No city has a right to perpetual success. Baghdad, Athens, Rome, and Istanbul attest to the impermanent nature of even centuries-long metropolitan glory. Mumbai, Milan, Moscow, Hong Kong, and San Francisco have all recently felt the shudder of a sudden loss of status. 

London could also decline if we fail to resolve its risks and address its imperatives. That’s why we need a New London Agenda. 

London is a negotiated city. It proceeds not through constitutions and masterplans, but through innovations that can be tested and scaled. London has negotiated its place in the realm since at least 1067 when the new Norman King, William I, agreed a ‘mutual recognition’ charter with the City of London. This enshrined our ‘Live and Let Live’ orientation. 

This is our London; a city where the social contract, and the license to operate for business, can be renewed, revised, or revoked, as cycles turn. The edge is reflected in how we use our land and buildings. Our built environment is renegotiated and reinvented frequently. We re-design our city from time to time, and place to place. 

London’s leadership amongst world cities is not just a function of strategic location, beneficial time zones, common language, historic influence on laws or codes, or a globally open mindset. Confidence comes also from a long history, distributed geography, and social mixity. 

These enable multiplicities of activity in different places within the same city, at the same time. Sheer size and scale give London powerful internal markets which are also compelling for mobile creatives, academics, innovators, investors, or elite sports talent.  ‘Play, perform, or compete with the best in London’. Arts and Business mirror the same dynamic. London’s soft power is its magnetism and connectedness, its reach and experience, the venture and scale-up capability. 

In the last cycle (c 1990 to c 2020) London gained vast new opportunities from accelerating globalisation in media, education, information, finance, services, IT and creative industries. The ‘contract’ then was that a ‘world city’ would serve the nation with opportunity, high-value jobs, tax revenues, connections, and foreign investment, through that specialisation in globally traded knowledge and services. 

The ‘deal’ was to let London grow, and to see that all would benefit. This led to massive reinvestment in London’s transport infrastructure, its built environment at waterfronts, markets, stations, and stadia; the densification and diversification of successful business districts, and widespread regeneration of the period housing stock. We reinvented our place. 

It took time for the full implications of this ‘world city model’ to be revealed. Whilst London prospered overall, and attracted new talent and massive investment, the gaps between London and the rest of the UK in fact grew wider, and the inequality and affordability within London got markedly worse. That deal is now dead. 

Our new cycle is beginning. The COVID-19 pandemic closed the constrained mini- cycle that had meandered through the Global Financial Crisis, the Brexit vote, and associated anti-London, anti-metropolitan, sentiment. The pandemic revealed in great detail the extremes of the national divide, and the depth of inequality and vulnerability.

Important shifts have occurred since that last contract. They provide the context for new tactic and settlement. 

First, global geo-politics have changed. Incumbent Governments have been punished for the costs of COVID; the established Western Alliance is diluted; fragile, multiple conflicts are growing; and faster growing nations are exerting new power and alliances. 

Second, the spatial economies of our cities have been transformed. The combinations of metropolitan population growth, with new trends and technology, are changing the ways we consume and work. Combined with the growing business clusters in the frontiers of innovation, our cities are being reformed with a new locational logic. City centres are reinventing themselves as sources of habitat, innovation, and experience. New districts and clusters are rising in a more distributed metropolis. 

Third, new place dynamics are emerging. The pandemic accelerated and widened the depth of choice about how we use our built environment. Offices, shops, venues, restaurants, and more have experienced a massive switch in demand away from large, aggregated, blocks of use, and towards more nuanced, bespoke, contested or agile requirements. The result has been a major process of reinvention of the modalities of property, place-making, and investment. 

These different shifts foster a quest for a new agenda for London. 

The unlocking of the established geo- political consensus creates opportunities as well as threats. London is better placed to navigate these than many other world cities, because its reach is diversified, and its links are well established with India, Middle East, Far East, Africa, and Latin America. 

With a new proactive and conciliarity agenda between London and the UK Government, there are more opportunities to work together to help position the UK in a changing world, and to drive for a new global cycle that is better for the planet, people, and shared prosperity. 

The changed nature of spatial economies plays to London’s strength as a geographically large city within a dynamic prosperous region. London’s spatial economy now has multiple types of growth clusters. Some, like finance and professional services, prefer tight clustering in high experience business districts. Others such as digital and screen industries prefer larger spaces with affordable borderlands where smaller firms can thrive. Life sciences and medical industries require proximities with research and clinical practice, and controlled campus environments. Whereas our maker economies need compelling destinations to drive demand and feed design. 

This means that London’s rich sector mix is now driving a more distributed business landscape, with greater scope for local hubs to thrive. 

The big cycle changes to property and the built environment are a catalyst for London too. More than any other city, London has the largest global cluster of world-leading firms and practices in Architecture and Urban Design, Planning & Civil Engineering, Property Development & Investment, Construction & Infrastructure. 

London’s scale and reach, negotiated character and reinventive capacity, mean that this city is the global innovation district of the built environment, and the world capital of urban design; a place where leaders in the built economy and urban fabric cluster together to compete and collaborate for edge. 

The quest is now focused on how the built environment leads on beauty, climate, innovation, agility, inclusion and experience. A greater design challenge there is none. 

London’s New Agenda is about how to lead the world to build a new social contract that addresses planetary, social, and spatial justice. 

This new contract will be intolerant of high carbon living, and much more focused on access to clean air, healthy lifestyles, and affordable housing. It requires a city that works for all its citizens, not simply the high skilled or well paid. No city can succeed without optimising its physical shape and built form to meet the needs of its people and the planet. If we don’t learn, and show, how to do this now, we face a long cycle of uncertainty, and perhaps an unmanaged decline.