(PUC - RS 2017/1)London: the city that ate itselfL

(PUC - RS 2017/1)

London: the city that ate itself

 

London is a city ruled by money. The things that make it special – the markets, pubs, high streets and communities – are becoming unrecognisable. The city is suffering a form of entropy whereby anything distinctive is converted into property value. Can the capital save itself?

London is without question the most popular city for investors,” says Gavin Sung of the international property agents Savills. “There is a trust factor. It has a strong government, a great legal system, the currency is relatively safe. It has a really nice lifestyle”. There are parks, museums and nice houses. Its arts of hedonism are reaching unprecedented levels: its restaurants get better or at least more ambitious and its bars offer cocktails previously unknown to man. In some ways, the city has never been better. It has a buzz. Its population keeps growing and investment keeps pouring in, both signs of its desirability. As its mayor likes to boast: “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutans. It is their natural habitat.”

At the same time, to use a commonly heard phrase, the city is eating itself. Most obviously, its provision of housing is failing to keep up with its popularity, with effects on price that breed bizarre reactions at the top end of the market and misery at the bottom. Thousands are being forced to leave London because their local authorities can’t find them homes and people on middle incomes can’t acquire a place where anyone would want to raise a family.

There are also effects beyond housing, although often driven by residential property prices. The spaces for work that are an essential part of the city’s economy are being squeezed, its high streets diminished, its pubs and other everyday places closing. It is suffering a form of entropy whereby the distinctive or special is converted into property values. Its essential qualities, which are that it was not polarised on the basis of income, and that its best places were common property, are being eroded. (…)

This would matter less if the city were making new places with the qualities of those now packaged up and commodified – if the supply of good stuff _____ expanding – but it _____ not. Although the cranes swing, much of the new living zones now _____ created range from the ho-hum to the outright catastrophic. The skyline _____ plundered for profit, but without creating towers to be proud of or making new neighbourhoods with any positive qualities whatsoever. If London is an enormous party, millions of people are on the wrong side of its velvet rope.

 

In the rest of Britain, a common view of London is that it is a parasitic monster or, as Alex Salmond put it, quoting Tony Travers of the London School of Economics: “The dark star of the economy, inexorably sucking in resources, people and energy. Nobody quite knows how to control it.” Both the SNP and Ukip can be seen as anti-London parties, as expressions of a feeling that national decisions are made in the capital, by the capital, for the capital. Those Scots who want independence are less concerned about being part of the same country as Middlesbrough or Ipswich than they are about London. But these views overlook the extent to which the city is feeding on its own.

Adapted from: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/28/london-the-city-that-ate-itself-rowan-moore

 

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