Which strategies should London develop? Mark Brearley, Head of Design for London and Peter Carl, professor for Architecture and Spatial Design at London Metropolitan University, talk about small steps, long streets and the benefit of the Olympics and social unrest for urban development.

Mark Brearley | London is a growing city that needs to fit more in. We do not want to sprawl, so we need to intensify. Over the last decade it has become clear that a process of identifying voids to fill will not be sufficient to keep us moving forward. Like most mature cities around the world London has been through a period of big structural change. That led to there being lots of space sloshing around; docks and gas-works and power stations left town. Many large parts of what had made up the city shifted elsewhere, leaving slack space that could be otherwise used. The stripping out and re-filling process is nearly finished in London and now there are no obvious sources of huge tracts of land for re-use. So, the mode of just growing our city by filling those voids, in the manner of Canary Wharf or Kings Cross, is coming to an end.

MB | In a mature city like London it is neither desirable nor economically realistic to fundamentally restructure. We have no choice, even if we didn’t like it, but to work with the existing overall fabric and just adjust it, piece by piece. This leads us towards a particular model of city: accepting mixed modes of transport, sharing public space, emphasising walking and cycling... Quite an attractive urban model in my view, but it is re-assuring to know that it’s the only thing we can do.  It’s not about a few dozen giant projects anymore, but about thousands of modest adjustments.

MB | I do believe in the idea of following an agreed plan that has democratic endorsement, and using the leverage of public ownership of development rights to influence outcomes. But these days that’s a slightly eccentric belief, and it is far removed from the day-to-day practice. In fact planning of that type has limited influence today as there are so many obstacles to actually getting anywhere with a whole concept for a locality. So we have migrated our efforts to where we think we can still have a good effect more readily; through a more entrepreneurial, opportunistic approach, pitching ideas and getting support for them, persuading, telling stories, marshalling resources, and helping seed enthusiasm. This is a more productive way than the idea of planning familiar since the 1940s.

Peter Carl | The approach taken by Mark’s team, Design for London, is very different from the approaches that strive to convert data or aesthetics into “urban form”, whatever that is. It requires a lot of negotiations, a lot of concrete discussion, working with what’s there, what’s possible, what kind of money it needs. They are working with the city as a live, civic topography.

MB | We are in the middle, because we are identifying possibilities and then trying to build them into a constituency, to make them bottom-up, even though we might have actually seeded the idea.  Not enough ideas for positive urban change come fully from the bottom up.  There are just not enough people around who have a clear notion of what can happen. Thoughts do need to be introduced, but I wouldn’t see this process as top-down; it’s not a crude imposition, it’s an offering up, and then building a constituency, nurturing a momentum.

PC | To somebody who believes in “planning” it sounds as though it just wouldn’t work, but Design for London have clearly demonstrated that their approach is actually stronger. It generates less noise and it lasts longer. The result is not spectacular objects, rather adjusting the direction of what’s already there. It’s a hard thing to understand in the first place and it’s even harder to figure out how to enable it. But that’s the point: it is about enabling it rather than designing it. The way it works is getting people to sort of vote for their town.

MB | London is structured around several hundred high streets, which are linear clusters of ultra-mixed-use where the public life is focused. When recession hit, there was a general sense of anxiety, and asking “Is the High Street dying?” There was a public perception that there was a challenge, a further challenge, to these places that are – in a rather vague way – valued. Now is the moment to try to pin down what this urban phenomenon is all about, to tell the story of these places and to figure out just how significant they are for London.

MB | On just one string of high streets between Uxbridge and Romford we discovered 6,500 businesses and institutions with their front doors on the street, 80,000 people have jobs on that corridor. That is similar to Canary Wharf, but stretched across London! Even outside the centre there are 1.5 million people working in these places. Now this is an example of pursuing a topic and forming a persuasive story that can build support and enthusiasm. That then leads, when it all goes well, to some money coming behind it. That has happened in this case. There are now a series of Mayoral regeneration programs helping growth and vibrancy in these parts of London, following the recognition that these existing high street places are the places that we should focus a big slice of the currently fairly modest public money available. Even though growth there is more complicated and needs to be more negotiated, it actually makes a lot more sense than trying to deliver growth on the ever more scarce and awkwardly located voids that appear in the city.

MB | Well that is a very special case and a lot of money was sunk into it, not finding the void, but creating it. There are not going to be more Olympics, or crazy Olympic-scaled investments. It was bold, but hard to repeat. There isn’t a trend that can be made out of that.  The Olympic experiment is an eccentricity.  Being an optimist, I have the feeling that something positive will come out of it. I could point you to some localised blunders of course, that’s normal, but the overall idea was something positive and much of what has been achieved is superb. The project is trying hard to integrate its infrastructure, and what it can allow to happen, into the town. That’s an unusual idea for a temporary sports event compound. It’s an obvious idea, but far from inevitable; they have had to battle to achieve it and they deserve praise.

PC | There are quite richly-layered communities on either side of the Olympic Park. It won’t remain a collection of strangely scaled housing and some sports facilities that are scaled for huge crowds, that kind of spectacular world apparently designed for the aerial view... Given time to mature, I think there is potential to incorporate the Park in an urban topography that includes the surrounding communities.

MB | One thing it does is to be a great piece of ‘boosterism’. Boosterism is generally thought of as something troubling, crass, but I don’t know whether that’s quite right. It’s a good thing to be talking up London and I think it was clever to make this so clearly London’s Olympics. This helps our city’s sense of pride, and it helps London’s sense of Londonness. Such moments are significant for the way people feel about their city. When the bombings happened in London in 2005, that was another significant moment. A simple advertising campaign was put on to help unite London – and suddenly everybody is like “yes, we are London!”

PC | The same thing happened after the riots last year. Suddenly everybody was saying: ”We love Tottenham”, “We love Croydon”.

PC | There were definitely losses, one would not advise that as an urban policy. But on the other hand:  In a curious way the riots were helpful. The reaction afterwards was probably more important and will last longer than the riots.

MB | There is much positive about that reaction. One part of it has been the desire to assert daily life, in the sense of, “we don’t want this in our city. This is not right”. Suddenly people were very ready to embrace the idea that in a place like Tottenham it helps to assert the positives. Yes, there are many fundamental problems around crime and family dysfunction, educational underachievement, etcetera that can’t just magically be solved. But also there is a more straightforward matter of confidence and helping people to be positive about their place, as this is a prerequisite of success.

PC | It’s not that the riots are producing the sense of community, nor are the Olympics… It’s more like jiu-jitsu, you have this great big weight and if it can be made to go the right way it becomes productive to your advantage.

MB | We spend some of our time worrying about where the skill and creative talent we need is going to come from to make our city ever better. In fact it’s all there, lurking, like Peter’s big weight that needs to swing the right way. To be getting more and more people into the idea of “London” helps, and certainly the Olympics accelerates that.