I am grateful for the opportunity to extract myself from the quagmire of the immediate policies, standards and regulations of my working day as chair of HTA Design and look at wider context that might lead us to some answers to a very broad question. I’ll take the challenges in the following order:
 
How can we be sustainable and fair?
Delivering a post-carbon city.
The question of cost and viability.
Seeking appropriate density and scale.

For London to be a sustainable and fair city, I’d say we need to first envisage a nation and an economy as a whole that is sustainable and fair.

My recent appointment as chair of the Historic Places Panel at Historic England has taken me to places like Dewsbury and Accrington, Luton and Portsmouth where we have been privileged to meet, and seek to advise Local Authorities in their valiant efforts at urban regeneration.  Many of you may already know, but speaking personally (rather than on behalf of Historic England) I have been surprised at just how challenged the economies of these towns are and how unfair the distribution of resources to them has become.

What I’m saying is that London needs to relax a bit about sharing resources with the rest of the country and Westminster certainly should relax its grip on the purse strings of the most centralised western economy.  Why?  Because we won’t be able to offer a fair deal for Londoners until the demand for space in London has regained some balance with the demand for space in the rest of the country.

I bought my first house in London in 1981 at the precise moment that the exodus of population from the city turned and people started coming back.  Including renovation the whole thing cost me less than the salary of a young architect at the start of my career.  Now the ratio of median housing costs to family income in London is 1:20. Time to reverse the flow once again, I’d say.

The route to a post carbon city also lies beyond the current boundaries of the Greater London Authority.  I’ve argued before at The London Society, and at an NLA Debate (which I lost!) that effective governance for London requires extension to at least the whole of its travel to work area – within which 75% of the working population rely on the city for their employment.  In my view it is just not reasonable for councils in the home counties to refuse housing generated by demand from London, whilst remaining reliant on London for so much else – including employment.

No doubt you will cry - what about the Green Belt?!  Well, we must re-think its purpose. No longer should it function solely as a corset to constrain development.  Greenbelt policy should turn instead to the task of offsetting all aspects of sustainability that cannot be met within the city’s existing built footprint.  Obviously, that should include biodiversity, but also aspects of leisure, recreation and health to benefit Londoners.  The transformation of the green belt from agribusiness to biophilic lung might very well include new homes too – but only if significantly carbon positive - and certainly not the incremental and inherently unsustainable sprawl we see at the moment.

It's well known that if all of London were at the density of the borough where I live, Islington, it could accommodate twice its current population.  But the dream of mid-rise gentle density seems a long way off.  At HTA we have been working on suburban intensification for over a decade and our Supurbia project may just be reaching the statute books under the heading of Street Votes in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill – not without its detractors!

Scarcity of land is driving up densities.  In our collaborations with other leading housing architects LBA, PRP and Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects – Recommendations for living at Superdensity and Superdensity the Sequel – we envisioned criteria for successful superdense neighbourhoods of streets and squares with high quality public realm.  But many of the GLA Opportunity Areas seem to fall way short and opposition to high rise housing is building.

In summary, I’m arguing that it will be necessary to look outside the GLA area at London’s hinterland and beyond to the nation as a whole, if we are going to find answers to questions of cost and viability as well as appropriate density and scale.  Otherwise, if current irreconcilable conditions of demand and supply of affordable land persist, the increasingly uncomfortable, indeed controversial juxtapositions of scale, cost and value will continue.
 
Thank you!