had delayed the process. It remains uncertain when the final plan will come out. Meanwhile, the current London Plan, a legacy of Boris Johnson’s tenure, was last updated in 2016, which measured by pandemic timescales, is an eternity ago.
Covid-19 puts the London Plan’s use, relevance and timing into perspective, and throws it under new light, sharpening already existing criticisms about its onerous process and raising further questions about its efficacy and suitability as a forward-looking document to reflect present-needed change. While the Mayor and the GLA work in the background to make changes to the plan in line with the Secretary of State’s directives, Covid-19 continues to change London in ways not yet calculable. The pandemic is reshaping the city and setting it on an unknown but decidedly different path than the one being fought over pre-virus.
Post-virus, will the new London Plan be obsolete by the time it does get printed because it bets on a future that is no longer viable and depends on doing things ‘business as usual’? The plan is predicated on interpreting past trends that have now been knocked off their trajectories by the ‘new normal’. Many policies hinge on projected population and continued urban growth, which are based on historical data and driven by a specific understanding of density, sustainability and the movement of goods and people, that the outbreak has completely turned on its head.
In our moment of staring down an uncertain future, what becomes of a plan made from and for another time and through a status quo process? How does, and how can, planning work when the unplannable happens?
Chi Nguyen is a communications designer and a doctoral researcher at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her practice centres on visual communication in architecture and urbanism, and her PhD research looks into the civic role of publishing in public conversations about urban change, focusing on the new London Plan. Chi holds degrees in graphic communication design (Central Saint Martins) and architecture (Carleton University), with additional training in art and new media from OCAD University and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. She tutors at Central Saint Martins and at The Bartlett, where she teaches with UCL Urban Laboratory’s director Clare Melhuish and co-director Ben Campkin on the module Histories of Global London: 1900 to the Present. Normally based in London, Chi is presently in lockdown in her hometown of Toronto.
