Sadiq Khan should work with Wider South East to rethink the green belt and tackle the region’s housing shortage

By Ian Gordon
A particularly attractive patch of London's green belt. Image of Rainham Marshes courtesy of Romfordian, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is an edited version of an article which originally appeared on the Centre for Cities’ blog before the election.

Ahead of the election on 5 May, the various London mayoral candidates were keen to emphasise their commitment to protecting the welfare of Londoners, present and future.

However, one major issue missing from the mayoral debates was recognition that this cannot be achieved by treating London as an island within the M25 – as both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson did in their time in office. This isolationism is no longer sustainable given the threat posed by chronic housing shortages, or the size of the opportunities that an integrated, regional approach to public investment would offer to both Londoners and their neighbours.

Incoming mayor Sadiq Khan, taking over a strongly established GLA, has the chance to make his mark by recognising the crucial linkages between his turf and the Wider South East. Practically, this means taking serious account of how “cross-border” economic, housing and labour market links will affect policy decisions. But it also means working more actively with representatives from the wider region to resolve shared problems and make the best of the joint potential of this southern heartland.

These themes emerge strongly in the final set of reports from the previous mayor’s Outer London Commission (OLC), but they barely figured in the electoral manifestos of the leading mayoral candidates. Caroline Pidgeon promised a specific dialogue with the rest of the South East about accommodating London’s household growth when brownfield sites in London ran out. But neither Khan nor Zac Goldsmith showed any more inclination than their predecessors to look beyond the borders of their electorate.

In part, this is because these are not electorally appealing issues, especially given the sensitivities around the green belt. But with the housing crisis set to dominate the political agenda in the capital for years to come, the question of how London engages with its neighbours has become important to address.

This will not succeed if the mayor is simply perceived as asking neighbouring regions to house those who they’ve failed to accommodate within the capital. Leaders from across the wider South East, who’ve two preliminary summits with Boris Johnson are expecting London to do its bit in releasing extra land for development – but they have a wider agenda and are responding to the fact that the housing crisis is region-wide. Its common cause is the overall tightness of land supply across the South East, exacerbated by greenfield development quotas which have bitten most directly outside London.

The issue is shared because neither mayors nor planners elsewhere can “control their domestic borders”. Housing completions need to double to meet the estimates of housing need, but despite all the efforts currently proposed by the OLC and others, this is still unlikely.

In that case, some of London’s projected population growth will simply get diverted into neighbouring sub-regions. But since capacity there is also limited, the likely knock-on effect will be for more local residents to look further afield for affordable housing – spreading London’s housing footprint even deeper into semi-rural East Anglia, Wales and the South West (if not to cities further north).

This would be a perverse and environmentally unsustainable outcome of “compact city” planning policies. Instead, a much better idea would be to take a city-region approach – channelling growth into well-connected strategic locations closer to London, which would enhance both economic and environmental sustainability.

The OLC's proposed growth corridors.

The OLC reports offer a series of recommendations for how the new mayor can boost housing output from brownfield sites within London. However, this alone won’t close the supply gap, requiring new initiatives to bring other land into residential development.

To address this in a sustainable way, the OLC recommends that the new Mayor should take a lead in ensuring strategic reviews of green belt are undertaken on a co-ordinated basis, both inside London and beyond. Another more specific proposal recommends a focus on the development of five “Growth Corridors” along major transport axes in and out of London, with an integrated combination of housing, employment and enhanced transport links.

As the Centre for London’s recent Manifesto for London also recognises, opening-up more land for development must be pursued in a controlled fashion that can command broad support. This may be best achieved through identifying specific well-bounded areas, with potential for dense development, to be excluded from the green belt – removing the fear of continual incursion into other areas. This should also be buttressed by “deals” to enhance environmental quality across other nearby green belt areas, and to upgrade communications links.

Of course, these ideas are speculative – the point is that willing partners and public confidence will be required in order to find solutions to the housing crisis across the South East. As the most powerful political actor in the extended region, the mayor of London could play a crucial leadership role in this process, by helping to negotiate deals with the government and to build habits of co-operation among regional partners.

But most importantly, the new mayor must recognise that London simply isn’t a free-standing city-state, and that it can’t “consume its own smoke” in accommodating its projected population growth. Securing a decent quality of life, both for Londoners and their South East neighbours, will require region-wide efforts to re-model a much-valued – but outdated – green belt for the 21st century.

Ian Gordon is emeritus professor in human Geography at the London School of Economics, and a member of the Outer London Commission.

This post was originally published on the Centre for Cities’ blog.

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“One of the few truly beautiful and sublime practices available to us”: on the pleasures of walking at night

By Nick Dunn
American Legion roof spotter Benjamin Franklin enjoys the New York Skyline, c1940. Image: Keystone/Getty.

In an extract from his new book, Dr Nick Dunn discusses how noctambulation can change our perceptions of the city.

The history of walking through cities is as old as that of cities themselves, and, as a practice, subject to a multitude of different uses and interpretations. Walking at night, however, offers something different, having the capacity to alter our ingrained, seemingly natural predispositions towards the urban surroundings, and our perceptions along with it.

It also allows the architecture of the city to be sensed differently. Architecture, through its presence and function, is typically a reflection of the values of the society that built it. Yet no matter how permanent our buildings may appear, there are temporal relationships occurring inside and outside – weathering, occupying, adapting – that subtly alter the fabric of the city.

By venturing into the urban night it is possible to experience the materiality of the city as distinct from its character in the daytime. It appears somehow more porous; the shadow play across its edifices is rich, deep and gelatinous.

In addition, and perhaps of greater significance, it fosters a different way of thinking. In an age of hyper-visibility, encountering anything genuinely new seems incredibly remote, weirdly distanced from us yet at the same time ever-present and depthless. As the feedback loops on all forms of culture tighten, we seem to have reached a terminal inertia of restless regurgitation. The need for a time-place to imagine alternatives becomes increasingly urgent. The point here is not necessarily where this occurs but when.

We can develop a tendency to think of the places we live as being the same, static or even boring. But just because something appears commonplace does not make it so. Surrounded by what largely looks to be identical backdrops to our lives, it is easy to forget this is an environment. On the one hand it is very familiar: we recognize its streets, its architecture and its composition. But on the other hand we enter its strangeness, a different domain that yields its features: sometimes readily and sometimes requiring considerable excavation.

The city is not simply out there – a built construction separate from ourselves – but in the here of our bodies: its particles inhaled and exhaled; its materiality and textures informing our gait and steadily reshaping our footwear; its smells, sights and sounds comforting us or perhaps causing concern. And, of course, pertinently the here of our mind where we reconstruct the city many times over, forging new maps and narratives in response to its restlessness. It lives within us and us within it. The artificiality of the built environment is transformed at night, a loose third place between the natural world and the stark configuration of the daytime city. This is the nocturnal city.

 

London's Soho by night, c1960. Image: Getty.

Architecture may be the original situated technology, supporting social relations and connections. It is also time-bound and has a relationship to space, whether sensitive to its context, indifferent or defiant. Gleaning place from space is no mean feat. But this is what architecture does all the time for good or ill to our sense of our surroundings.

At night, though, architecture’s power transforms the sense of location and orientation in a very different manner. Hitherto barely detectable features take on an altogether different quality in the dark. Urban crevices, interstitial spaces and the city’s margins loom forth in their confidence. The footnotes in these places are rich palimpsest, disclosing temporary inhabitation, sharp tangs of detritus and passage, dank and dripping, sunk and slippery against the more rational and acceptable materiality of the city. These charged voids of the night purr with anticipation of comings and goings, indiscriminate toward their dwellers’ predilections and cravings. To be on your own in the city at night is not to be alone. The architecture follows you, in close conspiracy with the city’s streets.

Noctambulation is at odds with the contemporary city. To be in a city is usually to be surrounded by life, the urban buzz of people, traffic, sights, sounds, smells and tastes all combine within the built environment. Unlike a static backdrop, frozen, or an empty vessel awaiting activity, the city wraps around and passes through you as its heady concoction pulls you into its rhythms, patterns and signals. During the daytime, cities may fizz with energies and exigencies, stirring the body within its soup and conforming it to within acceptable movements and behaviours. Anything and everything seems possible. But it is not. All is not as it initially appears to be. You don't need to look around for long for the signifiers of control and coercion to instruct you. Metal plate and plastic diktats applied on the city's surfaces telling us what to do, typically by virtue of informing us what not to do.

By contrast, the agency of the nocturnal city is a skeleton key to past, present and futures. It allows the unlocking of the city at night to reveal its latent energies and jewels. If we close ourselves down to the nocturnal city, favouring instead the simulacra of representations of life through digital devices, then we are condoning the elimination of the fragile physical aspects of our world that are essential to our reading of it. We are losing fundamental relationships with our surroundings and our understanding of them.

Walking in cities at night, therefore, enables us to sense, connect and think with the city around us. We are able to give things our undivided attention, a welcome respite from the ongoing erosion and subdivision of our time and sense of belonging in the world. Deliberately moving out of the glare and stare of our commoditised and highly structured daily routines and into the rich shadows and patina of our cities at night may be one of the few truly beautiful and sublime practices available to us.

Professor Nick Dunn is chair of urban design and executive director of ImaginationLancaster, an open and exploratory design research lab, at Lancaster University. His book “Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City” is published by Zero Books. 

 

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