David Taylor reflects on the key issues debated in the latest New London Sounding Board meeting, held last week at The London Centre and chaired by Sadie Morgan.

London can be a world leader in innovation and climate but needs to attend to its housing and affordability crises – and get its ‘mojo’ back. It could take a leaf out of Manchester’s book in terms of the energy, confidence and clear identity that city is showing. But London can also move into its next phase by tackling ‘big ticket’ items, building on its strong history of integration and continuing to harness the growing powers of partnerships between public, private, and citizen sectors.

Those were some of the key issues debated in the latest New London Sounding Board, held last week at The London Centre and chaired by Sadie Morgan. The first provocations were: ‘is London still a world leader’, where should we take a lead, and where are its biggest rivals?

 

NLA senior advisor Greg Clark said London is still a world leader in climate innovation, diversity, and very few other cities can boast its assets. ‘But London has lost one of its assets, which is the support of national government’, he said. ‘And that’s made a big difference to where we are, and the global map of cities is changing’. There are now perhaps more than 20 leading cities in the world, with New York, Paris and Singapore being the key ones, alongside a ‘strange kind of competition’ within the UK taking London’s assets away and competition from ‘non-cities’ such as digital platforms, small nations and European wannabes like Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Dublin.

 

Perkins & Will principal Sunand Prasad agreed about the lack of support from the national government but added that there has been a fall in the status of the UK generally around the world.  Is it a useful question about leading the world, though, he asked. There may be competition between cities with respect to particular offers such as financial services, but overall great cities have more to gain through sharing and collaboration than by identifying competitors. London anyway wasn’t a leader until the 1990s, said LSE London’s Tony Travers, but the city has a very different brand to the UK and Levelling Up is ‘slowly sinking into the sand’. London is also a 43% overseas-born city, of which 40% are of colour, and has managed rapid immigration and integration at least no worse than most other large cities of the same kind. ‘I think we need to think about the capacity to adapt and become a much more international city of people with different heritage, which has happened quickly.’ One of the weird consequences of Brexit, Travers added, is that we have a much more international version of London and a much less European one.

 

Perhaps it is the smaller cities in the UK and across Europe that will chip away at London, suggested the GLA’s Louise Duggan, offering quality of life, efficient public services and a social contract. We are still one of only two Alpha ++ cities, said ‘optimist’ Nabeel Khan of LB Lambeth, along with New York. But we should be taking the lead on climate matters, and AI is another real opportunity. But yes, few cities in the world have done integration as well as London, he agreed. ‘We should celebrate that fact’.

 

London is leading, but it is a ‘fragile’ situation, said British Land’s Emma Cariaga, and it risks being usurped if it doesn’t get to grips with what makes it special. Housing should be its key focus, not least to attract and retain talent. ‘Whatever form you want to enjoy London I think it starts with having a good housing stock that is fit for purpose, suitable for a range of different sorts of people and different affordability’, she said. 

 

Martyn Evans of U+I pointed to Manchester, where his company is building 2 million square feet of office space in the next eight years, as an example of a city that knows its direction. ‘I am constantly amazed at the force of confidence that comes from the people in that city, about their place in the world, and their relationship to London’, he said. This is not bluster, but is based on the universities, the students, and an increasingly large footprint of big companies servicing Europe from Manchester – so how is London progressing in its relationship with other UK cities?

Other points made included London’s strength of social mobility made by Fletcher Priest’s Dipa Joshi but also its reliance on the credit bubble, while Publica’s Lucy Musgrave pointed to the young demographic and the need to allow talent to flourish – which is about housing and building spaces to create. Perhaps though, we should focus less on competition, and more on getting it right, added NLA senior adviser Robert Gordon Clark, SAY Property’s Kemi Oguntoye suggesting that although London’s cultural and sporting offer remains impressive, our standing in the world is temporarily diminished. Affordability in London, though, is a ‘disaster’, said Homes England’s Elizabeth Rapoport, with a ‘horrific’ number of families in temporary accommodation. ‘I think the bottom is falling out, and there’s not enough attention to that’, she said. 

 

‘I think that is a massive crisis brewing’. London has something of an identity crisis too, said Arup’s Jo Negrini, and is lacking confidence not least from funding and attention from the central government. ‘It feels a bit fractured; it doesn’t feel broken. But it gives us a huge opportunity to realign relationships’. Instead, Negrini said, we should be tackling ‘big ticket issues’ that cities all around the world are finding challenging too. Manchester’s advantage, Negrini added, is in clear political leadership.

 

The Sounding Board also heard from British Land’s Emma Cariaga, presenting on the need to invest in innovation, and drawing on the Canada Water ‘new town centre’ project to back up her points, against a background of what she branded a ‘permanent state of uncertainty’ in London today. The project – in the first few years of a 10–15-year venture – covers a ‘super flexible’ permission for around 40 buildings and 5 million square feet: including 2,000-4000 new homes, and half a million to two and a half million square feet of commercial space. British Land is creating an innovation campus with modular buildings including an existing project that is home to a new university joint venture between Arizona State University, University of New South Wales and King’s College London that is totally challenging the way engineering is taught in the UK. The inherently flexible structure has allowed it to grow and expand and the developer to test whether buildings can genuinely grow with organisations and their occupiers as their needs change. Modular allows the developer to test demand for life sciences space, in a ‘short, sharp pilot’.

 

Finally, Greg Clark presented his paper on prioritising partnerships, again as part of the move towards producing the New London Agenda, suggesting first that the new urban economy is more distributed than what we have been used to for the last 30 years when finance, media and professional services responded to ‘super concentration’. Today, more places have more opportunities to have more of the jobs in question with particular concentrations of sectors across London. London is not a planned nor an institutional city it is a negotiated city, Clark said. ‘London is actually a bit of a world champion in partnerships, in a way’. It has been so good in this area through necessity because London is a kind of ‘organised chaos’ where things are negotiated, and then get done. Any new chapter in the city will require us to act together, pooling risks, returns, resources, capabilities, assets and other things to create co-benefits and employing levels of trust. It will require the provision of clarity, giving certainty, building trust, planning for future generations beyond boundaries, embracing, celebrating and prioritizing diversity and investing in innovation, all with partnership at their heart.

 

There are new priorities and demand patterns – population growth has been faster than housing supply growth, for example, or how digitisation arising from the pandemic is changing demand patterns for our streets and buildings.

We also need to make the most of what we have, Clark went on, capitalising on the fact that the Treasury has ‘remembered’ that London is important to the national exchequer, and optimising our existing infrastructure, centres, and reinventing our town centres. And it should look to increasing and encouraging investment through new platforms such as investment partnerships, mutual funds or guarantees, as well as ‘optimising adjacencies’ – working across boundaries.

Area partnerships are showing an evolution of BIDs, reactivating places through place leadership, and pooling interests, while area-based investment partnerships are also demonstrating new ways for big international investors to become involved, and net zero neighbourhoods looking to arrive at a consensus for reconfiguring residential areas. ‘What you're seeing is various ways of thinking anew about place-based partnerships, where there's a much stronger co-investment of assets and capital and talent in the same place. In the New London Agenda we must talk about this’.

 

Finally, Clark outlined new city-wide partnerships, and Opportunity London, as well as investment partnerships being worked on at Arup towards how we might finance decarbonisation or affordable housing. ‘These are all examples of what can we do with what we've already got if we create a different way of configuring what we've already got’. 

 

Responses to this last presentation included from Jo Negrini, whose observation was that you have to look at the whole place ‘system’, that we should note the role of the citizens in solving problems and also the need to learn from other cities. But are there too many partnerships, wondered Robert Gordon Clark. Should we be more robust at winding some of the failing ones up? The more interesting thing is to support partnership as a concept, said Evans, and understand what others need. ‘It’s a human cultural thing’. The issue about partnerships and the new social contract is about power, said Musgrave, and how in a climate emergency we all transition to a completely different way of operating and supporting each other. 

 

The LSE’s Tony Travers said that the partnership landscape is part of an incredibly powerful civil society networking arrangement that is very important to cities and that London has a greater scale than anywhere else in the UK. This is both a weakness and a strength because it is so big. The abolition of the GLC created an enormous pressure to fill its gap but partnerships can be a talking shop – some of which can be good – or can be about networking, and can lead to joint action partnerships formalized to deliver projects, buildings, masterplans and so on. So different types can be valuable, and the way in which they all interact and who the players are would be a very important mapping exercise to undertake, if possible. Finally, the community brings a different new perspective with a new paradigm, bringing different information and new perspectives, said Brixton Project’s Binki Taylor. ‘The formation of those partnerships and how they are replenished is super important’, she said.