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Part 1
SUSTAINING LONDON: THE KEY CHALLENGES
ONE
London’s future and sustainable city building
Rob Imrie and Loretta Lees
Introduction
The Mayor wants London to be the best big city in the world. The London Sustainable Development Commission supports this aspiration and believes that as part of being “best” we should work to make London the benchmark for sustainable cities by 2020. (Plowman, 2012, p 4)
The notion of sustainable development has rapidly become centre place in the governance of cities, and there are few policy makers who do not refer to it or use it as part of strategic policy making and implementation. In cities stretching from Beijing in China to São Paulo in Brazil and London in the UK, principles of sustainable development are seen as the saviour of cities, by providing the steer to crafting and creating liveable and habitable places. This is reflected in the place marketing of cities, and the various promotional activities by developers, designers and politicians extolling the virtues of space-shaping strategies allegedly assuring the development of sustainable urban environments. In London, the first explicit political overtures towards sustainable development were inbuilt into the Greater London Authority (GLA) Plan in 2004, with the then Mayor, Ken Livingstone (2004, p xii), noting that London’s future depended on enhancing ‘its economic and business efficiency … accompanied by strong improvements in the quality of life and environment and greater social and economic inclusion.’
His vision tallied with those of previous British governments, particularly New Labour’s national policy discourse of economic growth and competitiveness combined with the building of responsible and balanced communities capable of sustaining that growth. New Labour’s model of sustainable development meant, primarily, a focus on economic and environmental relations, but Livingstone also pushed other, more social, dimensions of sustainability as far as he could (Cochrane, 2006). His pronouncements for London reflected not only a broader global consciousness of the ecological and environmental harm wrought by urban lifestyles, but also the understanding that sustainable development ought to encompass, and respond to, social and economic, as well as environmental, dimensions of urban living (see Imrie et al, 2009, pp 10-12). Some examples of this were policies to increase affordable housing to 40 per cent on new developments, and requiring builders to provide Lifetime Homes to meet the needs of people ageing through the life course.
For Livingstone (2004), London’s sustainable future was more than the pursuit of a one-dimensional approach to development, based on the promotion of economic growth and the mitigation of harm to ecological and natural resources. His was also a moral discourse about the social and human dimensions of urban habitation, in which he sought to reduce social inequalities and create opportunities for social enhancement and wellbeing. Here, sustainable development was as much about the creation of new social relations, characterised by inclusive, open and tolerant places, respecting ethnic and sexual differences, redressing social inequality and enabling people to live healthy lives, as it was about securing socio-ecological resources. As Livingstone (2004, p ix) outlined, ‘My vision … is to develop London as an exemplary, sustainable world city [and] to give all Londoners the opportunity to share in London’s future success.’
The reality, for Livingstone, was that much of his vision, and the social dimensions of sustainable development, were never likely to be achievable in a context whereby the pursuit of an economic, ‘growth first’, agenda was shaping much of the policy and political discourse. Responding to the economic crash of 2008, there was renewed emphasis by policy makers on pursuing economic development and private sector-led regeneration to create the conditions for global investment in jobs and wealth creation in London. The contemporary politics of sustainable development in London (and indeed nationally) reflect the understanding that social and welfare benefits, including access to jobs, income and good housing, depend on liberalising markets. Facilitating investment opportunities for private investors in land, property and other sectors of London’s economy is presented as a fait accompli. Here, the logic is eco-modernisation in which, so it is argued, practical management and operational interventions will mitigate the environmental and social costs of economic growth.
This view has, if anything, sharpened since the Coalition government came to power in 2010. Austerity has become the clarion call to politicians to pursue urban development strategies that do not deflect potential inward investment, or place financial burdens on public sector debt and its management. The pursuit of sustainable development has to occur within fiscal constraint, and the supply and management of public sector goods and services, such as parks, lighting and transport, is no longer guaranteed or underwritten by public finance. Rather, the necessary components of social reproduction, including the air that Londoners breathe and the water that they drink, are subject to a diminution of public controls and regulation, and instead, various quasi-public and privatised formations preside over what some detect as a deterioration in the socio-environmental quality of London life (Higgins et al, 2012). Thus, despite recognition of London’s poor air quality, it has deteriorated since 2008, and the government’s own estimates indicate that illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide will affect 16 British regions and cities, including London, until 2020-25.
It is our argument in this book that such scenarios, and others like them, are unsustainable, and that it is not the future that London and Londoners deserve. The sustainable development agenda no longer fosters policies with Keynesian echoes (that is, the state investing in London’s hospitals, schools, infrastructure, and so on), as it aspired to do under Livingstone; rather, it extends a weak state entrepreneurialism, already evident during Livingstone’s tenure, led by the private sector and its interests.1 This is a recipe for what Tony Fry (2011) calls ‘defuturing’, that is, a way to name the unsustainable or those values and practices that undermine the future or people’s capacities to (self-)reproduce in ways whereby life itself is not undermined or threatened. To defuture is, for Fry (2011), part of a totalitarian culture embedded into the modernist project of human fulfilment through consumption. To critique defuturing is to describe the spatial-temporal patterns and processes of unsustainability, and to direct attention to the historically constituted nature of sustainable development discourse as not natural, inevitable or unchallengeable.
In London, defuturing, as the basis of sustainable development discourse, is the perpetuation of socio-economic and political practices that naturalise resource exploitation, fail to place limits on consumption, and rely on market allocative and distributional systems, shaped by a ‘development logic’, to provide people with access to life’s necessities.2 This logic is anathema to sustaining and supporting many people as it exposes them to vulnerabilities. These relate to reduced state welfare and support, the privatised control of land and key resources, including propensity for price fixing by corporate cartels, and market exchange that requires, for its functioning, people to be in work, and living off a decent and fair wage. This is not so for many people in London, and in 2012, just under 600,000 jobs were paid below the London Living Wage (£8.55 per hour) (see Aldridge et al, 2012). It is also estimated that from 2009 to 2012, 2.1 million people in London were living in poverty, and that income inequalities were greater than anywhere else in the UK (Aldridge et al, 2012).
Such data are symptomatic of a broader, structural crisis in relation to London’s policy approaches to sustaining people and the places and environments that they live in. As contributors to this book show, there is nothing radical or far-reaching about how London’s politicians engage with issues of sustainable development. Rather, as is argued throughout the book, sustainable development discourse is entwined with the perpetuation of market-based processes by, for example, (re)creating the basis for new rounds of investment in land and property. While London’s spatial development is premised on sustainable development as a key principle, it is difficult to find much evidence of such principles in practice. Indeed, far from sustainable development policy in London delivering the basis of the Brundtland Commission’s proclamation in 1987 (WCED, 1987), that is, intergenerational equity, sustainable development regeneration policies and programmes appear to be creating new social inequalities and extending and deepening existing ones in ways whereby the future is more likely to be characterised by intergenerational inequity.
We divide the rest of this introductory chapter into three parts. In the next section, we outline the different dimensions of sustainable development discourse in London, situating it within its historical context and, in particular, focusing on the period of economic austerity since 2008. We develop the argument that sustainable development discourse is neither new nor novel but is embedded in historically rooted debates about London’s future, in both the national economy and the world of cities. We then evaluate contemporary sustainable development discourse in London, and subject its elements to critique. There is an urgent need for sustainable development discourse in London to (re)engage with debates about social justice and ‘the rights to the city’, and to consider recent proclamations by UN Habitat (2010), that sustainable development is, first and foremost, a matter of human rights. What is required is no less than the development of redirectional practice, including the restructuring of socio-cultural and political relations, and the reanimation of what Fry (2011, p 8) refers to as ‘the common good’. We conclude by outlining the content, structure and key arguments of the book.
London and sustainable development discourse
There is heightened awareness of the deleterious effects of social and economic processes on socio-ecological relations, including constraints on capacities for economic growth. There is, however, nothing new about this, and London’s histories are embedded in social and political struggles over people’s access to land, property and public space, means of livelihood, or creating possibilities for socially sustainable ways of living. For instance, in Georgian and Victorian London, a perennial issue was social inequality relating to access to privatised water supplies in which, as Bynum and Porter (1991, p xv...
