The Artful Bodger and the Bloated Behemoth.

How London’s new mayor can learn from the capital’s housing crisis

Boris Johnson’s reign is over. The Artful Bodger has cleaned out his desk and is moving on the bigger and better things, maybe? As Mayor for London, he presided over the rise and rise of the capital’s biggest crisis - housing. How did he get it so badly wrong? Why did housing just become the domain of the big guys with their overblown solutions? Why is the cupboard bare? Has it all been one big bodge?OK, he took over at a time where the previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, had set the trend for ‘mega-development’. Ken told developers, ‘I don’t care how big it is, as long as 50% is mine for social and affordable housing’. He single- handedly moved housing from a failing social utopian model to the sideline of a booming real estate market. The standard investment-led, one and two-bedroom apartment block was spawned. This was at a time when money was cheap and given away easily. Aiming for the sky, space standards plummeted - urban quality, even further. We saw the emergence of the itinerant community with little commitment to the place. Housing became reduced to a commodity.Boris came into power at a time when the Ken model had collapsed under the weight of the global banking crisis. But, as we found out later, the banks (and the big housebuilders they were in bed with) were too big to collapse. This meant one thing. Drop the social and affordable housing requirement and plough on. London needs housing. Keep building. The big guys know best.Although Mayor Boris was born into this complex and changing world, he cannot escape the blame for what happened next. He had the Olympics legacy and big chunks of land to do something with. He had the energy and creativity of London in his favour. People were looking for something new. He had a mandate to develop a new London way of doing things. With good intentions, he blustered on about ‘Rabbit-hutch Britain’ where we imagined him swinging a cat and bouncing it off the walls in the typical development market’s single bedroom. He promised change. He established bold ambitions. He could have made a big difference.‘We are building places to live in a city with unique character, with examples of great housing and city-making at a range of densities. London’s terraced houses, apartment buildings, streets, squares and the best of 20th century development have created highly successful residential environments with enduring appeal. My housing strategy aspires to encourage a new London vernacular that can take its place in this rich fabric.’ - London Mayor’s Housing

Design Guide:

What follows is a catalogue of errors (or at best, 10 serious misjudgements)

• He appointed his chum, Richard Blakeway, as his deputy mayor for housing. An international policy wonk, he knew nothing about delivering housing in the capital so he was a very strange appointment for such acrucial role in London. Boris allowed him to bungle along for his entire term, making all the right noises, but achieving little. Just compare him with the deputy mayor for Berlin, who led on such game-changing housing projects as Self-Made City and the Berlin Townhouse projects. Blakeway was a disaster for London.
• Boris surprisingly retained many of the top city officials who blissfully continued in their role as box-checkers and bean counters at a time when we needed enlightened thinking and action. Some of them were the birth of London’s housing crisis, helping with its delivery. This group was so much part of the problem that they saw no way forward other than getting the big guys to solve their problems. Vast chunks of London’s housing estates were parcelled up to the big few. There was no imagination, no willingness to try anything different and no desire to allow others to do so. They protected their patch and defended the barriers against change. A lot of the blame can be landed at their feet.
• Shortly after he arrived, Boris abolished Design for London. The Head of Design for London, London’s best shot of having a city architect again, was banished to the far-flung reaches of his London Development Agency. Here was one of London’s most valuable assets being wasted for political reasons. What was left behind was band of amateurs with little experience of being at the coalface of housing. This band grew and grew. Never did we see anyone who could lead us to the different and exciting place that London so deserved.
• The box-checker, bean counters and amateurs moved the Mayor’s housing guide, originally commissioned by Ken and led by the Head of Design for London, from being a comprehensive neighbourhood design guide showing the London Way of doing things, to an uninspiring space standards manual that missed the whole point. Another wasted opportunity.
• Boris and his team dallied with self-build, community housing trusts and new family housing models but nothing ever got off the ground. More complex policies were written; more unrealisable targets were set, more bold and brave announcements followed. More opportunity sites were declared, more big masterplans with even greater unrealistic expectations held London to ransom. More hearts sunk.
• Boris sold the best bits of land to others. The Chinese got the Royal Docks, one of London’s best opportunity sites. The Qatari Development Agency got a big chunk of the Olympic Village. The rest of the Olympic Legacy sites are being parcelled up to sell to the big players. It seems that the only game in London was to parcel up big chunks, sell it to the big players and wait for them to deliver. When they don’t, sell them more or give them more money. Why did Boris sell the family silver? Why didn’t he cut out the middle man and deliver smaller chunks of land to smaller players on land controlled by his authority. Berlin showed how they could deliver housing 40% cheaper on land with the same relative value as London by dealing directly with the end-users.
• When nothing happens, where does his team go to for advice? Of course, those who have a vested interest in the status quo – the big guys and theirmegaconsultants. It was like the foxes and the weasels advising the farmer on pest control. New ideas for housing were invited. The big guys and their megaconsultants help to judge. The status remains quo.
• There is sheer lack of imagination about what London’s rich building fabric might be, despite Boris’s calls for a new London vernacular. The big guys are producing housing as distinct products not as the fine-grain building blocks that integrate to form socially diverse urban neighbourhoods. Every scheme appears to be a victim of bigness – bloated behemoths. Every scheme calls for unique brand. Every scheme is a ‘Square’, a ‘Quarter’, or a ‘Village’. Nothing adds to London’s unique character. Nothing hangs together.
• The housing crisis has spawned thousands of ‘beds-in-sheds’ in London and this is a growing trend. In one way this is symptomatic of creative people solving their own housing problems. In another way it is exploitation of desperate tenants. Boris never showed any leadership in dealing with this issue. He should have found a way of capturing this energy and allow for positive intensification of our sprawling suburbs.

Boris and his team have made some disastrous decisions on major schemes in the capital. He circumvented the local planning process to take the decision on the Mount Pleasant scheme, another monolithic development that will diminish the rich urban fabric of Clerkenwell. His shabby support for the megastructural Earls Court Project was yet another reflection of the fact that he was never committed to the ambitions he set out in his own guide. Caught in a crisis fuelled by his own lack of leadership, anything became acceptable to show the numbers.Our new mayor, Sadiq Khan, has a lot to sort out but we cannot see how his manifesto, ‘Homes for Londoners’ will actually deliver on his promises. He needs help. He cannot waste one single opportunity.Housing is always talked about as a product not a platform. He needs to change this. He needs to lead us to another place quickly and define a London Way of doing things. He cannot afford to commission another long, protracted strategy. He needs to get a small group of people around the table (no foxes and weasels) to give a best shot at defining the Way. Have a draft out in a month. Tweak it and evolve it within six months. Start by starting. Learn by doing. Use rapid and continuous feedback to evolve the London Way. Always keep it open to challenge and don’t tie it up in a web of complex policies. Use simple protocols or rules to ensure open, responsive and collaborative environments. Make it understood by all.Our new mayor needs to develop the conditions for all Londoner’s to help solve their own housing problems. He cannot do it alone and nor should he. Housing must move from a problem to be solved to a potential to be realised. He must not be caught in the headlights of big numbers. Just focus on the many small actions and see how quickly they add up to the big numbers. Widen the spectrum of housing players to include the individual, the collective and the institutional. Open up many fronts and don’t dwell on the big guys alone. It will always be difficult to eke out the 50% social and affordable housing requirement, especially in this tight money market.Take their contributions in the form of a tariff and spend the money wisely in releasing thousands of development opportunities across London. Focus on the small guys. Make many developers, many small builders and many community makers. Make housing a distributed system done by many - like it used to be.All the agencies in London need to concentrate on early intervention and not being obsessed with fixed endstates that never arrive. Rather establish the preconditions for a London vernacular to emerge. Seed projects. Let things evolve. Manage in the present. Be nimble and agile. Develop simple protocols to harness collective action. Transform the Mayor’s housing department into London’s Neighbourhood Enabling Agency and provide high-level support to the boroughs. Get some experience in there. Appoint wisely. Don’t let the boroughs think they can solve the problem by building their own housing. It never worked and it only made the poor poorer. Councils must also act as enabling leaders, using their funds and resources to release potential and create responsive environments. We must think creatively about how the housing associations can build neighbourhood and not just housing. Do they have different roles?We must allow the suburbs to intensify incrementally. They are doing it anyway, despite government. Show a creative way of dealing with the beds-in sheds challenge. Let housing be incremental to make it even more affordable to many. Demonstrate fast track ways of getting planning consents. Use local development orders or use the mayor’s own powers effectively and fairly. Create a neighbourhood challenge fund. Make it competitive. Get communities to self-organise around the problem.The new mayor’s team must focus on the popular home by developing a default range of London housing typologies from the mews house to the townhouse, from the small apartment to the mansion block. Structure choice. Build social capital at every opportunity. Move away from seeing housing as a product to establishing the London Platform, a common building code or method to drive down the costs of housing and drive up innovation. Show the way by example. More importantly, always be open to new ideas.On your marks, get set, go!

About the author:Kelvin Campbell is the founder of Smart Urbanism, an urban research and development collaborative and runs the Massive Small project, a research programme funded by the Royal Commission 1851. He led the team that was appointed to produce the London Mayor’s neighbourhood design guide and is the author of the ‘London Popular Home Initiative’ and ‘The Radical Incrementalist: How to build urban society in 12 lessons’. He was a long time assessor of the National Housing Design Awards and his submission ‘London FABRICation’ was shortlisted for the New Ideas in Housing competition last year.