A new London agenda

Professor Greg Clark, chair of Connected Places Capital and 3Ci Cities Commission for Climate Investment, sets out the scale of the challenge for London’s next development cycle, and how it can seize the opportunity to lead the way as a revised global city This year is not just the beginning of a “post-pandemic phase” in the way that cities work. It is the start of a whole new cycle of global urban development and reinvented cities.  This is much more than a “reset”. It is more like a redefinition of what cities are, and it requires proactive leadership and initiative to shape and manage it. This new cycle could last for 20, 30 or 40 years. At its heart is the quest to foster a new “social contract” for a post-20th century economy and its cities. If it works, our cities will emerge stronger from the pandemic, not weaker. The pandemic revealed massive inequalities in our cities. The climate emergency, coupled with troubled capitalism and a revised version of globalisation, require us to reassess the magnetic pull and refine the underlying deal at the heart of our preference for clustering people, systems, assets and activities together in the dense places we call cities.  London’s past two cycles have been largely successful but the last cycle (between 2010 and 2020) also revealed the manifest difficulty that all successful big cities have in combining population growth and increased prosperity with sustainability, affordability, decarbonisation and reduced inequality.  The cities that have managed to combine population and job growth with better outcomes on the social and environmental measures are few and far between but most of them are smaller rich cities that had some “spare capacity” at the start. These cities have an existing high quality of life, higher income, investment capacity, have learnt how to host innovation economies and have an ability to sequence growth via the shaping of a medium-density, high-amenity, well-serviced, well-connected and increasingly polycentric city.  Making the transition London must show how the transition to the redefined global city can be achieved in ways that combine and unite new sources of jobs, prosperity and population growth with progressive measures that yield real outcomes on social and environmental priorities.  This is not just difficult, it is essential. It requires a new and additional set of tools, approaches, platforms and systems that better link and incentivise the right mix of outcomes. At the level of urban and metropolitan governance, this toolbox does not yet really exist in the UK.  London’s inter-dependence with its regional neighbours and its ever-deepening economic links with the rest of the UK, increased by the recent uptick in hybrid working, learning and consumption, making old administrative and political geographies even less helpful than before.  One advantage London brings to this post-pandemic quest is that it has an unerring appetite and zeal for reinvention. London has been a source of innovations from which other cities have learnt. It has led the way in how larger cities have tried to tackle 21st-century urban challenges such as cultural strategies, integrated transport authorities, long-term planning, infrastructure financing, creative enterprise zones and cycle superhighways.  This new cycle is both a clear challenge and a major opportunity for London. The reversal of the previously positive sentiment towards the global city model of concentrated prosperity and shared tax revenues has revised the national context, making it essential that London becomes more self-reliant and adaptable to new politics. Embracing the opportunity of the new cycle requires a different kind of determination from the past two cycles where London’s success was largely seen as a national and regional project. Perhaps this cycle will require greater endeavour because the national policy context may not be so conducive.  From roughly 1991 to 2010, the UK government and the leaders of London worked to an implicitly agreed formula. London was encouraged to grow and succeed, fuelled by its specialisation in the globalisation of finance, services, media, creative industries, information and education. This was supported by international and domestic migration and aided by EU membership. London’s growth in these high-productivity sectors raised UK exports, generated high tax revenues and attracted large-scale international investment into the UK. London’s net tax contribution to the UK Exchequer ranged between £5bn and £20bn a year for much of this period and the implicit deal was that London’s growth financed public services and infrastructures elsewhere in the UK, and London acted as a gateway for talent, tourists and investor flows into the UK as a whole.  A world city Post-pandemic, post-GFC, post-Brexit, and in the context of the great challenge of our planetary future, a new phase of fractured globalisation with accelerated digitisation has begun and London is now reinventing what it means to be a world city.  This revised world city will build value through technology, creativity, innovation and human experience. It trades in knowledge, know-how, networks and unique combinations. It is the hub of circuits of trade in ideas, designs, prototypes, ventures and applications.   The revised world city will focus on the activities that are globalising now and provide a platform to shape them. This means that green finance, life sciences and biotech, AI and IoT, materials and earth sciences, and digital content are increasingly to the fore.  The new world city economy will be driven by four emerging forms of value creation: the innovation economy, the experience economy, the circular economy and the sharing economy. Each of these plays to new forms of global exchange and new enterprise models, and requires an urban landscape that is agile, flexible and resilient.    The revised world city must build a different social contract to the model that went before. In the last cycle, the contract was about how the world city would serve the nation with jobs, tax revenues, connections and investment. In this new cycle, the world city must build a new social contract that addresses planetary and social justice and be more attentive to its relationships and exchanges.  This new social contract creates a fresh license to operate for business and investors. It is intolerant of high-carbon living and much more focused on access to clean air, healthy lifestyles and affordable housing. It envisions a city that works for all of its citizens, not simply the high skilled or highly paid.  The new cycle of world city growth may see up to 100 cities recognised as being leaders in hosting the newly globalising sectors. Most of these will want to learn from and collaborate with London.  The prize for the UK is great. Not only can London help lead the post-pandemic recovery but it can do so in ways that advantage other UK cities and position the UK as a leader once again. To seize the opportunity, London can build the revised world city agenda, just as it did in the 1980s when this new century of the city began. As a new era of the city unfolds, it is time to focus on the opportunity for leadership that London has, and the roles the world expects it to play. Click here to read Clark’s essay in full Image © Pexels/Nikita Khandelwal Opportunity London is a new initiative promoting sustainable investment into real estate, regeneration and green infrastructure across London’s boroughs and communities. The programme has brought together London councils, the London mayor, the City of London Corporation and the private sector to showcase a single message for the capital. Through the initiative, Opportunity London will also fund a post within London & Partners to work on bringing capital investment into the capital.  Nick McKeogh, chief executive of the NLA, which is driving the initiative, says London and its development market has never before needed a voice as strong as it does today. The capital needs to sell itself, collectively. Key is bringing together the public and private sectors to talk about the opportunities a “new London” has.  “You need a public/private coalition of people who have a long-term view on London and are looking to support long-term, properly sustainable capital,” says McKeogh.  “Opportunity London is not just about selling London for London’s sake, it is saying let’s drive capital investment, sustainable investment into London’s boroughs and communities to deliver positive and environmental outcomes for people in London, because if you do it is going to be economically attractive.” Find out more about Opportunity London