An investigation of authority in London has the potential to take you through hundreds of entrances and into thousands of offices. It isn’t as open and democratic as some people think. There are many different individuals wearing many different hats. They decide on an array of issues in which everybody has to win but only some make a request.
In recent times there has been open questioning over the effectiveness of a decision to benefit the wider public that’s made in an application by a small number of people. It’s believed that some proposals have missed out the public benefit stage and have gone straight to the consumer stage as the primary concern.
This isn’t new since London used to be known as being a niche city in many respects. The broad appeal of modern London has meant that planning has had to go through a much more rigourous process and has resulted in a broader set of benefits for just about anyone. So the query is over the sudden change of perspective on this issue.
The leading example is a bike hire company proliferating their services in the centre of London and threatening to engulf boroughs beyond the towers and parks that have made London a nice place to visit, to live in, and to work. This cannot be an oversight because of the obvious, visible decline of the pedestrian experience.
The local theory is that the workforce has come to define what public opinion is about on these things. In spite of the fact of repeated independent assessments, the bikes still appear and are left stranded in the way of people who have somewhere else to go. It may be that it benefits office workers or those looking to get to a different campus site. But the cost of this is heavy for others.
The response needs to be a review of how ideas get to the point of execution by looking at who is involved at the beginning, middle, and end of it. In this case, there are too many targets for rebuke who would fear coming forward because they don’t fit into the category of worker or student. There is now a need to reconnect city planning with everyone who uses it.
