Sir Terry Farrell loves London and wants it compact. Speaking recently at a panel discussion in the Institute for Contemporary Arts Future Cities series, he reiterated his proposal that the Thames Gateway growth area (one of four identified by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) should not be built on east of the 2012 Olympic site near Stratford. Far from envisaging London turning and growing eastwards, Farrell proposes that the Thames estuary - stretching out to Southend and Sheppey - should instead be landscaped as a national park around the 600,000 households who already live there.
Sir Terry is consistent: this was the position he established in his presentation The Thames Gateway Landscape – The First Infrastructure, given at the Institution of Electrical Engineers on December 2003, at which he led the discussion and introduced further presentations by Demos, The Campaign to Protect Rural England, and English Heritage.
Of course Terry Farrell, internationally renowned architect and master-planner, has a point. If only 120,000 homes are to be built by 2016, as planned by the ODPM, there will be no significant expansion of London in any direction. Even the 300,000 homes called for by the reformed Urban Task Force (UTF) under fellow architect Lord Richard Rogers, with the support of the Department of Culture Media and Sports, would increase densities around old infrastructure, and remain contained within the east of old London. Such little development will not transform London as a city, and investment in necessary new infrastructure is far from certain.
Housing consultant Roger Humber observed recently in Building magazine that the ‘big idea’ of ‘… the g rowth areas’ depends on development that is infrastructure-intensive and highly concentrated.’ He argued that the growth areas, proposed in the name of sustainable development, are undeliverable because even if planning were not obstructive, ‘… the flood protection, land remediation, rail and other transport required is unaffordable and the Treasury will never pay for it.’ He concluded that ‘… if a policy is undeliverable then it is unsustainable. On reflection, perhaps that is a compelling reason to abandon a big idea.’
It seems that almost no one believes in the potential of the Thames Gateway growth area to become an extension of London as a much larger city, let alone one stretching to the sea. Minister for Sustainable Communities David Miliband, in an interview for Manmade Modular Megastructures, the issue of AD magazine to be published in January 2006, took care to subdivide Thames Gateway into London and non-London components:
‘The Western part of the Thames Gateway is definitely London. The Eastern part is not. It would be wrong to think of a 40-mile stretch eastwards as being London. Places like Southend have their own identity and are only part of the Greater London economic area.’
Miliband seems to make a Rogers-like virtue out of the probably realistic view shared by Farrell and Humber: not much else is going to happen. The massive expansion of London is not going to be one of New Labour’s achievements.
Instead, Chancellor Gordon Brown seems keen to be remembered for sustaining the property market. The average cost of a London home in November 2005 has risen to £300,000, with prices set to rise further. The will to ease, let alone reverse, the relentless rate of house price inflation by building much more of London, does not exist within government - or seemingly in any other section of society.
London is officially a city of 7,400,000. The London Sustainability Exchange (LSX), a project of Forum for the Future, aims to make London a more sustainable world city. They claim London as the world’s first ‘mega-city’, but do little to define London as such beyond the observation that it is no longer a mid-nineteenth century compact city. For the UN megacities have populations of over 10 million, but are also characterised by their rate of urbanisation, often at low densities. London is not without problems, says the LSX. ‘While it lacks the absolute poverty of those other megacities, the social, health, and economic inequalities in London are enormous,’ they insist, while ‘… environmental inequalities in London are to date less clear-cut.’ They want to ensure ‘environmental justice’ for all.
For the chairman of the UTF, Sir Richard Rogers, there is no environmental justice while we rely on car based suburbanisation. In Cities for a Small Planet he complains that ‘… while the city population has declined, the population of outer London has increased, sprawling outwards in an ever-widening circle.’ He observes that what may be considered as London, ‘… some thirty miles wide in 1945, is now a commuter belt 200 miles wide stretching from Cambridge to Southampton, and is the largest and most complex urban region in Europe’.
For Rogers, like Farrell, this is an economic, social and environmental problem that requires the deliberate densification of already urbanised areas to prevent further, car-dependent sprawl. Everyone in the imagined compact city is supposed to be equal, even if some, travelling the world yet living within walking distance of work in two very expensive Georgian town houses knocked together, are more equal than others.
Rogers misses an important point about urban expansion – a point which is appreciated by Kenneth Frampton in his insightful Megaform as Urban Landscape. Namely, it was the train and the telegraph that first made it possible to find living space outside the compact city. The car, telephone and Internet have merely accelerated a process that allows settlement to expand into land that is no longer needed for food production, and is not considered special enough as landscape to be maintained uninhabited for private or public recreation. Since ‘… the dissolution of the city as a bounded domain dating from the mid-nineteenth century’, says Frampton, ‘… architects have long since been aware that any contribution they might make to the urban form would of necessity be extremely limited.’ Small wonder architects like Rogers look to anachronistic compact cities like Barcelona, as ‘… an exception to the megalopolitan norm.’ Repetitious building types have been used to generate megacities around the world with little or no architectural input, and generally using site-based and laborious construction techniques.
While recognising that ‘… infrastructure is the urban glue that binds together individual buildings and makes life in our cities, towns or villages either a delight or a tribulation’, Sir Norman Foster, later in his career than Rogers, also believes that population growth necessitates restraint on land use:
‘In a world that is witnessing the growth of megacities, depletion of fossil fuels and the environmental threats of global warming and pollution, the pressures on infrastructure are multiplying and offer new engineering as well as social challenges… One might argue that, on a finite planet, the biggest challenge today is to provide for increasing density - putting more people into less space - at the same time as improving the quality of urban life.’
Whatever happened to the megastructural optimism and architectural strength of Rogers at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where, as Frampton says, change was part of the expansive plan? Where has the vision of Foster gone with his Millennium Tower, creating new space vertically in Tokyo Bay? Foster appears to be forgetting that engineering helps make the human world go round. It seems that the best of the technologically inspired British architects have adopted a naturalistic perspective, and have become convinced that there needs to be a return to the pre-industrial compact city.
Now of course it is obvious that there is nothing necessarily free, fair or fulfilling about the development of megacities. Poverty features in the world’s rapid urbanisation, and Britain serves as an excellent example of the painful unevenness of industrial development, dilapidations and dependencies.
In June 2004 the population of Great Britain was 57.5 million, less than 1% of the global population. According to the latest figures 86.1% of the population live in England, 8.8% in Scotland, and 5.1% in Wales. . England is far from uniformly developed. In their atlas of the 2001 census, People and Places, Daniel Dorling and Bethan Thomas convincingly characterise the human geography of England at the start of the twenty-first century as a tale of one prospering metropolis and its provincial hinterland:
‘On each side of the divide there is a great city structure with a central dense urban core, suburbs, parks and a rural fringe. However, to the south these areas are converging as a great metropolis, while to the north is a provincial archipelago of city islands.’
The metropolis of Greater London ‘… now extends across all of Southern England’, from Gainsborough in the North to Penzance in the West.
In 2004 the Office of National Statistics (ONS) expected the population of Great Britain to peak around 2050 at just over 63.0 million, and then gradually fall. The declining population of Scotland is anticipated to continue, while it is thought that the population of Wales will peak around 2030 and then fall. The population of England is still expected to be rising in 40 years’ time, but at a lower rate. More recently the ONS anticipated that the population may surpass their previous ‘peak’ to reach nearly 64.0 million by 2031.
The problem in Britain, of course, is that we have an economy with small prospects for growth. Any problems we face are certainly not to be found in too much development, but in realising far too little for the population as it exists. There has been much discussion about the inadequate level of house building, which is acute in London and the South East, and is bound up with the following factors:
These factors have been well summarised by Roger Blitz and Scheherazade Daneshkhu in the Financial Times. Whether London builds 120,000 or 300,000 homes is almost inconsequential, with the policy debate never confronting the year on year inadequacy of development activity.
There are two components to the calculation of the necessary housing output:
There is discussion of the former, but little about the latter. John Gummer, then secretary of state for the Environment, started the current debate about household formation with the 1996 report, Household Growth – Where shall we live? He argued that 4.4 million new households needed housing by 2016, and that further suburbanisation was to be resisted in the process:
‘Only one thing has to be taken as read. That is that we should seek to provide as many as possible of these new units on land which has already been used, particularly that land which is found within our towns and cities. The principle of sustainable development, which lies behind all that the Government seeks to do, demands that we use every opportunity to protect green field sites.
…The wholesale destruction of the countryside is not an option.’
The consensus against sprawl has persisted with the shift from a Conservative to a New Labour administration. The wholesale destruction of the countryside is still raised as the fictional threat, as if bigger homes with gardens would be the end of the world. Yet the land cover of Great Britain is 23.5 million hectares, used in 2002 as follows:
If settlements are added to the ‘sundry’ component of largely transport infrastructure such as roads and railways then the total developed coverage is about 2.3 million hectares, or almost 10% of Great Britain. Clearly, Great Britain is largely a rural landscape in which intensive agricultural habitats of improved grasslands and arable crops occupying just under than half of the land. A further 45% is broadleaved and coniferous woodland in nearly equal proportions, with semi-natural habitats, such as bog, heath and ‘acid’ grassland, making up over a quarter of the total, mostly in Scotland. Coastal habitats and open water, while important, are small in extent. The three countries of Great Britain differ markedly, with intensive uses affecting nearly three-quarters of England and about half of Wales; in Scotland, less than a quarter is intensively farmed or developed. Overall 90% of Great Britain remained undeveloped in 2000. Considerable growth in the UK population and household numbers could be easily accommodated across Great Britain, in high urban concentrations, as dispersed settlements integrated into the landscape, and in every pattern of land development in between.
Household growth is a component of population growth, but is also occurring because household sizes are getting smaller through better health or people choosing to live alone. The UK has an ageing population, the success story of industrialising societies. With such prosperity understandably come legitimate demands for independence. However housing undersupply closes down retirement prospects, sustains unhappy households, locks first time buyers out of the market, and ensures that annual output stagnates despite record property speculation.
Britain ’s population of 57.5 million lives in a housing stock of about 24 million dwellings. We might estimate that a Britain of 64.0 million by 2030 needs a stock of around 26.7 million homes if household growth were to match population growth. But households are getting smaller and more are needed than population growth would suggest alone. It seems reasonable to estimate household numbers at 29.0 million by 2030. That increase of 5.0 million new households is a requirement for at least 200,000 new homes per annum over the next 25 years. Of course, that reveals nothing about where they should be built, or the distribution and range of house types required. Subject to the presumption against greenfield development, they could be on either new or reclaimed land.
Then there is the rate of stock replacement. A domestic structure periodically rebuilt as a museum piece will last indefinitely, because it is lavished with resources. Ordinary flats or houses will just about last 100 years with a life of laborious refurbishment, and a lot of DIY. To replace the housing stock as it increases from 24.0 to 29.0 million on an average 100 year cycle requires us to build 242,000 new homes in 2006, incrementally rising up to 290,000 in 2030. In 25 years that is a total of 6.65 million homes, or an average of 266,000 every year.
Adding the 200,000 required for annual new household formation and the 266,000 average for stock replacement, Britain requires an average minimum of 466,000 homes annually over the next quarter of a century. That is a total of 11.65 million over 25 years. Such an unprecedented housing output would surpass the record number of 413,714 built in 1968, when Harold Wilson's Old Labour government had promised 500,000 in their election manifesto. It also stands in stark contrast to the low levels of house building achieved by New Labour since their 1997 election:
Table 1: ‘Permanent dwellings started and completed by tenure, Great Britain’ (open in new window)
Of course the previous record of Conservative administrations was not much better, but it is New Labour that presides over an average annual undersupply of about 295,000 homes. On the estimates accepted by the ODPM, there is such a low level of stock replacement involving demolition that each home standing today will have to last 1200 years. That is ridiculous as a practical long term prospect, but some of the more spacious stock does age fairly well, provided renovations are kept up. The consequence is that the construction sector is stuck as a site-based refurbishment and DIY business, unproductively patching up dilapidated dwellings. That is one of the reasons why British construction is so backward.
Table 2: ‘Dwelling stock by region’ (open in new window)
As the British population has increased we have been making do with an insufficient stock of ageing properties, over a fifth of which in England are pre-First World War antiques. Just under a further fifth predate the Second World War across England. In London, and despite all the bomb damage of the Second World War, over 60% of the stock originates from the first half of the twentieth century or earlier. Whereas in the South East of England 66% were built post-war, and in the East the figure built after 1945 is 71%. In recent years, everywhere, we have been building far too slowly.
London ’s housing stock is very different from the rest of England, which makes refurbishment harder to carry out. 4% of households in the capital live in detached properties compared with over 20 per cent in England as a whole. In London over a third of all households live in purpose built flats or maisonettes. That proportion is set to increase. Thanks to Gummer’s presumption against greenfield development, restated by Farrell and Rogers in their attempt to return to the compact city, volume housebuilders nationwide are now selling more diminutive flats than diminutive houses. Aspirant families rightly want gardens. However the definition of ‘sustainable communities’ rejects private outdoor living space through the policy of increasing housing density. The average densities of new development in London and the South East have increased from 55 and 26 dwellings per hectare respectively in 2002 to provisional estimates of 71 and 33 dwellings per hectare in 2003. Everywhere villages and towns are being officially ‘densified’ where once that was understood to be overdevelopment. For all his professional criticism of the supposed monoculture of suburban sprawl, Rogers has inadvertently encouraged a monoculture of slightly higher density, site-built apartment blocks and town houses which are invariably overpriced and undersized. This is not the Urban Renaissance of New York loft style living he imagined for most people. New Labour and their policymaking architects talk about ‘Decent Homes’, but with no standards on room size since minima were abandoned in the 1980s.
What if Miliband were wrong about London? What if we accept that most of us are already not living in the compact London he takes as a model? What if living space were available? Rogers is right in this regard: Today we can identify a megacity South and East of a line from the Isle of Portland and Weymouth, through Poole, Salisbury, Swindon, around Oxford to Milton Keynes and Letchworth, taking in Cambridge, across to Ipswich and down to Felixstowe and Harwich. This megacity is centred on London. It very roughly follows the county boundaries, with incursions into Dorset, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. It can clearly be seen illuminated at night from satellites. It contains the full range of development densities amidst a varied and inhabited countryside. In 2003, according to the ONS Regions in Figures series, it comprised:
Roughly then in 2005, allowing for slight overlaps with county boundaries and another 2 years of development from the Regions in Figures series, the London megacity consists of:
As we might expect, there is already a preponderance of single and two person households in this region compared to the rest of the country. While the South East and East more or less reflect the national average population age distribution, Outer London, and even more so Inner London have a very high proportion of 20 to 34 year olds, but fewer elderly. Many younger people migrate to London to work before they have their families, and either move outwards, or elsewhere. As the South East of England Development Agency (SEEDA) understands, this region is where the British economy happens. It is full of ‘Enterprise Hubs’ and ‘Gateway Locations’. In 2002 the South East had a £140 billion regional economy, the most successful in Britain, making a net contribution of £17 billion to the Exchequer - far more than any other region including London. That said, ‘… SEEDA’s particular concern is that the lack of affordable housing is a threat to the sustainable growth of the region. It affects the ability of business to attract and retain workers and therefore their efficiency and competitiveness. It also squeezes out the key public sector workers that are an essential underpinning to any successful economy. Lack of affordable housing also has an unacceptable social cost.’
However, despite their confident sounding regional strategy, SEEDA is nowhere near considering itself as working within a megacity that associates their South East with London and the southern half of East England - let alone participating in the nationwide construction of 11.65 million new and replacement homes to 2030. Neither, for that matter, does the East of England Development Agency (EEDA), or the London Development Agency (LDA). It is unlikely that the LSX meant a megacity of these proportions either.
Elsewhere in Britain a particular kind of megacity is being conceptualised by Will Alsop, a contributor to Manmade Modular Megastructures. Alsop identifies a ‘Supercity’ on the West-East axis of the M62, from Manchester and Liverpool through Leeds to Hull. For Dorling and Thomas this is part of the ‘provincial archipelago of city islands’ outside of the South East and East of England ‘converging as a great metropolis’. This is rather a confirmation of Alsop’s projection of a Northern Supercity. He anticipates travel between urban concentrations within the landscape of the Supercity, so that identifiable centres of community leave most uncultivated countryside for recreation. Like Martin Pawley, Alsop recognises urban sprawl as based on road transport and telecommunications. Pawley, however, sees society levelling out to a uniform dispersal with reduced need for physical mobility in an inhabited landscape made possible by Information Technology. Both appreciate that the presence of landscape is critical in the megacity. Frampton prefers to think of topological megaforms characterising or marking the landscape of the megacity, which may contain megastructures which vertically accentuate the varying density of sprawling development:
‘One may object that the megaform approach gives sufficient attention to the transport infrastructure or, conversely, that the physical form of the city is of little consequence in a telematic age. Alternatively, one may claim that urban culture in a classical sense can only be reconstituted typologically, or, conversely, that the traditional context of the historical city is no longer pertinent. Each of these polarized positions seem to be somewhat evasive to the extent that they fail to confront the responsibility of giving an identifiable shape or inflection to the late modern megalopolis.’
There is indeed a strangely popular assumption that people can’t live a full life without physical proximity and a degree of anonymity in a compact city, or be comfortable in the countryside unless everyone else stays elsewhere. These abstractions - urban compaction and rural isolation - are not mutually exclusive as ways of defining sustainability. They are both part of the demand for a compact city for the majority and the countryside for the few. Frampton creatively suggests that developing megaforms, which may contain megastructures, is ‘… a realistic mediation of the random megalopolis as an iterated form.’
Within the megacity centred on London, we might break free of the simplistic and deterministic talk of ‘sustainable communities’. We might look at where the LDA meets SEEDA and EEDA, and where the ODPM has said growth is to be prioritised. We might consider the Thames Gateway as the first place to experiment with topology, suggesting megaforms along the A13, the Thames Estuary and the A2/M2. It may be a potential setting for a typological approach to megacity development. Repetitive but highly variegated shorter lifespan architecture built on site or, more productively, manufactured housing, offices, schools or healthcare facilities. They would range in development densities to concentrate around megastructures. These are major capital investments that have a longer lifespan, and are designed, along with the megaform, to anticipate periodic change within their modules.
Anticipating a population of 64.0 million people in 2030, which is taken to equate to 29.0 million households, 5 million new and 6.65 million replacement homes are needed in a quarter of a century. That may be an underestimation. The South East and London is likely to grow faster than the rest of Great Britain, and with faster household growth. By 2030 we might estimate a megacity of:
That, if correct, would be an increase of 2.7 million households alone in the London megacity region, which requires 108,000 homes per annum. Assuming a design life of 100 years, accepting the commitment to refurbishment, the rate of housing stock replacement should be a further 91,540 homes per annum for 25 years. That means building 199,540 homes each year up to 2030 in London, the South East and the southern half of East England.
In summary then, we might anticipate that between 2005 and 2030 Great Britain and London, the megacity from Oxfordshire down to the South East coast, requires:
Table 3: ‘London megacity requirements ’ (open in new window)
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, average of completions from 1997 to 2003, ‘Table 232, Housebuilding: Permanent dwellings completed by tenure and region, England’, ODPM Live Tables, accessed 14.02.05
200,000 homes, more or less, are needed each year for the next 25 in the London megacity region alone. At the current rate of house building, in 25 years time there will be an accumulated undersupply of about 3.68 million too few homes built either side of the megacity fringe. That will be a worse state of affairs for the South where undersupply of both new and replacement housing is higher in proportion to the total number of households.
Clearly sub-regions could be considered in detail and the numbers require further development. In this generalised model the same numbers of existing properties are being demolished as replaced North and South of the megacity fringe. A cleverer model, based on a study of Northern depopulation and migration South might allow for more demolitions in less popular, less dynamic areas, and more construction where people want to live or need to work. That is a political and economic process that has proven impossible to resist through a succession of regional regeneration policies. We can accept this long run trend by planning a megacity centred on London that works, or face the consequences of denying it is happening.
Responding to this challenge does not mean concreting over the countryside either. The replacement housing might stand on cleared sites. In other words on brownfield land. Or people might want to raise or lower existing densities. In high demand areas that have no infill sites available greenfield sites will be needed, while the demolition site in low demand area can be used for something else or remediated as landscape. But there is clearly plenty of scope for sophisticated planning of development at a range of densities, and on all sorts of land, if only we could break out of the Greenfield/Brownfield oversimplification.
Only 9.0% of the combined 2,445,000 hectares of London and the South East are developed, compared to 7.9% of the 1,207,100 hectares of the East of England. That is less than the average of 10% for Great Britain. This seems unbelievable when we are constantly being told that the South East is over-crowded. It is as accurate a figure as is available. Mark Fraenkel at the ONS has explained that figures for London’s land use cannot be isolated from those for the South East as the data is not reliable enough. In other words, the government does not know the true extent of London’s development. No one seems to. However, when the next Countryside Survey is undertaken in 2006 to 2007, it should be possible to be able to generate land use figures at the London level. That will then show a lower percentage for the South East, and a far higher one for London. One third of the region is designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) representing nearly one third of the total AONBs in England. Another 15% of the South East is designated as the Green Belt. There are over 700 Sites of Special Scientific Interest, with 72 km of designated Heritage Coast.
The Thames Gateway growth area might take a greater share of the 200,000 homes per annum needed in the London megacity. The Thames Gateway is 80,000 hectares, of which just under half, or 38,000 hectares is brownfield land. That compares to the estimated 285,000 hectares of development land to the South and East of Oxfordshire containing 7.75 million households, including all of the London Boroughs. If 10.45 million households comprised the London megacity in 2030 the total built up area would not exceed 385,000 hectares, even if built at densities comparable to those that already exist. That equates to 11.7% of the megacity after 25 years of unprecedented development.
The sensible thing to do is build the Thames Gateway as a large share of that household growth, make something of the place, and keep the best countryside for recreation. Rather than argue for mega-scale infrastructure consequent on population, Farrell instead values the landscape well beyond the merit of all but the most exceptional parts of the estuary and its wildlife. Places like Rainham Marsh, Tilbury Fort or Upnor are obviously worth protecting, and there will be many others. But not much of the estuary is exceptional.
Speaking in Thurrock, Rogers assumed that only the 38,000 hectares of brownfield land in the Gateway might be built on at a boring blanket of 80 homes a hectare, giving a total of 3.04 million homes. His presentation slide incorrectly stated the total as 304,000; out by a factor of 10. In Manmade Modular Megastructures we correct Roger’s figures and show what London might be like if the Thames Gateway were invested in. We assume 25% of the best of the Thames and Medway estuaries, marshland and tributaries is cared for as landscape. The remaining 75% of previously developed land, poor farmland and waste ground might be developed at densities that range from 1 per hectare upwards, and up to a mile high, leading to a Thames Gateway of 3 million households, with 600,000 living there already. For such a place were to be built over 25 years, 96,000 homes per year are required now. That would be like building another Greater London to the East of the existing. To do that well near complete replacement and replanning of the existing stock should be entertained, and that will require more like 120,000 homes per annum in the Gateway for the next 25 years.
Not all need be manufactured, but most would. That raises tremendous architectural possibilities in both a typological and a topological approach to megacity planning. Particularly since a further 80,000 homes per annum would be required across the rest of the London megacity outside of the Thames Gateway, with the remaining numbers of planned demolitions vacating land to accommodate some of the development on brownfield land. Perhaps only 20% of the housing outside of the Thames Gateway might be required to be on greenfield sites, with a focus on developing around the other growth areas of Ashford, along the M11 corridor to Cambridge, and about the Solent.
The housing stock is ageing badly, and with annual national production around 171,000 we are building about 300,000 too few homes every year. Those being built are increasingly microflats. People need to live somewhere. Even assuming low levels of immigration, the current level of development in Britain cannot sustain the population. The London megacity is happening. We need to recognise the unprecedented challenge of our time requires a completely new approach to development. Frampton understands the scale of the task:
‘What has changed dramatically in the last fifty years is the rate of technological change and the rapacity of development, occurring at a speed and scale which totally outstrips anything that urbanized society had experienced in the past.’
If only we could get excited about them, manmade modular megastructures could help to build London 2030 on a sufficient scale, and with enough of a dynamic, to reverse house price inflation. Sadly that prospect seems to fill Farrell and Rogers, Brown and Miliband with dread. If they don’t want more of it, it can only mean they don’t think London is so great, after all.
is a practising architect and founder of www.audacity.org. He is co-author of Why is construction so backward? (Wiley, 2004), and co-editor of Manmade Modular Megastructures, the January 2006 edition of AD magazine.
© 2004·06
What are proper densities for city dwelling? The answer to this is something like the answer Lincoln gave to the question ‘how long should a man’s legs be?’ Long enough to reach the ground, Lincoln said….. Densities are too low, or too high when they frustrate city diversity instead of abetting it.
Jane Jacobs
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