黑洞社区

By tomorrow morning London should be ready to declare a new mayor. As the capital鈥檚 citizens prepare to cast their votes today, Labour鈥檚 Sadiq Kahn was the pollsters鈥� strong favourite to enter City Hall, consistently coming out ahead of Tory rival Zac Goldsmith in last minute polls. Even as the votes are counted, however, what鈥檚 already clear from a built environment perspective is the scale of challenge that will greet the new man in charge.

With the already teeming capital projected to become home to another 1.4 million people by 2030, London offers, writ large, an example of the challenges facing cities across the UK. The new mayor will be expected to lead huge growth in housing supply, and upgrade transport and social infrastructure that is bursting at the city鈥檚 seams. Crucially, he must do both of these at the same time as driving regeneration, and creating an interconnected built environment that allows the whole city, not just pockets of it, to become a centre for regional economic growth.

One of the many high-profile figures with whom the mayor will cross paths in pursuing this elusive goal is Tory grandee Michael Heseltine, whose recent appointment as head of a Thames Estuary 2050 Growth Commission follows swiftly on from being named as chair of the government鈥檚 drive to regenerate deprived council estates, and as a member of the National Infrastructure Commission.

The new mayor will be expected to lead huge growth in housing supply, and upgrade transport and social infrastructure that is bursting at the city鈥檚 seams. Crucially, he must do both of these at the same time as driving regeneration

Linking the built environment鈥檚 various challenges together is core to Heseltine鈥檚 philosophy of how the physical environment can be used to drive growth; a philosophy he has espoused since setting up development corporations in Merseyside and Docklands in the 1980s. And Heseltine鈥檚 numerous roles will give him an obvious advantage in spotting chances to create this 鈥減lace-based economics鈥�, as he terms it in an interview with 黑洞社区 this week (see ).

Doing so is, however, an even bigger ask where political structures and individual remits do not readily link those challenges - housing, infrastructure, education provision - together. Persuading the various organisations that are stakeholders in London鈥檚 built environment to think and plan in this way must be central to the mayor鈥檚 approach.

The new mayor will also need to knit together a range of funding types if he is to stand any chance of driving the growth that London needs - even though some private sector financing may be met with suspicion by local boroughs.

With this in mind, it is worth casting a glance behind the headlines in Scotland recently, to the woeful saga of 17 schools forced to close following defects in construction. The media has made much of the fact these are PFI schools, with the failings used as another stick with which to beat the controversial funding method, and lambast the council which signed up to it. However, the faults in the construction of the schools are issues with the supply chain, not the procurement method - which has, ironically, offered some financial protection for the client over maintenance work now required.

Nestling within the mayor鈥檚 epic to-do list, however, will be one welcome gift: Transport for London鈥檚 (TfL) 拢3.6bn development pipeline. This is not just because of its scale, but because it is centred on the interlinked development of transport interchanges, commercial clusters and housing.

That pipeline provides a ready-made platform to advocate an intertwined approach to the built environment鈥檚 challenges. The new mayor鈥檚 test will be to capitalise on this opportunity - not just with TfL鈥檚 land, but by embedding a fresh, more strategic approach across London鈥檚 development as a whole.
Sarah Richardson, editor