Todays’ papers and tweets are drawing parallels with Japan’s ‘lost decade’. That reminded me of our (JustSpace’s) exchanges with City Hall in 2010 where we were arguing that the recession would be long and deep, and exacerbated by public spending cuts. We argued that the London Plan should at least allow for the fact that this might be the future, even if their preference still was to treat the “recent downturn” as a blip. They really were so wrong and I just enjoyed re-reading the two papers they then produced, criticising our position. They aren’t on the GLA web site any more so here they are for the record:
20100903ED82PublicExpenditureLondonPlanStrategy (Japan discussion on page 3)
michael edwards 