LONDON'S URBAN NEXT CYCLE
Alberto Zancanella
MBA @BBS | Export manager DACH, China and ASEAN area for DDCHEM
2022 isn't just the beginning of a "post-pandemic phase" in the way cities function. Rather, it is the beginning of a whole new cycle of global urban development and reinvented cities. In this cycle, which comes as we enter the fifth decade of a special century in which the world's urban population is tripling in number and doubling in percentage, we will adapt to both the behavioral changes accelerated by the pandemic and their market consequences, and also to a much broader set of factors connected to urgent decarbonisation, revised globalisation, reversing entrenched disparities and inequalities, and exploiting accelerated digitalisation.
The prolonged lockdowns and accelerated digitization of the past 2 years have begged the question; what is the physical city for now? Do cities really have residual value?
This is much more than a "reset" as it is sometimes described. It is more like a redefinition of what cities are and requires proactive leadership and initiative to shape and manage them. This new cycle could last 20, 30 or 40 years. At its core is the quest to promote a new "social contract" for a post-20th century economy and its cities. If it works, our cities will come out of the pandemic stronger, not weaker.
The new "social contract" is about a new agreement on the role of cities and how they should work. The pandemic has revealed huge inequalities in our cities. The climate emergency coupled with troubled capitalism and a revised version of globalization require us to reevaluate the magnetic pull and refine the underlying deal at the heart of our preference for the clustering of people, systems, resources and activities in dense places which we call city.
The last two London cycles, 1990 to 2010 and 2010 to 2020, have been highly successful, if success is measured by population growth, job creation, visitor attractiveness and leadership in the innovation.
But the latest cycle has also revealed the manifest difficulty all successful large cities have in combining population growth and increased prosperity with sustainability, affordability, decarbonisation and reducing inequality.
One advantage London brings to this post-pandemic quest is that it has an unerring appetite and zeal for reinvention. In the past two cycles, London has been a source of innovations from which other cities have learned. From cultural strategies to integrated transport authorities, to long-term planning, to district developments, infrastructure financing, congestion and emission charging, creative enterprise zones, innovation districts, cycle superhighways, 'super sewers' and much more, London has led the way in how larger cities have tried to tackle 21st-century urban challenges.
Much of the leadership has been shared. Mayors of London worked with Local Boroughs, and with Institutions, Businesses, and Investors to combine efforts in newly negotiated models to make things happen. The fact that London has done this in a context where there it has comparatively low levels of self-government and self-financing, just makes these innovations more impressive, and more applicable to much of the world (where there are similarly low levels of self -government and self-finance). London's secret weapon has been that it is a 'negotiated city' rather than a 'constituted city'.
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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. So, London is now re-inventing what it means to be a world city.?
The opportunity is a big switch where cities shift out of mundane forms of consumption, production, and services and embrace new qualities that play to urban strengths, and are premised on what cities do well. The rich opportunities of habitat, innovation, and experience.?
A key effect of the rapid digitisation is to change the functional geographies of our cities with two key consequences. Firstly, hybrid working enables cities to be served by larger housing markets, effectively making all cities more regional. Secondly, neighbouring cities and towns are much more connected with each other by a shared labour force and common housing market. We now have large regions of multiple interdependent cities and towns emerging.??
Cities don’t compete with digital platforms, they complement each other, and harness them to make connected places work. The new super-connected world city is hybrid in multiple ways. It is physical and digitised, it is global and local, the city is a place, and it is also a platform. The hybrid city is a blended city.
London can be this new city of opportunity. It is pioneering a new kind of world city. The pandemic has accelerated developments that were already nascent in London.?