Prologue: Situating London within global urbanisation circuits
London was the first metropolis of the modern era and the first world city. London's development history has been shaped by political power, government agencies and private consortia associated with mercantile trade and the imperial project, national hegemony in intermediate banking and financial institutions, and a distinctive form of industrialisation from the nineteenth century onwards. The British capital's development has also been influenced by particularly rich milieux effects, comprising deep social capital, cultural diversity and network formation, shaped by migration as well as practices of established cohorts and actors.
These vocations underpinned national primacy, and London's ascendancy within circuits of power and influence among European capitals and trading cities, including over history are Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, Copenhagen and Hamburg. Following contraction both in the economy and population base over the 1970s, associated with Britain's overall economic malaise, and benchmarked by declining productivity, unfavourable terms of trade and more particularly the collapse of the Port of London and basic manufacturing industries, London has emerged in the twenty-first century as a global exemplar of regeneration.
Over extended history London's spatiality has been produced by factors which have included advantages of national primacy in the concentration of institutions of political control within a highly centralised state, and by industrialisation and world city formation in the nineteenth century, associated with the expansion of international trade and the management of empire. The construction of 13 mainline train stations over the last century and a half, and the development of the Underground from 1863 onward, greatly facilitated the physical growth of London well beyond the London County Council area, with new housing estates penetrating deeper within the metropolitan fringe and the Home Counties.
London's growth trajectory following deep industrial decline and overall population loss during the 1970s was influenced by a ‘new international division of labour’ (Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye 1980) within which apex-level global cities are privileged in the concentration of higher-order services industries, and with industrial labour shifting to the growth economies of East Asia. Forty years on from this prognosis London has largely retained its competitive advantage in intermediate services within an increasingly multipolar world urban order. London's economy also has strengthened in other key sectors underpinning contemporary metropolitan economies, exemplified by higher education and the knowledge sector, culture and creative industries and the innovation economy.
London's ascendancy as global city has been underpinned by concentrations of finance, corporate control and specialised services and labour in the City and Canary Wharf, and is expressed in new design values and idioms within reconstructed landscapes across the metropolis. London, along with New York, has been a principal beneficiary of the deregulation of financial markets, although the dividends have been disproportionately captured by executives, shareholders and fund managers and traders.
At the national level, Doreen Massey (1984) described a distinctively asymmetrical spatial division of labour in Britain which powerfully favours London over provincial cities in the distribution of high-wage occupations in finance and intermediate services: a tendency which has if anything strengthened in this century. London has also been the principal beneficiary among British cities of membership within the European Union, and has more to lose than other cities from a hard Brexit which would deny or obstruct entry to the single market. Similarly, possible restrictions on the free movement of workers, students and immigrants ensuing from Brexit would be damaging, as each is key to London's social capital and unique cultural vibrancy.
Platforms of development in globalising cities
Twentieth-century cities within leading national economies were largely shaped by a specific sector or industrial ensemble which defined eras of growth and change, including first the manufacturing sectors of the ‘industrial city’, and then the postindustrial city characterised by expanding services employment. Over the final three decades of the twentieth century, the collapse of traditional industries produced urban economies and labour markets within which services (both intermediate and final demand) accounted for a preponderance of employment growth.
The reassertion of London's growth trajectory and power projection in an era of transnational urbanism, and the ascendancy of cities among the dynamic economies of East Asia and the Global South which underpins an increasingly multipolar urban world, have been achieved on a robust platform of multiple high-margin industries, skilled labour and institutions that facilitate knowledge creation and innovation.
Like New York, San Francisco and Shanghai among other world cities, London has in this century capitalised on the development potential of the most propulsive sectors situated within advanced economies. These include notably the multiple platforms of intermediate finance and related services; cultural industries; higher education and the knowledge sector; and innovation across specialised fields of applied science, medicine and information technologies.
There are of course important differences in the governance systems of each of the bastions of the global economy, situated within the Atlantic realm of mature economies, the growth economies of East Asia increasingly led by China, and the emergent economies of the Global South. What most have in common though are variants of twenty-first-century capitalism which privilege the interests of the market and associated agencies and actors. A corollary experience of globalisation is observed in urban housing markets which cater increasingly to highly remunerated, knowledge-intensive workers.
A very large consumption sector of restaurants, cafés, bars, theatres and musical performance venues complements London's visitor economy, and offers opportunity for individuals imbued with talent and creativity. The consumption economy caters to the intensive social interaction needs of London's high-wage financial, technology and knowledge sectors. These activities and their diverse sites have in the aggregate contributed to the production of a more complex space-economy in the metropolis.
Internal markers of change within London
London's development trajectory has entailed sustained investment and enterprise formation within the established clusters of the central city, but has increasingly brought into play a far more extensive array of districts, sites and communities across the metropolis. Space is increasingly mobilised for development not only by corporations but also by the multilevel state and its agencies, by public and private institutions and by high net-worth families and individuals. Importantly the experience of change includes the serial reproduction of place and territory in response to technological innovation, market trends and preferences, and shifts in returns to capital, notably in the property sector.
Over extended history and in the active present London has benefitted greatly from inflows of immigrants, traders and refugees, enriching the capital's cultural milieu and social diversity, and deepening knowledge of commercial possibilities and external market dynamics. London's economy and social structure are highly internationalised: a consequence of London's development history, and sustained by massive flows of inward investment, the extensive presence of multinational corporations and subsidiaries across key sectors, and a diverse pattern of immigration matched only by New York.
Large numbers of young workers and students collectively animate the spaces and place-imaginaries of the metropolis, including participation in cultural industries and institutions, and the visitor economy and higher education. Young people also contribute in important ways to public welfare (and to lively cities) through engagement with social media, community associations and volunteering sectors.
London encompasses districts and communities which present a vernacular built environment motif, notably in prestigious areas of the central area. Much of central and inner London's built environment has its origins in the Victorian era (1837–1900) and, as Anthony King has observed (1976), the cultural implications of empire have included the imprints of colonial architecture in the British capital. Indeed the nineteenth-century world city experience shaped a comprehensive aesthetic for London, expressed in architecture, urban design, art and literature, as recounted in Celina Fox's volume (1992) cataloguing a major exhibition in Essen on ‘London – World City 1800–1840’.
London overall lacks the coherent domestic architectural template of cities such as Paris, Florence, Amsterdam and Vienna among other cases. But the legacy of Victorian architectural values and idioms, building types and heritage spaces within many districts has proven to be conducive to accommodating the arts, cultural industries and creative workers, and more recently the innovation economy, demonstrating the robust utility of London's built environment over cycles of change.
In the contemporary era of neoliberalism (and inter-city competition), London has consciously opened up both to global capital and to design innovation from diverse international sources, as well as from British firms and professionals, observed in distinctive projects and iconic buildings situated across the metropolis. This impressive record of redevelopment and experimentation in architecture and urban design has been achieved in turn through comprehensive capital relayering and associated upgrading processes, contributing to widespread dislocation and deep inequality, as well as wealth and opportunity for many endowed with high levels of specialised knowledge and skills.
London's development storyline: Continuity and contradiction
My purpose in this volume is to contribute to a deeper understanding of London's developmental saliency within contexts of globalisation, urban transnationalism and industrial restructuring. As prelude I seek to identify illustrative meanings (and contradictions) of London within urban studies which necessarily have a bearing in the first instance on positioning the metropolis as field of study.
London performs as the capital of a mature, established unitary state. But London's political and economic primacy is a source of friction within the UK's diverse polities and regions, and is widely seen as an impediment to a more balanced pattern of regional development. London's size, prosperity and power projection within Britain were viewed as aggravating features in the Brexit vote of June 2016 and in the continuing political alienation of electorates in smaller and more peripheral British regions and towns, and was further underscored in the regional, community and class voting patterns in the 12 December 2019 British election.
Second, London was the largest industrial city within a nation that was the earliest to industrialise, but which also experienced the extensive collapse of both traditional industry and labour and the Port of London during the second half of the twentieth century, creating deep hardship and deprivation. Employment contraction undermined the residential tenure of industrial labour throughout much of the inner city, enabling extensive gentrification in traditional working class communities, as representatives of the new middle class exercised agency in processes of revalorisation and displacement. London's extensive former industrial districts and riverside docklands have been repurposed for large capital projects, high-value housing, the arts and cultural industries and for the innovation economy. Manufacturing now accounts for rather less than 5 per cent of London's employment, a proportion roughly equal to that of Hong Kong.
Third, London was the control centre for the world's most extensive empire for two centuries, an experience replete with subjugation of colonial populations and exploitation of resources, but has emerged as a critical site of postcolonial contestation and inequality as well as reconciliation in the postwar era. Immigration from former colonies contributes significantly to the shaping of a uniquely cosmopolitan urbanism, and to the productive diversity of London's social ecology. There is broad public acceptance of the many reciprocal benefits of multiculturalism in the British capital. But minority groups and individuals still face discrimination in daily life in contemporary London.
Finally, over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries London was at the forefront of radical thinking and the formation of progressive movements, exemplified by the polemics of Karl Marx, the rise of Fabian socialism and imaginative thinkers such as William Morris and the growth of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The commitment of elected representatives in the London County Council (1888–1965) and Greater London Council (1965–1986) eras to public housing and to political economy values in the management of the metropolitan economy is a matter of record (see for example, Hall et al 1973; Thornley 1992; Travers 2003). But the last four decades have seen a steady rise in inequality in London measured in terms of incomes, public welfare and measures of health, as documented by such scholars as Chris Hamnett (2003, 2016) and Danny Dorling (2013). Indeed London represents among other things a pioneering site of neoliberalism within the global political landscape, replete with variants shaped by both national and local governments since the 1980s.
Key factors in the growing inequality in the metropolis include the exaltation of the market over social goods and community values as the leitmotif of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, rollbacks to local planning powers as a means of facilitating high-value development and the privatisation of much of London's council (public) housing stock.
Successive governments, including both Conservative and New Labour, have tinkered with the neoliberal project but have largely accepted the basic order favouring marketisation over public goods. As Susan Fainstein observed in her influential treatise on The Just City (2003), London ranks well below the best European examples of progressive urbanism, the latter including notably Amsterdam, measured by key indices of effective representation, access to housing, social equality and inclusion.
Millennial Metropolis: An outline of purpose and objectives
My approach is not to insist that London uniquely stands for a particular moment as urban archetype; but rather that it offers an especially rich and instructive field for investigating the developmental implications of cities increasingly open to capital and to cultural penetration, and to relational geographies of change: through purposeful intent, or as an indirect outcome of broader changes in governance, regulation, policy and planning practice.
London's value as field of study is enhanced by its complex external relations, incorporating both competition and collaboration with cities and societies situated within a particularly extensive range of networks, including other apex global cities such as New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. London's network interactions include economic, political and social relations with other British cities and communities, weighted by an extreme national primacy matched only by Seoul in the case of South Korea, and Bangkok, as capital of Thailand.
London benefits from a deep network of financial, business and cultural relations with other European capital cities and business centres, exemplified by Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt and Milan. London's numerous universities and col...
