Matthew Lockwood
Cities lie at the heart of our climate change dilemmas. Half the world’s population now lives in cities, a figure set to rise to 80 per cent by 2050. Big concentrations of people make vulnerable targets for climate disasters. These will be not only sudden and dramatic (Hurricane Katrina) but also slow and insidious (Shanghai struggling with salination from rising sea levels).
If towns and cities are on the front line of climate change impacts, they are also central to it causes. Cities, after all, are the ultimate “final consumer” of energy, using an estimated 75 per cent of the world total, in transport, construction, industry, and in the heating, cooling and lighting of buildings. Responsible for 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, urban centres also have enormous ecological “footprints,” as they suck up food and resources from their surrounding regions.
Yet in theory, cities should produce many of the solutions we need, both in adapting to the changes and in cutting further emissions. As Nicky Gavron, deputy mayor of London, says, cities have both the motivation and the opportunity to tackle climate change. Learning happens fastest in cities, and city dwellers are more likely to be open to political messages about climate change. Moreover, in the developed world, city dwellers are lower per capita users of energy and bigger users of public transport than suburb or country dwellers.
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Paul Barker
London has always thrived on a gentle version of anarchy. It wasn’t created, or much shaped, by royal or imperial edicts. Nor will it be, I now trust, by mayoral ones. Apropos Ken Livingstone and London, Prospect last month asked: “Is his megalopolis out of control?” To which the best answer is: “Let’s hope so.”
To Prospect Livingstone spoke like a wheeler-dealer, who adapts to almost anything. Not quite so: he is a man with a Plan. “The spatial development strategy for greater London”—otherwise known as the London Plan—was published in 2004. Anyone living in London must pray it is never carried through. The Plan, which is very personal to Livingstone, claims it doesn’t “dictate lifestyles.” But it does.
London’s big burst of new energy—Prospect rightly noted—occurred in the years after 1986, when Livingstone’s previous stamping ground, the Greater London Council, was abolished. Boroughs did deals with central or semi-central agencies. Not the best idea—but it preserved us from a grand design.
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Simon Parker
Simon Parker You still describe yourself as a socialist, but the approach you take to London and to politics in general appears to be quite different to what it was in the 1980s, in the GLC days. How do you think your views have changed since then, and what does it mean to be a socialist today, running this most capitalist of cities?
Ken Livingstone Well, the whole world has been transformed since the early 1980s. I grew up in a world in which everything came down to where you stood in a conflict between America and the Soviet Union, and that poisoned the politics of every country. When I became leader of the GLC, in 1981, we had an agenda that now looks incredibly moderate in terms of discrimination: making the police accountable and so on. Now you have David Cameron embracing most of these things, but in those days it was seen as a threat because it was somehow on the Soviet side. When we cut the fares on public transport, the Daily Mail said this was the first step towards the introduction of a full Soviet economy; you need to remember that everything was being seen through the prism of Fleet Street, where there wasn’t a single black reporter, no-one was openly gay, and there were no women in any senior positions. It was a repository of homophobia and misogyny and racism: they felt threatened by our approach and just laughed at it all.
My role has changed since GLC days too. Then, my job was the day-to-day management of the Labour caucus. Now, I just have to make sure my budget goes through the assembly once a year—and in the rest of my time I can put together coalitions of interests around a common agenda. City Hall is the centre of a web. So, for example, you get everybody signed up to Crossrail [the proposed east-west rail link through central London, running from Maidenhead to Shenfield and Abbey Wood]. Where before I was looking inward to the party machine, now I look outward. It’s a position that, thanks to the prestige of the office enables, you to broker deals with government or the private sector—Americans understand this better than we do. Another example of this kind of coalition: we have just launched our climate change strategy, which identifies how to reduce emissions by 30 per cent in ten years, and 60 per cent in 20. New York and LA and Chicago are working on similar strategies as well, and here it’s involved working with the boroughs, with the private sector, with the government. City Hall is the centre of the web—together we can get all this done.
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Simon Jenkins
London is the world’s top city, so it is shouted from the rooftops. Back in the 1980s boom, when London “boosterism” was first emerging after decades of the British disease, an American immigrant told me that there was only one reason the world was rushing to colonise the place. It was because being a Londoner was like living not in a city, but in a small town like he had known back home.
Only recently has London even referred to itself as a city rather than a town. It was never planned, laid out, formalised or, until the 20th century, governed as a civic unity. London was spared Paris’s Haussmann, Vienna’s Ringstrasse and Manhattan’s gridplan. It simply sprawled outwards, engulfing villages, landed estates and suburbs in one multifarious settlement. The Hanoverian monarchs, as local landowners, were church wardens at St Martin-in-the-Fields. When Karl Marx moved his family to Walthamstow, he found to his astonishment that he had to do service as a vestry constable. The rubric “a city of villages,” which survives to this day, was a misnomer and yet a potent one.
I have lived variously in Camden Town, Upper Norwood, Pimlico, Crouch End, Earls Court and Primrose Hill. Most Londoners would recognise these places as geographical personalities, even if they never visited them. London’s topography is not of its administrative boroughs but of Kentish Town, Crystal Palace, Hampstead, Pimlico, Battersea, Stepney, Rotherhithe. My village of Primrose Hill possesses the essential components of an urban village: high street, parish church, square, clinic, council flats, primary school and a branch library. Yet it possesses no shred of self-government. To government it is a postcode, no more.
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Simon Parker
At the top of the Greater London Authority’s headlamp-like headquarters on the south bank of the Thames, Ken Livingstone’s office takes in a panorama from the edge of the City of London, over Tower Bridge and down the river towards Canary Wharf. A hubristic man might feel he was in London’s cockpit, surrounded by the levers of power.
Actually, the GLA has rather few levers compared to comparable big city authorities. And it is just such minimal governance, both here in City Hall and Westminster, that is said to be one reason for London’s renaissance. The management consultants McKinsey recently said that Britain’s relaxed approach to immigration and regulation was making London the best place for financial business in the world. In the next few years, the city could regain its historical role as the world’s financial capital, pushing a traumatised, post-9/11 New York into second place.
Since becoming mayor seven years ago, Livingstone has watched from his cockpit as the glass towers of high finance—including the iconic gherkin— have sprung up across the river. And whoever is sitting in the mayor’s office in ten years’ time will be watching a new line of skyscrapers wind across east London’s Lea valley and down towards Canary Wharf. The 2012 Olympic games will have spurred regeneration in the east, including a new era of high-density housing for the 800,000 extra people who will be living in the capital by then (taking its population from today’s 7.5m to 8.3m). The streets around the GLA building will have few cars on them—the congestion charge will have expanded its reach and cost, taking in most of inner London—and private gardens and cars will increasingly be the preserve of the rich. London’s 32 boroughs may have been reinvented as five gigantic wedges, dedicated to shuttling people into and out of the centre.
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Max Nathan
The green belt is planning’s gold standard. It places a green ring around our major cities, holding back sprawl and protecting the countryside. Over the past 60 years it has achieved totemic status, like the NHS or A-Levels. It is beloved of environmentalists and middle England alike.
In December, the government made these people very anxious when it published the economist Kate Barker’s review of land use planning. In a previous review, Barker had recommended Britain build an extra 140,000 houses a year. Now she was arguing for the government to rethink the whole green belt approach, encouraging cities to build out into the countryside.
Most reactions to the review were hostile. Journalists, pressure groups and former ministers lined up to denounce it as “armageddon,” “devastating” and “complete lunacy.” But is this really the end of the world as we know it? What are the real implications for planners and the public?
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Joel Kotkin
The world’s great cities face serious, even catastrophic problems. Terrorists have planted bombs in London’s Underground and bus systems. Floods have wiped out New Orleans, and fires incinerated scores of impoverished Africans living in crowded, seamy Paris apartments.
Everywhere—from New Orleans to London and Paris—the middle classes, whatever their colour, are deserting the core for safer and more affordable suburbs, following in the footsteps of high-tech industries and major corporations.
Yet rather than address serious issues like housing, schools, transport, jobs and security, mayors and policy gurus from Berlin and London to Sydney and San Francisco have adopted what can be best be described as the “cool city strategy.” If you can somehow make your city the rage of the hipster set, they insist, all will be well.
New Orleans, the most recent victim of catastrophic urban decline, is a case in point. Once a great
commercial hub, the city’s economic and political elites have placed all their bets on New Orleans becoming a tourist and culture centre. Indeed, just a month before the disaster, city leaders held a conference that promoted a “cultural economy initiative” strategy for attracting high-end industry. The other big state initiative was not levee improvement but a $450m expansion for the now infamous convention centre.
This rush to hipness has its precedents, perhaps even in Roman festivals or medieval fairs. But in the past, most cities did not see entertainment as their main purpose. Rome was an imperial seat; Manchester, Berlin, Chicago and Detroit foundries of the industrial age; London, New York, and later Tokyo, global financial centres.
Perhaps even worse, the lure of “coolness” leads cities to ignore the fundamental issues—infrastructure, middle-class flight, terrorism—that have so much more to do with their long-term prospects. Cities once boasted of their thriving middle-class neighbourhoods, churches, warehouses, factories and high-rise office towers. Today they set their value by their inventory of jazz clubs, gay bars, art museums, luxury hotels and condos.
The advocates of this approach are a new generation of “hip cool” mayors, including Ken Livingstone, Berlin’s Klaus Wowereit, San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, Baltimore’s Martim O’Malley, Detroit’s “hip hop” mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the gay chief executive of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe.
Ken Livingstone sees London’s future tied to “the richness, breadth and diversity of its cultural and creative resources.” Theatres, sports stadiums, museums and cinemas are, he notes, “what many of us enjoy most about living here.” Culture, not commerce, is “London’s heartbeat.” For a city “vulnerable to the up and downs of the global political and economic system,” the mayor proclaims, culture and tourism represent an ideal way to counteract “the negative impact of such events.”
This refocus of urban policy around culture and tourism has wide appeal, particularly in continental Europe. Expensive—and increasingly economically marginal cities—like Paris, Vienna and post-cold war Berlin have all embraced the notion of a culturally-based lifestyle economy.
Berlin epitomises the trend. In the 1990s, massive funds were expended to make the restored German capital into the business capital of Mitteleuropa. These ambitions foundered on the city’s high taxes, red tape, and generally anti-business culture. Over 100,000 jobs have left in recent years, unemployment is nearly 20 per cent and the population is declining, as people flee to the suburbs or more prosperous parts of Germany.
Faced with such problems, what does the mayor of the bankrupt city propose? Cut taxes, build new infrastructure, find ways to keep the middle classes and businesses? No, Mayor Wowereit pegs the future to selling Berlin as “the city of glamour.” To him, “the most decisive aspect is to bring creative young people to Berlin.” Somehow, he believes, this will turn the city’s sad economy around.
Similar thinking has been picked up by political and business leaders in grittier places like Liverpool and Manchester, Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit. Faced with population decline of 30 to 40 per cent over the past half century, these cities have all created programmes designed to lure gays, bohemians and young “creatives” to their towns.
This ephemeralisation of urbanism derives, in part, from the theories of Richard Florida, an American academic whose theories about the “creative class” have captivated many city leaders. Using research drawn largely from the dot-com era of the late 1990s, Florida insists that the key to urban success lies in attracting such groups of young twentysomething singles, artists and homosexuals. Florida’s favourite hip cities, not surprisingly, are places like Sydney, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Boston, areas with lots of students, artists and gays—and the lowest percentages of families. Other less hip locales have been duly forewarned, as a headline in the Washington Monthly put it, that cities “without gays and rock bands are losing the economic race.”
There is little evidence that this is really how urban economies work. It turns out that many of the most prized members of the “creative class” are not 25-year-old hip cools, but fortysomething adults who, particularly if they have children, end up gravitating to the suburbs and more economically dynamic cities like Phoenix, Boise, Charlotte or Orlando.
The false promise of Florida’s “creative class” has been obvious for the last five years, particularly with the collapse of the dot-com boom. In the late 1990s there did appear to be a new kind of urban economy—driven by black-clad graphic designers, programmers and marketeers—that was bringing new jobs, wealth and residents to old urban areas from San Francisco’s “multimedia gulch” to New York’s ultra-trendy “silicon alley.”
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Paul Barker
Not long after the second world war, ex-sergeant Eric Hobsbawm moved into a flat in an 18th-century house on the north side of Clapham common. “Outside,” he writes in his recent autobiography, “I recall seeing my new colleague at Birkbeck College, Nikolaus Pevsner, perambulating the area for his great Buildings of England like an examiner giving marks to the past.” The Leipzig-born Pevsner, with his newly acquired British citizenship, was working on a classic early volume in his planned Buildings of England series: London Except the City of London and Westminster. It was always known to Pevsner fans simply as London Except.
This book symbolised his love affair with his adopted country. Many people had written architectural, topographical or antiquarian guides to London. With a few picturesque exceptions, such as Hampstead, Richmond or Greenwich, these books had always focused on the usual sights of Westminster and the City. Eventually published in 1952, London Except made the full circuit of all the other boroughs within the old London County Council area: from St Pancras and Islington in the north to Lambeth and Lewisham in the south; from Hammersmith and Wandsworth in the west to Poplar and Woolwich in the east. It was in these places that most Londoners lived. These urban tracts had been built up by the Victorians. Within them lay—then largely unregarded—baroque wonders like Hawksmoor’s great east end churches, or the Georgian terraces of Barnsbury (which was known as Pentonville before the estate agents waded in).
This April, 53 years later, the final updating of Pevsner’s London Except is completed, the keystone in a new arch. The last part is London 5: East. The earlier revisions of Pevsner’s great work, London 2, 3 and 4, reported on, respectively, south, northwest and north London (volumes 1 and 6 cover the City and Westminster). The whole of the original London Except was less than 500 pages; London 5 alone extends to 864. The lead author of London 5, as of all the other London Except revisions, is Bridget Cherry. She began work on the national series in 1968, as Pevsner’s research assistant, and went on to become overall editor of The Buildings of England (now called the Pevsner Architectural Guides), retiring from that role three years ago. As series revisions have gone ahead, Pevsner continues to be listed as a co-author. This is more than posthumous piety: something of what he wrote is retained, though the revisions are often blander and always much bigger. The new London volumes now reach out to the wider boundaries of the Greater London Authority. But the revised volumes’ aggrandisement is largely due to the 50 years of research, amateur and professional, which Pevsner himself stimulated. He inspired thousands of conservation-minded groups and people, who had not realised what was there to conserve.
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Ken Worpole
The amazing professor is telling his Edinburgh audience a joke at the expense of “predict and provide” traffic managers around the world. It concerns a man living in a small town in midwest America who finds a skunk in his basement one morning. He asks a neighbour for advice on how to get rid of it. “Easy: lay a trail of breadcrumbs from the basement back out into the woods.” The following morning he has two skunks in his home.
Jan Gehl, professor of architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, is today’s global superstar of urban planning. He advises city authorities in Adelaide, Changsha, Edinburgh, 
Melbourne, Lyon, Oslo and, most recently, London, on how to bring human activity back into cities dominated by cars. Gehl’s work has the great advantage of being based on more than 40 years of experience, starting with the pedestrianisation of Copenhagen’s main thoroughfare, Strøget, on 17th November 1962. That decision was the beginning of a project which continues to this day – to turn Copenhagen from a car-congested city into the café-culture capital of the world.
When Gehl and his colleagues announced their programme, the Danish newspapers protested: “We are not Italians.” The idea that Danes would leave their cars at home and walk or cycle into town to sit at café tables in the street was considered absurd. Today, more than a third of Copenhagen’s traffic is made up of cyclists, and most of the rest either walk or use public transport. Since the 1960s, the amount of pedestrian space in Copenhagen has risen from 15,800 square metres to over 100,000 today. The city centre now only offers just over 3,000 car parking spaces, mostly on the street. Perhaps the most important cultural change, however, has been the 350 per cent rise in people engaged in “stationary” activities in the city centre; that is to say, standing talking, sitting in a café or on a public bench, alone or in groups, simply watching the world go by.
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Michael Lind
Can everyone on earth be rich? Not rich in relative terms – in a world of billionaires, millionaires would feel poor – but in terms of the lifestyle choices that today only the rich enjoy: in particular, in stuff (personal technology), space (low-density living in proximity to nature), and speed (geographic mobility). The world’s population is expected to stabilise at around 9bn and then decline. Can 9bn people enjoy stuff, space and speed?
The austerity school says no. The earth’s environment will be devastated if 9bn human beings attempt to enjoy the average standard of living of a middle-class individual – much less a rich person – in Europe, North America or Japan. Not only should the majority of the world’s people resign themselves to poverty forever, but rich nations must also revert to simpler lifestyles in order to save the planet.
But the pessimism of the austerity school is unfounded. There may be political or social barriers to achieving a rich world. But there seems to be no insuperable physical or ecological reason why 9bn people should not achieve something like the lifestyle of today’s rich, with technology only slightly more advanced than that which we now possess.
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