Greater London Authority (Referendum) Act 1998

Transcription

>>Thank you very much for coming along this evening to this event on The Long Legacy: London 2062. UCL calls itself, or names itself, "London's global university". That might have originally been a name coined to irritate the other University of London, however, I think time has shown that [it] has a degree of resonance. And as a global university, we have asked ourselves the question, what is the role of a leading university in the world, and we feel that it's important that not only do we carry out world class research, but that we actually integrate and cross tension the expertise we have in different disciplines to try to find solutions to globally significant problems. So, as Vice-Provost for research, my responsibility is to try to encourage colleagues to cross the traditional divide of different disciplines to come up with solutions or possible solutions to major problems. And as a result, what we've done at UCL is to create and define four grand challenges which focus on major societal issues which the world faces. The first of these grand challenges is global health: why is it that citizens of sub-saharan African countries are actually dying from diseases that can be readily treated here at UCH or elsewhere? The second of our grand challenges is sustainable cities, and that's born some of the activity that we'll talk about tonight. Our third grand challenge is intercultural interaction, and our fourth grand challenge is human wellbeing. Now these grand challenges are being evolved over the last couple of years and continue to do so but tonight we are focusing on the cities problem, and in the sustainable cities equation and studies that we've been carrying out at UCL focused on a variety of things, for instance, recently in May we published a commission with the Lancet on 'healthy cities' -- what is it that one has to do to ensure that cities around the world are healthy places and engender healthy lives for their citizens? But tonight we focus on the analysis of colleagues at UCL and outside UCL that have been working in the last year or so on aspects related to London and the future of London. And we titled that project 'London 2062', a fifty-year view forward as to what are the challenges, what are the issues that this wonderful metropolitan city face, and how is it that we could start thinking now in a way that will avoid and alleviate some of the challenges and the negatives which could occur, and obviously, what is it that we need to do to conserve the positive features of London. And I think in the summer, we've all seen some of the fabulous things that bring London to life and what makes London a special place, and I think it's really exciting to talk about tonight how it is we can capture, grow that and actually have this long legacy fifty years after the Olympics. So I'm delighted this evening that we have a number of colleagues who have been involved with the thinking and the development of this analysis, and we'll be hearing from three of them this evening. Later on in the year, or maybe at the beginning of 2013, we will be publishing a book which captures the ideas of a number of other colleagues and which will be launching a little bit later on there. But I'd like to start this evening, therefore, by asking my three colleagues to come and give some of their thoughts about some of the issues, and after they've spoken, we'll be able to have a dialogue and discussion with questions from the audience. So to start this evening, I'd like to introduce to you Ben Harrison, who is the Director of Future of London, and has been involved in the discussions throughout the last year or so, and is going to give us a synoptic overview of some of the thinking which is being developed. So, Ben, can I pass it over to you? >>[Applause] >>[Harrison] Can I just start by asking if you can all hear me all right? Is the mic okay? It sounds like it is. Excellent. Thank you very much David and good evening ladies and gentlemen. Before I start with what I have prepared to say tonight, I just also want to thank Sarah Bell, Mark Tudor Jones, James Paskins and Ian Scott from UCL for offering the invitation to Future of London to come and get involved in this programme of work. It's been a fantastically interesting one and we specifically were involved in running a series of seminars at the start of this year looking at a number of different related disciplines and policy areas and I'm going to say a bit more about that in a moment. Before I do that, though, I just want to take the opportunity to give a bit of an introduction to Future of London. We're a relatively young organisation and I'm conscious that our involvement in this year may very well be the first time that you come across us as an organisation. So, I'll do a brief run through of that, and then following that, I will give a brief overview, as David mentioned, of some of the areas where we were able to find that consensus from our events and the contributions that were made within them and then some key points of difference going forward about London's future over the next 50 years. So, to begin, what is Future of London? Well, as our strapline says, we're an independent, not for profit, policy network focused on the big challenges facing regeneration, housing and development practitioners in London. What does that mean specifically? Well, we are a membership organisation bringing together London boroughs, registered providers and housing associations, the GLA, TFL and overall we have three main programs of activity. The first is focused on developing the next generation of regeneration leaders in London. We run a training and development program called The Future London Leaders and that identifies individuals whom across our membership who tend to be between five an seven years in their career and provides a range of development and networking opportunities for them. We're into the fourth round of that program. It's been hugely successful and is a very popular part of our program, and we're about to launch the next round next month. We also offer our members various forums to share best practice and innovative thinking across the London Practitioner Network. We're very conscious that despite being a global city, actually a lot of what goes on in London can be surprisingly parochial and building relationships across borough boundaries and between organisations is something which we believe is absolutely vital if we're going to learn the lessons from the various programs of regeneration underway across the capital. And finally, we also produce various outputs from a research and policy point of view but really with a specific focus on pieces of work that will be of practical assistance and are really focused on delivery. Hopefully you've seen a few copies of reports that we've launched over the past 12 months this evening. They've tended to focus on the implementation of various pieces of government legislation, most notably the green deal, and how that can work in London, and we've just published a report recently on flows of overseas investment into the London property market, what that's doing to house prices and what it means going forward for housing policy. So, to deliver this work we engage in a range of partnerships, working with a diverse groups of organisations from UCL to the Joseph Rowntree Organisation, major house builders and big city law firms to deliver a vibrant program as I say with a number of different component parts. Our membership for 2012 is here. We're just about finalised that for 2013, and if you are interested in getting involved in our network, then please do visit our website, it's futureoflondon.org.uk. And there's various different ways that you can become individually involved or as an organisation. So, that's the mini sales pitch over. Turning to think about London 2062 and the seminar series that we collaborated with Sarah, Mark and colleagues on in the spring of this year. The seminar series itself consisted of four sessions. We welcomed a total of over 100 participants, drawn both from the academic community but also from our practitioner network. Each was designed to explore a specific topic, energy housing, transport and the economy, looking ahead over a 50 year timeline, and alongside these events you'll have no doubt seen that colleagues at UCL and ourselves have published a range of think pieces, articles and essays and as David has mentioned there is a more substantial output coming next year. In terms of the sessions themselves and what we -- the themes that emerged from them were, clearly we set our contributors a very large and probably unfair challenge, to conceive of what London is going to be like over a 50 year timeline. It's not a usual task that you present to people that you're inviting to come and speak at an event. And I guess perhaps reflecting the pre-Olympic double dip recession gloom that pervaded over London at that time, it's fair to say that we heard some fairly terrifying projections of what London's going to like in 50 years time: overcrowded and bursting at the seams, subject to the mal-effect of large temperature increases and rising sea levels as a result of global climate change, more unequal than ever and with an economy unable to compete with rising global megacities in the east. Of course, others were simply holding out the hope that the hoverboards that we were promised by the year 2000 would have materialised by then. By and large, it was a pessimistic set of contributions that we received from a number of individuals. Having said that, though, there were definite areas of consensus and disagreement both between and within the practitioner and academic groups that we talked to and who presented to us. And I'd just now like to highlight a few of these, perhaps to inform some of the discussion that we're going to have later on in the evening. So, first of all, to look at where there was a degree of consensus amongst our contributors. When taking into account a rather unscientific show of hands in the seminar looking at specifically the economy, but also taken with the general nature and tone of contributions throughout the series, it seemed pretty clear that most people are of the view that London will continue to be an unequal place and actually will become more unequal over the next 50 years as things stand. Many were concerned about a gap between those at the bottom and the top of the income scales continuing to increase, particularly a disparity between inner and outer London also becoming wider. Secondly, when considering energy policy, all four of our sector specialists highlighted the Danish model of decentralised energy as a key example that London should look to follow in the years ahead, and with colleagues both within the GLI and in our borough members already pursuing schemes in this regard, there was certainly some degree of optimism that progress in this area will be possible and that this will be a very important component part of London meeting its carbon reduction commitment by 2062. Third, the successful delivery of Crossrail is clearly vital to the development of London. But we should also be actively considering what comes next in terms of major investment in London's transport, and there was a sense that perhaps more thought needs to be given to the period between 2020 and 2040 in terms of what that investment's going to look like and how transport can meet the needs of a changing London economy over that time. And fourth and finally, it was widely recognised that tough decisions are going to be needed to improve London's energy efficiency and reduce its carbon output of its built environment. Specific policy initiatives like the green deal are thought to be good places to start but clearly there are significant financial and delivery hurdles that need to be cleared if London is to meet, if these schemes are to be widely taken up and their benefits felt across London, and given that the proportion of the built environment that is still goign to be in use in London in 50 years time is so high, it really does need to be a major priority for London in the years ahead. And then turning to some of the areas where there was more disagreement or uncertainty around where London will be in the next 50 years: much discussion was had over whether we need a new economic model in light of the recent financial crisis and whether the old way of assessing and looking at London's economy was somehow no longer fit for purpose. On the other hand, many of our contributors that actually to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not play to London's existing strengths would be a huge mistake, and I think finding a resolution within those two points of view was probably beyond the two hours that we had to debate it, but it's something which is going to be developing over the coming years, and really, I think, a key point of focus for Future of London going forward is thinking well, if we are serious about developing a more poli-centric London economy with a diverse set of sectors stretching beyond financial services by taking advantage of the opportunities of the digital economy, what does that really look like, and what as practitioners do we need to do to achieve it? Secondly, a clear area of uncertainty was around what if any new powers London should seek from central government? Clearly we have in power at the moment a government that is serious about devolving power to a local area since the events were held, we've obviously seen city deals and a significant devolution of power to Leeds and Manchester and Newcastle and the local deals it's true did bring additional powers to the mayorality in London and increased the scope of mayoral involvement in housing development and other areas. But I think a key question for the next two to three years will really be well, should London be looking for a new settlement to deliver growth in the period ahead, and is it right that London, for instance, takes control fully of the business rate, which has been long on the agenda or other pot of money that could potentially be used to boost investment in the capital, not without controversy, not without extremely complicated areas, but nevertheless, with Boris Johnson probably never being more powerful than he is right now, you would imagine right now that the scope for him to go back to David Cameron and demand a better settlement for London will be one to look out for. Thirdly, and perhaps most controversially of all, the future of aviation policy in London was a big feature of our transport session. Do we expand our existing airport transport incrementally, build a new airport, essentially for Europe in the Thames Estuary, or actually do nothing and take the view that London's priorities should lie elsewhere and that the costs of increasing air travel in London to perhaps some of our other aims in the capital would be too great and therefore not worth doing. Clearly, it's a hot topic politically, so hot in fact that it's been well and truly kicked into the lawn grass for this parliament with none of the major parties that keen to engage with it, nevertheless, the issue's going to continue to dominate public debate and it's not an issue that can be put off forever and whichever way it goes, it's going to have major implications for the future direction of development in the capital, geographically, environmentally and socially. And fourth and finally, and extremely importantly, how can London deliver the number and types of new homes it requires to meet the needs of a population that's projected to grow significantly over the decades ahead, while also ensuring that access to this housing is widened. There is consensus across the practitioner network in London that some of the old models for delivering housing and in particular, affordable housing, are now dead in the water, we are very unlikely to see a return to the levels of public subsidy for affordable housing in London that we've seen prior to 2010 and therefore a new model of investment is required. Quite what that's going to look like is not clear right now, but we have probably a two year window before 2015 to really think about what that should look like for London and be proactive about it, so I think that's going to be a key priority in the years ahead, we'll have very long lasting impacts looking forward to 2062. So, those are some themes and questions emerging form the 2062 event series, and I hope it can inform and spark some discussion later on this evening. They're by no means comprehensive, but each will have a bearing on the kind of city we inhabit over the coming decades. Future of London will certainly be interrogating these issues in more detail over the coming months, and in doing so, we look forward to continuing our partnership with UCL and as I mentioned earlier in the evening, if you do want to know more about Future of London or become actively engaged in some of our projects or programmes, please do look at the website or catch myself later on this evening and I look forward to answering your questions as and when we move to that part. I'll hand over to Ben now. >>So, there we have a synoptic quick whistle stop tour through some of the topics that have been discussed. Next, we're going to hear from Ben Campkin who is Senior Lecturer in the Bartlett School here at UCL and Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, so some aspects of the urban regeneration challenges, focusing now on a little specific window following up that more general oversight. So, Ben, over to you. >>[Campkin] That was already set up, I just wanted to slow us down. Thank you very much and thank you for inviting me to speak this evening and to be part of the London 2062 project. I think it's been a really excellent initiative so thanks to the colleagues for organising it, both in UCL and in Future of London. We've had some really stimulating conversations, and I think it's really important to have these conversations between academic researchers and practitioners and policy-makers around these really important questions. I've been involved with two London 2062 events. I did two different talks. And I seem to have spent both of them trying to avoid talking about the long distance future in different ways, trying to avoid this idea of future-gazing, but what I wanted to do today was really think through some of the ideas that came out of the London 2062 housing workshop that I participated in in relation -- and not all of those ideas were specifically about housing, some of them were about wider regeneration issues, and to think about those in relation to the Olympic legacy. I should say also that this comes partly out of my own research interest in regeneration and the history of regeneration. Also the sorts of discussions that we've been having at the Urban Laboratory at UCL, which is an interdisciplinary centre for thinking about cities and urbanisation that goes across UCL, so there are ideas in here that come from discussions with colleagues recently as well. In terms of regeneration, I wanted just to start by saying 50 years is not a long time. If we look back at London 50 years ago, there's a notable correlation between the areas we see here, identified in the most recent London Plan's opportunity areas and the areas that were identified in the 1943 County of London plan as opportunity areas. So this tells us something. These areas that are now designated for future growth are likely to still be growing and opportunity areas in 50 years time. And the built environment typically changes at a very slow rate. An estimated 75% of London's building stock will be the same in 2062. This was one of the figures that stuck in my mind from the discussions in the workshops that we had. But as well as built form, the underlying characteristics of different forms of urbanisation obviously have long term consequences, and where those are flawed, they could work precisely against the values of equality, diversity, social inclusivity that we talk about when we talk about the current aims of regeneration in London. So, the kinds of structures of urbanisation can cause intractable problems as well as improvements for the future. And other points, I think, that came out of the workshops to me was that our evaluations of the success or failure of different regeneration projects and the places that are their focus tend to be obfuscated by powerful rhetoric by political ideology, and as the political landscape changes, one generation's utopian schemes become the ruinous backdrop for the next one's vision of a better future. The large scale physical transformation of the Olympic Park is obviously a very specific kind of urbanisation that's taken place very quickly under special circumstances, through massive public funding by the UK's largest ever compulsory public purchase order and the ability, to use the ODA's phrase, to lock down the site temporarily to get this done. And the area's immediate future will be governed by a very particular and exceptional kind of body, the Mayoral Development Corporation, which is given special powers. So I think how that body represents the community's interests is obviously a key issue looking forward to the next 50 years. The games have obviously provided an extraordinary global spectacle. The Olympic Park exists as an image itself but it's also a place of image-making, and this image of this transformation, this transformed park has been circulated around the world. But within this, any sense of perhaps the specifics of Stratford and what Stratford needs, what the local area needs has perhaps been temporarily lost. So we need to now go back to that discussion about regeneration in a very specific part of London with a very specific history and specific community, and obviously the narrative through which the regeneration has taken place has been about a place of poverty, a place of industrial contamination that has literally been regenerated, that it's been cleansed somehow, reconfigured as a place of cultural capital, as a place of consumerism, and the Olympics is a kind of stepping stone on this yellow brick road towards tech city, in the long term regeneration plan. We could debate the direct and abstract value of the Games themselves endlessly, but I don't think that's really the purpose of tonight. What I would like to do is for us to focus constructively on a discussion about what are the values that should underpin regeneration going forward for the next 50 years. The justification has been that the Olympics will accelerate the regeneration of this part of London for the benefit of the local community, so that's what we should try to keep the focus on over the next 50 years. And politicians have already been -- and the media, as I've been watching on the news -- have already been claiming the regeneration of east London, but that seems kind of incongruous when you actually go and walk around Stratford and you walk down Stratford High Street and there's still this -- there's a disconnect, and I know there is a plan to regenerate Stratford High St, but the fact that it's happened in the reversed order of the Park first, does leave this disconnect, and one can't help feeling a sense of isolated Olympic Park, a kind of Vegas-like experience as you walk around it. This island within the urban fabric, which isn't yet integrated into its context, and that's obviously the challenge for the next 50 years -- the worrying image that comes to mind is of Canary Wharf and the boundaries of Canary Wharf, that when you walk from Canary Wharf to Poplar there's this sudden transition and it's still not integrated. So that's a kind of warning that we have to have in mind when we think about integrating this new site within the fabric of the city. So just to go back to that idea of the transformation, the literal regeneration, the cleaning up of the soil, which has obviously been a key part of the discourse about the transformation of the area. This is an image taken by Mike Wells on the website gamesmonitor of some of the earth waiting to be cleaned in these big washing machines. For me, this was one of the most striking images of the redevelopment process. The soil waiting to be cleansed. You know, this is historically, regeneration in London has always been propelled by these narratives of dirt and disorder and the need for it to be cleansed. And in this case, it's about the bioremediation of the soil, so there's a kind of pseudo-scientific justification for regeneration going on there, which I think is interesting. And it also fits into a longer tradition of the east end being described as the kind of dirty other to the west end of London. But what's striking is that although public health narratives and narratives of cleansing have always driven regeneration, in this case, unlike the social values and public health initiatives that underpinned urban change in the mid-20th century, with the expansion of the welfare estate, somehow this public health narrative is not quite connected, it's part of the discourse, but actually the idea of making the area economically productive again seems to be the key driver, so that's something that I want to come back to later on. I want now just to think about this concept of regeneration. You don't get much more literal images of regeneration than this. This word has been critiqued a lot recently by urban researchers. For example, Michael Edwards, who's at UCL in the planning school, who may be in the audience somewhere, I cant see, writes of it as a "slippery word" that's "used to legitimise almost every construction project". Another academic working in architecture writes that "Property development is not the same thing as regeneration." -- I think these are key things to bear in mind Another academic, Robert Furbey, talks about the longer history of this metaphor as a very "ancient term" that has these kind of religious and spiritual and biological connotations. In the modern period, it also has this conservative idea of personal transformation and empowerment as well, so I think it's important to bear these different ideas of regeneration in mind when we think about it and to try to be quite precise about what we mean by it. And in London, the concept has been in use in relation to urban development since the mid-20s, sorry the mid-20th century, but since the 80s it's become very prevalent. It's in the County of London plan. It's likely to still be around in 2062, but in the intervening period between the '40s and now, the meaning has changed quite radically. So, in the County of London plan, there's a sense that the city might regenerate itself. There's a sense that where the city doesn't regenerate itself, that's where it needs major restructuring and renewal, which is quite similar to an American academic Jane Jacob's idea of regeneration, which is more about incremental change from the bottom up. In the 40s also in London, it's about focusing on the improvement of living conditions for those living in poverty. Since then, regeneration has continued to accrue different meanings as a multi-layered metaphor, and although, if the rhetoric of regeneration is now balanced between economic and social values, in practice it seems to focus overridingly on economic growth, and regeneration will be successful, I read in a major newspaper finance section yesterday, in the Olympic case, if in the longer term we see increasing overseas wealth flowing into the area and rich west Londoners moving east. Okay, this is like a fairly straightforward idea of regeneration as gentrification by bringing in outsiders. But regeneration in the Olympic context also proceeds through this idea of trickle down wealth through providing benefits for local communities, but this is something that we need to think about more carefully over the next 50 years. The GLA have recently said, in relation to creative cities regeneration, that actually there isn't any evidence of trickle down effects to local communities, the communities that are in regeneration at the start of regeneration processes. So this is something we definitely need to invest research into, and many urban studies scholars have in fact suggested that current regeneration strategies actively disadvantage and displace rather than improve the lives of those in whose name they proceed, so according to them, London in 2062 won't be a city necessarily of greater equality of wealth, but will be one of polarisation. We saw this in Ben's talk just now. A greater polarisation of wealth but also of health and wellbeing. Okay, so, from the workshop, this rather bleak list of issues came up that I just wanted to quickly run through, that we might expect to see. So, increased displacement of local communities and the destruction of the very kind of mixed communities that we talk about when we talk about the aims of regeneration. The destruction of the idea of London as a tolerant city. The reinforcement of this general trend of excluding low income households from living in central London, increasing inequalities to access to housing, this debate about affordable housing is really key. Continued decline and fragmentation of the affordable housing stock. This incredibly complex market already of social housing providers being very much pressured by the government to act in particular ways, perhaps we need to go back to an earlier idea of socially registered landlords or explore new models. Also the polarisation of the city through intensive pockets of investment and disinvestment, and the loss of public space to privately managed estates with detrimental consequences on citizenship and the sense of community and belonging in the city. So these are all points that came up and obviously these are all big issues. I'm not going to wrap them up neatly now, but I want to outline five, if you like, grand challenges for regeneration practice moving forward. And there are colleagues who would argue now that actually regeneration is a redundant concept, we need to resist regeneration because regeneration equates to gentrification. But I would like to think that perhaps we can develop new models of ethical regeneration, and this is what I've been discussing with colleagues recently. So, just to run through those: I think we need to move to a more incremental -- these might sound naive and oversimplifying issues, but I think we need to actually go back to basic what are the ethics of good regeneration? So, incremental and contextual urbanisation. It seems quite shocking that despite rhetoric otherwise, we are still pursuing urbanisation of the city through tabula rasa, through clean sweep urbanism, and since the mid 1970s, state-led regeneration has given away to a more market led laissez fare approach, but we're still pursuing this large scale clean slate urbanism, and in spite of the value attached to heritage and diversity, our large scale redevelopment projects in working class areas are particularly characterised by this approach, and break up communities, and this goes against one of the key ideas that came up for me in the London 2062 project, was that to face these difficult challenges in the future we need strong and resilient communities -- so why are we breaking up these communities now. Secondly, we need to think and work on mechanisms for preserving affordability in regeneration zones, so as we improve the physical character of the city and change its socioeconomic composition, we need to develop ways of preserving affordability for a wide group of people and prioritising, bringing back social value from increased land values and for a greater number of people. And this obviously requires radical shifts in our thinking and imagination. There are not easy ways of answering this problem, but if we really believe in diversity, then gentrification, which was a term coined at this university by Ruth Glass in the Geography department in 1964, is not the way forward. So, thirdly, we need to try and develop ways of tackling ways of the housing crisis that are evidence based, so working on the housing crisis in a way which is not subject to the ebbs and flows of politics and changing in political policy, that actually, over the next 50 years, in the Olympic boroughs, housing is a key issue. Over 100,000 people in the three boroughs waiting list. Overcrowding, poor quality and design, unregulated private rental market, poor connectivity, poor communal areas, and a massive shortfall in affordable housing and family housing, and a lack of onus which is only getting worse of developers to actually provide affordable housing. So how can we move away from a politicised, polarised debate about affordable housing towards a more evidence-based approach focused on need. And then fourthly, how do we -- this is a question that came up recently at UCL, with the publication of the Healthy Cities pamphlet that David referred to earlier, which I recommend you read -- but how can we reconnect the regeneration in more meaningful ways to the public health agenda, getting back to an idea of regeneration as primarily about and driven by public health needs. I think this is really key. And then, fifthly, how can we move towards a more community-led and open and honest discourse that accompanies regeneration. I think a lot of those -- a lot of communities affected by regeneration have become very sceptical about what it means and about the consultation processes that they've been subjected to, which they felt to be tokenistic, and a lot of the actual imaging practices and representational practices that we use within regeneration make people suspicious because they are used to deceive and coerce rather than aid the process of connecting communities to the research agenda in meaningful ways, so I think this another key area that we should be thinking about. I realise that they're very big issues and questions, and we were asked to be provocative so I'm not going to apologise for that, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts on these things, and I probably should leave it there, so thank you. >>[Applause] >>[Vice-Provost] Ben, thank you very much for those thoughts and stimulating questions. Now I'll turn to the final speaker in this part of the evening, Janice Morphet, who has been or is a Visiting Professor here again at the Bartlett, but also has been or is still on the planning committee for the London 2012 Olympic Games. So, I'm not quite sure what she's been up to lately, but I'm sure you've been quite busy, and perhaps we should congratulate you, you can take all the credit for the Olympics while you're here, but we'll hear your thoughts about some aspects of the future for London. >>[Morphet] Thank you very much. Good evening, everybody. I'm in a slightly difficult position because I'm still associated with the Olympics, so I can't say much about that because I'm still involved until the end of the month. But I thought coming at the end, it's a rather privileged position, because we've had these discussions, we've had the sessions to think about that, and we've had the summation this evening, so what I'm going to try to do is perhaps something slightly different. I'm going to take us, I hope you'll come with me, anyway, to 2062, when I'm going to see where we are and take a look back to see what's happened, what has come about -- have any of these things actually occurred. So, here we are in 2062. And thinking about this 100 years ago, in 1962, the swinging '60s in London were just about to begin. London was the centre of world news, front covers of international magazines and the world's media were very curious about what was going on in London at the time. London was loosening its belt, and it opened up a huge period of creativity and change that started the separation of London from the rest of the country. Was this where the seeds of change for the creation of the London city state were sewn? London was, and wanted to be different. The real turning point came in 1999. Devolution in Scotland and Wales and the powers given to the Mayor of London started an irrevocable process of separation. When Scotland voted for independence in 2014, the transition to the federal state of Great Britain began in earnest. Then, as now, it was the role of England that seemed to be the big issue. And it is hard to look back now from 2062 without remembering those intense debates about the establishment and location of the English parliament. The main concern was about where it would sit, and when Manchester was chosen, it seemed to galvanise London's position as an international outward global city and as a separate part of the UK. Even 50 years ago, in 2012, the Mayor of London had more powers than any other elected politician in the UK apart form the Prime Minister. So, looking back, what led to the creation of the London city state after the referendum in Scotland? And what difference has it made? Well, firstly, the UK referendum to leave the European Union put London at odds with London, and it found that it had more in common with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The federal structure of Great Britain, as it was devolved, immediately demonstrated that the leadership vision agenda for England was different from the drive and determination of London and its people. London was already separate in its governance, so why not take the next step? Manchester was always interested in running the rest of the country. >>[Laughter] Apologies to any Mancunians. When the Blair government set up Manchester as the second England growth poll after 1997, not many people noticed that way in which it was consistently privileged through government decisions made by both Labour and Coalition governments: devolved spending, new local authority arrangements, and eventually, transferring taxation and civil servants to the Greater Manchester Authority showed the government's intent. And if you think those last two things are rather strange, they're already happening, so that's not prediction, that's fact. So when it was proposed in 2016 that the government of England should move to Manchester, London wanted the UK government to stay in London. The separation was needed to enforce some independence on England, but London feared it might follow. In the end, the establishment of the English parliament in Manchester and the associated move of some civil servants, created a much smaller governance machine in London, and so, as many civil servants faced with a move to Manchester, opted out through retirement and stayed in London, particularly as pensions could no longer be guaranteed, it also led to a reduction of the UK government as well. However, the effects of this change in the seat of government for England could only be anticipated as being more important at the time given the amount of debate they engendered. What has proved more critical to London's position is the creation of the United States of Europe, the US of E in 2057, 100 years after the EU was formed in 1957. Any doubters on this, read Mr Mr Barroso's speech yesterday. Since the UK/EU in-out referendum in 2018, the potential for different relationships between the nations in the UK and the EU has emerged. The decision of the UK to opt out and the subsequent decisions of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to opt back in to the EU created a way for London to rejoin the EU, and supported its transition to the United States of Europe. This has been a difficult path to take, not least for London's economy, and through the transfer to the euro, but without this, London was faced with a major threat to its international position. Yet despite these changes in government structure and institutions, is London any different from the way it was 50 years ago for ordinary Londoners? Firstly, there are more Londoners. London has continued to grow, not just in the centre, but also in those high-priced housing areas of Barking, Romford and Dagenham. That's accompanied the east London airport expansions (plural). Of course, it would be difficult to accommodate so many people if there were still private cars, but the decision to abolish the use of cars in zones 1 and 2 in London has meant more bikes and buses which have now become the predominant mode of transport. It is rare to see a petrol filling station or car park within these areas now (Zones 1 and 2), most having been redeveloped for housing in the 2020s and 2030s. It has also opened the streets to more walking and running, which most people do everyday. Much of London's housing looks the same, but the major housing retrofitting program, which began after the nuclear energy crisis in the 2020s, has also had a major effect, and I suppose you know that we have a real difficulty about replacing our nuclear energy just at the minute, and this might well happen. London is no longer dependent on external energy supplies, and those long held objections to local energy stations have been tempered by the domestic energy production modules that most buildings now have. London now has more parks, green space and wildlife than many rural areas. Our streets and roads have been planted with trees and shrubs in place of the cars and the traffic signs. A dramatic reduction in food consumption in the 2020s, when high sugar, fatty and processed foods were banned, has had the same effect on health as earlier bans on tobacco and alcohol. And only today, New York has banned large sized fizzy drinks, so, not so off the wall. London may be a larger and denser city, but it's now more self sustaining than its ever been. So, what next for London? Well, 2062 held a new swinging 60s era. Many of today's active people were born in the 1960s, so I'm assuming people are going to live and be active until they're 100. So, being 100 years old is going to be the new 60 or the new 70 and are the product of the swinging 60s generation. And after all, Boris did say that the Olympic Games was going to create another generation, didn't he? So what has London learned in this last century? Well, it's learned that change is inevitable, but London's energy to lead its own future is not diminished. London is now at the heart of the United States of Europe and a leading member of the federated state of Great Britain. Only the problem of England remains, but that isn't a problem for London. Thank you. >>[Laughter, applause]. >>[Vice Provost] Wonderful, thank you very much. So, we've seen two very contrasting views, really, almost a dystopic, nihilistic approach to the future of London with increasing inequality and misery that Ben was almost anticipating as the status quo continued, we've seen perhaps a utopian renaissance for the city-state. And all of these options are available to us. So I think, with that and the overview that we had from Ben, I'd throw the questioning open to the floor for further interrogation of tonight's wonderful speakers. But before we do that, perhaps we could have a round of applause for all three of them, because I think they've said really exciting things. >>[Applause] >>[VP] So we have microphones being wielded by colleagues, so if there are any questions, who would like to start. We have one at the front here, if you could run down. >>[Audience member] Hello, John Danzig. I take everything with a pinch of salt because I don't think futurists have been very successful in the past on predicting the future. In fact, they've been abysmally wrong. But I do remember an Evening Standard mock up of London in about 2060, it might have been 2100. And, it actually showed London absolutely covered in water. We were all drowning. So I think all the plans are probably wrong. We need to be starting a programme now of mass swimming lessons, and also we need to be building a lot of boats. And all your plans are underwater. >>[VP] Okay, I think we can have some comments on that. Projected sea level rises with climate change in the next 50-100 years: 10cm, or something like that? >>[Campkin] The only comment I would make on that is that actually, in one of the sessions, we did look at quite a lot of architectural representations of the 50 year future. And a lot of them tended to be very dystopic, and to show the city of London in ruins, and to show flooding and so on as a way of playing out the scenarios of climate change and economic crisis as well. So it's, if you go into the architectural school down the road in the Bartlett, that's what architects are speculating on at the moment. >>[Morphet] Ah, we'll be drinking seawater in 50 years time. >>[VP] Desalinated, I hope. >>[VP] No doubt climate change, very important factor. Sea level changes happening, perhaps not right at the rate that may be shown in the Standard, although obviously, exposure to surges and extreme events will become more problematic, and so the whole issue of the next Thames barrier is an issue which has to be addressed, and also those plans for housing to the east of the Thames barrier I think is also quite an interesting area for consideration in the future as well. Thank you. A question over there, yes. >>[Audience member] Thank you. Patrick Hughes, Director of Salient Work. I was hugely interested by what you had to say. But there was one disappointment: the word London, of course, featured frequently in what you had to say, but only one of you used the word Londoners, and that was once. That was you, Janice. And I think, if I may say so, that there's a sense from what you've said this evening, and I can't speak for the rest of your research, that you've fallen into the trap of thinking more about the hardware than the software of the city. I think we need to think more about Londoners and think of them as a unique resource and opportunity, particularly in all their glorious diversity, which really, you haven't touched on at all, and their useful energy, in other words, their fascinating cultural and population demographic. Would you like to comment on that? >>[Morphet] I was trying to get at that by saying that London was going to take charge of itself, and the decisions taken to ban cars and to turn the city over to itself, and rethink about how it was using that city, was one of the sort of themes that I was trying to explore, and I agree with you -- that the diversity of London is its strength, but I wonder almost if we've moved beyond remarking on it because it is so fundamental, it is what London is -- so there's no, how do we find a new language about just accepting that and seeing that as an enormous strength, which it is. And I think that strength is the thing that's going to drive London, and that's really what I was trying to elaborate on. >>[Harrison] I would agree with you as well. I guess partially picking up on some things Ben was saying about having a common definition or a new definition of what we mean by urban regeneration. By the very nature of the work that we do at Future of London, our major focus is on the built environment. Whether it's necessarily fair to burden the word urban regeneration with also having to deal with other areas of economic development or whether actually we're looking at a related and very important set of issues and actually, given the state of public finances, probably something we're going to need to focus on more in London and certainly the government is clearly focused on it. But there's also no getting away from the fact that they are very difficult, often not altogether tangible challenges as well, that often involve specific families with long term worklessness issues, etc., which from the state's point of view are very difficult to try to intervene, perhaps far more difficult to imagine intervening in than managing to build some new infrastructure or some new houses. So I absolutely take the point and it's surely something which we're going to hear more about in public policy debates going forward. >>[VP] Ben, you mentioned the loss of the mixed community, that was one of the threats you highlighted. >>[Campkin] I think I was talking a lot about Londoners but just not using that word -- I was talking about the community and how diversity requires certain parts of the city to be affordable and the dominant regeneration practices at the moment do not work towards affordability being maintained over the long term, so I think that was a key point that I wanted to raise, and also that regeneration should in fact be community led, not just involving communities or consulting communities but actually the research has shown that its successful if it's community-led rather than being imposed. >>[VP] We have a question here. >>[Audience member] Ben stressed the problem of social divide: poor people against rich people. But first of all, we have to understand, what are these poor people going to be doing in London in 50 years time given the labour saving device, technology and science, what's going to be their role? Will they be here in London, before you say there's going to be a social divide -- will they be here in London, in a big city. Can you share with us what you think they're going to be doing, poor people, in 50 years' time? >>[Campkin] Sure, if you look at Henry Mayhew's mid-19th century London Life and the London Poor, a lot of those jobs are still around in London, a lot of current service jobs would be recognisable from that, so I'm sorry, but I don't believe that the jobs and the labour is going to change that much. The city needs to be serviced. I think Dominique Laporte, the French philosopher said "the city is a jewel fed by lonely operations", and it still will be in 50 years' times. >>[Audience member] So, you envisage then, same employment situations...? >>[Campkin] Not exactly the same, but I think there'll be -- 50 years is not that far ahead. >>[Audience member] Basically the same, though? I mean you've got to have hotels, you've got to have shops, you've got to have transport, people running the transport. I've been around for 60 years as a worker and 20 years as a developing individual. I've worked for four local authorities and I've been in planning, not your side of it, but legal planning. All these things take time. Point 1 I would make is, add another 50 years because any redevelopment in this huge city will be patchy. Your recent example of the Olympic games area is probably a way ahead for clearing an area, but we haven't got too many areas like that to be cleared, otherwise we've got to knock down stuff before you put stuff up, and that will take a lot of time because a lot of opposition. Unless you say, we're going to take over -- I used to live in Islington -- we're going to take over Islington and redevelop it, the state is going to do it, because that's the only way you'll get something done in its entirety. The rest of it will be biting into certain areas, developing those areas, another 5 or 10 years later you'll do another one. You've got to add another 50 years to your plan, but I do think that once you've decided on an area such as the one, well the Olympic Games, the area progress was a little bit dodgy at one stage, and then somebody pressed the lever, and it was moved up. Now you've got to face it, these things can go wrong. Look at what's happening in the west end, not in the west end, Tottenham Court Road area. It was chaos for ages! Who suffers? Londoners. I'm a Londoner. So, you can't envisage big developments without very careful planning. You've got 33 London boroughs, you've got to knock their heads together, of the 33 town class, boroughs. You've got a heck of a problem in getting a plan that really is meaningful. The plans that were created post-war have taken ages to implement, all of the time because the war was still creaking at the edges. It will take another 50 years and it's going to take big thinking redeveloped. Now if you can knock that down, I'm interested. >>[VP] I don't think we're suggesting that we'll have London redeveloped by 2062. Ben, you're engaged with a lot of authorities, perhaps you'd like to comment on the challenges of the fragmentation in dealing with the boroughs and so forth in developing cohering plans. >>[Harrison] Sure, I mean, I guess that's a longstanding problem for London. It's not the case that boroughs don't work together and don't work together with other agencies. But I would add to your point is that we are entering into a period, or we're now in a period where the levels of public investment that we've seen in these sorts of public investments just isn't going to be available. So never mind anything on the scale of the Olympics -- even smaller regeneration schemes that have received significant public subsidy, that's off the agenda for the foreseeable future, so we need to find new models. As well as presenting a challenge, that is an opportunity to find new models of conceiving of regeneration and of delivering it, but I think we're probably quite a way off. There are specific instances within London where public bodies have significant landholdings that are significant, that are suitable for regeneration and can be used, but that's not necessarily the case across the piece, and they're not necessarily in the part of London that you would seek to redevelop. So, I agree with you, it's a very big challenge and it's not going to get easier any time soon, but we do need to meet it. >>[VP] Janice? >>[Morphet] I think I, I want to say that I do agree with one of the points that you made, and that was around public authorities building again. We already have at least four London boroughs who set up housing companies, and the only time in our history where we had huge numbers of houses or dwellings being built was actually at the time when local authorities were building them. Even before RSLs or housing associations. Now, I'm not sure that I agree with the point about there being no money, because if we look at the powers in the 2012 Localism act, then local authorities and indeed all the different accounting standards are changing, the ability for local authorities now to capitalise development, set up development companies, capitalise on their own assets, now if you can't do that in London, you can't do it anywhere. Lots of places across the country are doing it, Liverpool in the northeast, so actually, London boroughs are sitting on huge assets, which they don't need to sell, they need to capitalise, and if you look at the banks, look at the city, they're sitting on piles of cash, pensions of cash, looking for safe investment, pension investment. So I think until London boroughs really start building again, not council houses, but housing for a mixture of tenures, I think that's going to be the way of moving forward. And that's why I was suggesting looking at carparks, looking at these kinds of sites now that we don't need so much. And there are still places in London -- anyone been on a train through Willesden recently? I mean there's masses of land in London that we just don't see. So that would be mine. >>[Audience member] And I just wanted to build on some of the comments that came from the gentlemen in the audience earlier around the lack of a focus around the demographic of London and Londoners in some of your assessments of what London will look like. And one of the things that I was surprised not to hear any of you mention, given the implications it has for the built environment, for issues around affordability in the capital, and also for local authority finance, is around the changing demographic towards older people within the city, and when you're talking about getting regeneration back to something that isn't about moving people who are viewed to be problematic out of a particular space, how do you imagine that a London of 2062 is addressing that challenge and how that might impact on what the built environment begins to look like. >>[VP] Well, I think Janice, you'd solved the problem by making 100 the new 60. But perhaps you'd like to comment on that first. >>[Morphet] Well I think, a) we probably are going to have to get off the idea of buying houses for a bit, although I think we'll end up doing that until there's another -- until the treasury can come up with new pension product, we're all stuck with buying houses if we can, as our longer term nest egg for the future. Thinking about old people, thinking about affordability, the only way to challenge the market is to create more units or more dwellings, and the only organisations I can see who can really break the landhoarding tendencies of housing developers with consents in land is actually the public sector who can put more -- as soon as the public sector builds more, it reduces the value of the land that is generally hoarded by developers, and I think that's what we've got to see. And I agree, we need other interventions, we need to think differently. The current approach is clearly not sustainable in the long term. >>[Audience member] [unintelligible beginning] In terms of the amount that we need to build in order to bring down those values, we're talking about millions of homes while we're building maybe 20,000 a year. >>[Morphet] No, I agree, we're not doing enough now, I'm just saying, we've got to attack it in quite a different way, and if you go back to think about how a million and over, however many homes we've been building, most of those homes are being built by the public sector, not just in London but across England, and to some extent, we've got to get back to that in different ways, and I can't wave a wand and make it happen, but that's the only way you're going to increase the volume and looking at other uses for buildings. >>[VP, interrupting audience member who is unintelligible] We can't have a dialogue, we want to hear other voices. Ben, you mentioned the Healthy Cities and the demographic and the age profile. Would you like to expand about how you think that might be interesting? >>[Campkin] Just to say that, that issue came up in one of the workshops that we ran and the need for better housing for the elderly, but also in terms of a more active elderly population as well, so I think that's really important. I just wanted to ask -- am I allowed to ask a question of Janice? In terms of thinking about new models of affordability, one of the things that's come up in Urban Lab workshops that we've been running and also Boris has been talking about, is community land trust, and I was just wondering what you think of that model because it seems like a thing that some people are positive about. >>[Morphet] I think it is, but I don't think it's -- I think it's one contribution but I don't think it's going to reduce the volume required on its own. So I'd support it wholeheartedly, but I don't think that's the only measure. >[VP] Okay, we've got lots of other questions, this gentleman here. >>[Audience member] Paul Rob, Birkbeck. Question for Ben Campkin, really. I don't disagree with your ethical principles for regeneration, but I just wondered if you could say a little bit about how you think those might be embedded in a regeneration schemes, given that if anything, the political and economic tendency is for many of those issues not to be looked at. So for example in relation to housing need, that's virtually a concept which is redundant as far as a lot of local authorities are concerned because essentially, as you well know, when you look at regeneration schemes that are being done, both in labour and conservative authorities across London, the net effect of those regeneration schemes is invariably that either you get no increase in social housing or you get actually a reduction in social housing as the old estates get bulldozed and you get lots of private developments. So the question is really then, how can one embed those ethical principles into the current political economic structures given that they seem to be if anything going against those very laudable aims.>>[Campkin] I agree, and there is no easy answer to that question. They are all almost all directly opposed to the current trends, so this is the key question, but I think in terms of setting a research agenda, these are issues that we should be dealing with. And I don't think this was about a dystopic projection of the future, I think actually my assessment was meant to be, it might sound pessimistic but it's actually realistic in terms of what's happening now, in terms of what the research tells us. So it was not a dystopic projection of the projection of the future. >>[VP] It's just the future is dystopic? >>[Harrison] What I would add, and partially in response to Janice's point as well, I think ultimately what's going to be needed certainly within local government is a culture shift in terms of what boroughs are for, and certainly, I think an outcome from the localism act will be that you'll see a divergence in approach across London. I mean that's not necessarily something new, but it will probably be exacerbated, where some boroughs decide actually yes, it is old, build houses, and we'll seek to do that and we've got the land to do it and we've got the expertise to do or we'll bring someone in, and others will very much see that that's not their role, and you just have to look at boroughs like Barnett and others who are actually seeking to commission out services and actually see their role as being a much more coordinating one, I suppose. So Ben's absolutely right, there are no easy answers, and we're not going to get there very quickly, but you can see across London, areas of experimentation where it's all behaving differently, and how successful or otherwise, how replicable those models are going to be, we'll find out, I suppose. >>[VP] Gentleman at the back. >>[Audience member] Hi, good evening, Gary Hayes. I'd like to ask the question about technology. I sit in front of a computer 14-16 hours a day. What were we doing 50 years ago, and in 50 years time, materials, energy, will be universal, we already have the solutions so we can have as much energy as we want. The change in human performance will be significant, with the growth of intelligence, artificial -- how do you see the city of the future? >>[VP] Easy question. >>[Harrison] Easy question, yes. >>[Silence and laughter.] >>[VP] Well, Janice, since you did speak of the future. >>[Morphet] I know, but I kind of avoided technology because I think that's one of the most difficult areas to predict. If you think back 50 years to the early 60s, then I think people were not even then much using phones, landlines. I think it was very much a paper based, face to face working environment, and then gradually it became more phone based, and then obviously to where we are. So I just think it's quite difficult to predict how we're going to respond to devices, new devices that are appearing almost weekly, that offer us new functionality. But it seems to me at the moment that if you look at the amount of time that most people, lots of people in business are now spending more time on Twitter, I was reading today (on Twitter) >>[Laughter] than business people across Europe, than actually reading the Economist or Financial Times or Wall Street Journal or whatever, so it seems to me that may go too far in one direction, because although it's very social, it's also very isolating if you're constantly looking at a screen. And I wonder if we'll come back to something that's a bit more personal, but I think it's a difficult area to predict and I think that anything that we said today will be wrong tomorrow. >>[VP] And Ben, if you've discovered courage? >>[Harrison] I have. I guess what I would say, so the proposition that you put forward I suppose is one that in various forms I guess we've heard a number of times in the past, and is actually used to often say well, you won't need to live in cities anymore because technology will allow you to do all the business that you need to do and actually have all the advantages of living in a nice leafy countryside area and avoid the pollution and the congestion and all the rest of it. And actually, all of the prevailing evidence says that that's not the case, and the continual important of face to face interactions will remain and the trust that they entail and the interactions between talented people that is currently a hallmark of the London economy will continue to be important, even if we are spending 12-16 hours a day sitting in front of computer screens. >>[VP] Yes, I guess thanks to Janice's committee, a lot of us were suggested that we work from home, and it was very fun for a bit, but I also noticed a lot of colleagues couldn't wait to get back to have a chat over coffee to talk about the Olympics. >>[Audience member] Alright, thank you, Steven Vauxhall from Regeneration X, I'm an independent regeneration consultant. I wanted to bring up London's hinterland. It's often said that London's economic footprint is much larger than its political boundaries, so to what extent do you think the hinterland might change, and what extent does it have to change for London to have all these changes that you're talking about, and also, connected with that the point someone else made from the audience -- the rich are going to have jobs, the poor are going to have job to serve the rich, what about the middle? Already the middle has been hollowed out. >>[VP] Ben, you were talking about becoming a more unequal society, which suggests there's lots of activity at the bottom and the top but the middle? Do you have any thoughts on this. >>[Campkin] Well, I think London is a city where there are polarisations all over the city, it's not so easy to describe it as a rich centre and a poor outskirts. It's never been like that. So I think the polarisation will still be dispersed around the city, and then in terms of the hinterland, one of the things that came up in the workshop was the need to develop on the green belt and green corridors or green wedges, so I guess that's a big debate which probably Janice will be able to say something on, in terms of the immediate future. >>[Morphet] I mean, I think the movements in London, the transport movements, Journey to Work, is not as clear, or is not as we might think it is. If we think back 50 years ago, the sort of in-out movements, which we think are typical, probably were, but if we think now, many of the movements are east-west or lateral and actually in-out, so when years ago, I used to travel and work in Woking and I live in Clapham Junction, so I was the only person getting on the train, and now masses of people get on the train in Clapham Junction to go to Woking. If you go to Woking, which is a place that used to have heavy commuting into London, actually now a much higher proportion of people in Woking now work locally rather than travelling to London. Yes people do travel in, but proportionally that is much more even than it was, say, 30 years ago. So in a way, what might happen is that hinterlands become over time more self sufficient, but their networks develop and they change the way they work. I think we also need to think about the effect of Crossrail and what that will do. And the stealthy increase of orbital rail is changing the way people are using London as well so you might argue that the real issue is can the centre of London maintain its authoritative position when all these other things are happening. So I think that's maybe an area where things will continue to change. >>[VP] Janice, I'll just ask you a question. The London citystate, given its control over and no need for a green belt because that's governed by England. So would we reach a situation where, in your scenario, we had a gentrified city with leafy avenues where there were previously bus lanes and so forth and shanty towns around Hartfordshire and St Aubins becomes the new sink space for the [unintelligible] to be brought into London to support its affluent middle classes. >>[Morphet] Well, Slough already has the most beds in sheds. You don't have to wait for the future for that, sadly. I don't know. I think that places will, if we look at something like functional economic areas and local enterprise partnerships are really going to work, and I think they're going to be the new local authorities of the future, actually, but if that is going to work then they're going to have potentially the same dynamics and the same sort of -- I mean the whole of England is going to be covered with large-ish areas which are going to be like Transport for London, and that's just about to happen in 2014. All the areas outside London are just forming into those groups now by the end of this month. I think one area where London is weaker is that it doesn't acutally look to see what's happening elsewhere. It gets to its boundaries and it's a bit aloof from the rest but actually the rest of England is getting organised and the question is what effect will that be for London .>>[Audience member] Good evening, Paul Campy. I think Ben touched upon privately managed land, sorry Ben Campkin, touched on privately managed land and with many of the thorough-faires to the Olympic park actually being Westfield Stratford City where private security roamed those thoroughfaires and where photography was not encouraged, shall we say, do you think there's an inevitability that we'll have those sort of developments where previously, perhaps, public land becomes privately managed, do you think that's inevitable and do you think that's a good thing or a necessary thing for future regenerations? >>[Campkin] Well, I wouldn't want to say it's inevitable, but it's definitely the trend, and it does fundamentally change the character of what those spaces are and what relationship people have to them and what powers they have to use them and to interact in those spaces, so it's something that a lot of people are very critical of at the moment, so Anna Minton, the journalist with her book Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City writing about the securitisation of public space, so the turning of public spaces into an image of public space, but are actually places that are highly controlled and ordered. >>[Morphet] I think factually that you can't compare Stratford or the Olympic Park in games mode to the rest of the time, and we'll have to see what it looks like next year when it's opened on the first anniversary, but I would say that just on a factual point, that because the park is in different boroughs, when we were looking at design standards on the committee for roads, footpaths, cycleways, we made sure that each of the boroughs had their standards adopted in each part of the park so that they can adopt them without any problem when they're passed over. And I think "old style regeneration" or old style top-down UDC type of approaches would have just done one standard across the piece and let them get on with it, whereas we were very sensitive to thinking about the management afterwardsand realising that that would be the case, so I think it's too early to say really. >>[Harrison] Just thinking, picking up again on Janice's point earlier of London borough land holdings and also the land that's now been transferred in the GLA. It's obviously the case that both boroughs and the GLA have some influence over that, and if those are political decisions that will be taken at that level and therefore there's no reason why it would necessarily be the case, I would say. >>[VP] Sorry, I'm just showing my naivete by being shocked and surprised that different boroughs have different standards on footpaths. >>[Morphet] Cycle ways are the worst. >>[Audience member] A lot of what was said here assumes a certain path of growth or land maintenance globally, talking about wealth that would allow regeneration and population growth. I just wonder if we are daring to look far enough into the future, 2062, you know in the 1930s the -- I don't think anyone would imagine that the British empire would be gone only 20 years later, well, maybe there were signs, or that the docklands would suddenly, within a decade or two, would disappear. And now that we see the growth of Asia, the middle east, Africa, a lot of London's success is based on migration, on international companies, it is possible, I mean maybe we're not stretching our imagination enough, maybe in 50 years London will lose its significance in the global economy. >>[Morphet] It could do. The points I was making about investment was not about global wealth but the fact that there's already a certain asset value in London that can be utilised and resources that can be deployed to utilise that. If you think about London globally then I think that, I agree with what somebody else said, that it takes a long time to change, and we thought that China was going to make the lead and still may they, but their growth rate has come down, we've seen that this week, they're actually way lower than their target, we have an uncertain leadership election, we don't know who's going to take over in China. So global capital doesn't want to go to uncertainty and London has -- its problems in relation to financial regulation seem to me more critical than anything else about threats from China. It's the way it's actually managed itself. But if it can get through that then somewhere in Europe is going to be that. And the issue about London being a capital city and having that international role is not one that's shared by anywhere at all. It's not shared by New York, for example, so it has a lot going for it. >>[VP] Ben, do you want to say anything? [Harrison] I would echo what Janice said. I mean having said, we don't have to look too far back into the past to a time when London's population was falling and you would have struggled to predict that the role of London in the UK economy that it now takes, so there is a point there that we don't want to become complacent about London's preeminence on the global stage. I think there's also probably a point that picks up on some of the things that Ben has said, or that we've all said really, that it is important and it's likely to become more important that we remember who growth is for and make sure that it's serving Londoners and, for example, the influx of overseas investment in London properties is a fantastic example of that. It's heralded as a sign of success and of buoyancy in the London housing market. But you don't have to look too hard at the housing market to see that yes it may be buoyant but it's fundamentally dysfunctional and it's not serving the interests of Londoners in many ways. So that's something which we must continue to look at and is probably going to become more important. >>[VP] I said originally when we started that UCL describes itself as London's global university. Experience shows you can't have a global university in a city that isn't a global city. So, it's part of our mission at UCL to do what we can to ensure that London sustains its prosperity and its global position, because without that, we can't sustain our own global position. So there's a degree of enlightened self-interest in trying to make sure that we don't -- it's not futurology that we're trying to do, but what we're trying to do is to anticipate as best as we can the challenges that our city faces and see what we can do to mitigate the negative and accentuate the positive. I think we have time for probably one more question. The lady there. >>[Audience member] Mary Conneely (?), very interested and as you keep talking about a global city -- a global city needs to be well led. And I think my question to the panel is about leadership and the governance of London. There are, Janice made some great points about the issue about what kind of emerging city we want, where we close the cars from Zone 1 and 2 -- how do we get to that ability to have that decision making. One of the Bens talked about the idea that -- I think, sorry, it crossed over between the two of you -- the question of capitalisation and realisation of assets. I've spent the last two years working for the six host boroughs and as their chief adviser on employment and skills. So there's a real issue about -- they had a single goal to coalesce around. That's been taken apart, and the question of collaboration and moving forward, on how they go from being the host boroughs to the growth boroughs is exercising minds, but some of the issues with the way that London's governed at the moment, the role of the mayor actually dislocates the boroughs a lot of the time, and the question of the localism agenda -- will it really allow the boroughs to move that forward, or would that be seen as a threat to the mayor's powers? I think there's a disconnect there and I'd like to hear from the panel on some of those issues. >>[Ben] Happy to start, yes. I think you're right, there's huge tensions. London in so many ways is unique to the rest of the country, but perhaps none more so than the way it was -- the impact that the localism act and those reforms have played out, where regional policy is being disbanded across the rest of the country but has actually been strengthened here. I think the real concern which perhaps still exists amongst London boroughs is that far from being an empowering agenda for them, they've had power taken away from the top and that's gone up to the mayor, and then potentially, the empowerment of neighbourhoods below them and actually it's made life much more difficult for London boroughs. I mean whether that will actually be played out remains to be seen. On your point about how do we get to Janice's utopian vision of a car free zone 1 and 2, and speaking personally that seems to me to be a very pleasant set of circumstances to arrive at, there is of course a democratic point within that in that people do like their cars [laughter], and it seems -- I was just meeting with colleagues at Transport for London today and we all agree that there is a kind of danger that in living the kinds of lifestyles that we do -- I don't drive, personally, you can forget the fact that lots of people do depend on their cars in order to remain economically active and so whether it's right that we'll have an all powerful mayor who can just decree those kinds of things or not, I'm not 100% sure though I do personally probably share your enthusiasm for the outcome. I guess I would reiterate just finally one of the points I made in the presentation where I fully expect there to be another round of devolution to London in some guise or another over the next period, probably leading up to the next general election. Quite what form that will take I don't know, whether that will be the devolution of particular revenue streams or funding pots, but it's -- I'd be very surprised if the mayor doesn't want to try to capitalise on his popularity within the conservative party if nothing else and try to push that forward. But those tensions, I would imagine, between borough leadership and the mayor and other organisations will remain. >>[Morphet] Well I think you're going to have to have mayoral candidates with big ideas. I think that's an important thing. But London is already the least car dependent place in the country, and those figures were published last week. And I think it's actually why older Londoners will live longer, because they're used to walking, to using public transport to get to work, then they get their freedom pass, there's a kind of culture of being on the move in London which I think distinguishes it now from a lot of other cities where they are car dependent still even though there is good public transport, so I think that's another issue. In terms of the boroughs, I mean certainly the issue about amalgamating boroughs to kind of reduce the number has been on the agenda at least since 1965 or 64, since we reorganised last time. And London government is unique in the country as going so long without any kind of reform. Most other places have been reformed at least twice in that period. Some people might say that's because it works, I think the others might say well it's because it's politically so difficult. I think the attempts to bring boroughs together to run services together has been a stepping stone, or attempted stepping stone to see if that would work. I don't think it will. I suspect the change will come from underneath and I'm fully expecting to have a Holy Parish to London before too long, and parishes now have the same legal power as local authorities and so, actually, you might get a different kind of change coming along with local banishment and that's the the one I'd be looking out for. >>[VP] Do you want to say anything about our St Pancras Parish? >>[Campkin] Erm, no, but just >>[Laughter] my fellow panellists have given very eloquent answers to that question. My only experience of dealing with the administrative boundaries in the city through my research is looking at pest control and how pest control is quite radically different in the different boroughs and pests are obviously a problem that should be dealt with centrally, it doesn't have respect for boundaries. >>[VP] So if the fox can get over the border it's free. Okay, well, we've had a chance to have a discussion on some of the points. There's so many more, I know. Sorry if you haven't had a chance to ask your question. You will have a chance, however, to catch the panellists. We are inviting you to withdraw to one of the great developments of London in 1828, the Wilkins Building in the quadrangle across the street. There'll be wine and refreshments available there, and hopefully our panel members will be able to join us and you can collar them further. But in the mean time could I ask you to thank our panel members for their contributions to this evening.