Tag: news

Take advantage of London’s stalled housing production

Personal response to GLA/MHCLG consultation on ‘measures to support housebuilding in London’

Michael Edwards, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, and Just Space, January 2026

sent to londonplan@london.gov.uk  and londonhousingconsultation@communities.gov.uk<londonhousingconsultation@communities.gov.uk>

This response…

…is from an experienced scholar of London planning, especially of the economic aspects of housing. I have contributed to group responses sent by Just Space (a network of community activist organisations in London) and the Highbury expert group on national housing supply but this personal response is necessary because the friends and colleagues in these organisations – from whom I have learned so much – are not adequately stressing the benefits of the collapse in speculative housing sales and output.

Key point: celebrate

Policymakers at all levels of government in Europe and the UK, down to London boroughs, or most of them, have subscribed to the mistaken belief that the housing affordability crisis is mainly the result of an inadequate supply of housing relative to demand and that the policy solution must be for public policy to boost supply. This leads to weak regulation of private developers and landlords and massive public subsidy to developers and landlords. Housebuilding firms and landed interests invest heavily in promotion of these strategies through think tanks like the Centre for Cities and London business organisations. It is made to seem like common sense and is echoed by GLA research and the London Boroughs. Housing and land price escalation are now key processes in the whole urban system, in family savings strategies, banking stability and the growth of regional disparities. Challenges to the orthodoxy and system-wide analyses are still mainly within the research community.

The London planning and housing system, since at least 2000, has tried to maximise the output of housing rather than doing what was most needed: maximise the stock of council housing which is where the GLA’s own figues show that the need is greatest and the backlog always growing. Not enough council homes are built while much is lost through the Right-to-Buy policy, sell-offs and estate regeneration.

Believers in this strategy have trouble demonstrating where and how the production of housing for market sale helps lower the housing costs facing low income households and homeless people. (With income and wealth inequality now at unprecedented levels it would be remarkable if it worked.) The world’s research literature is scoured for examples but the GLA have to admit that nothing is so effective as direct production of low-rent homes. 

At best, the build-build-build strategy in a de-regulated planning environment might lower house prices by a few percentage points if sustained for a decade. But that effect has been swamped by price increases often averaging many times that, year after year. Until recently. The slowdown of sales and new production in London in the last year or two is the first sign that greater affordability may be on the way. Developers, who resist lowering prices if they can, will be driven to do so and will reduce their land holdings, eventually stabilising and even lowering the prices they pay for sites. This should all be welcomed and encouraged. 

If public authorities are concerned, as they should be, to avoid permanent damage to housebuilding capacity they can take advantage of falling prices to acquire unsold homes from developers and commission more council homes.

Thus we should celebrate the ‘crisis’ of London housebuilding and adopt thoughtful ways to manage it to – finally – secure the housing London needs.

Futher observations

There will be resistance to this radical approach. The following comments are designed to make the best of a bad job: to avoid making things worse. They draw heavily on the formulations by Michael Ball and the people at Just Space.

Londonhas an entirely unrealistic housing target of 88,000 new homes per annum. Only once have over 80,000 homes been built in a year, in 1933 when most of today’s GLA area was green fields.  The average number of new homes built each year, for the past twenty, is 35,000.

Last year panic set in when there were only 2,158 new home starts in the six months to June.  In response the government and Mayor announced this set of ‘measures to support housebuilding in London’, which they said ‘…responds to the current challenging macro-economic circumstances and the changing national regulatory landscape which have led to a reduction in housebuilding in the capital’.

But there was no real analysis why speculative housebuilding had come to a juddering halt.  Landbanking (300,000 homes permitted but not built) and developer profit (£2bn for top-five housebuilders in 2024-25) went unexamined. So did the flat-lining UK economy which underpins domestic demand; so did people’s loss of confidence in new-build safety and quality and the leasehold system.

Instead, the measures take aim at affordable housing, a long-standing target of the housebuilder lobby, and also at standards for better quality and safer homes, post-Grenfell.  The proposals’ centre-piece is a reduction in the affordable housing requirement, with the hope that this will kick-start stalled developments, by making them more profitable.  Other changes proposed include reducing cycle parking, permitting more single-aspect flats, and increasing the number of homes served by each building core. Reductions in borough CIL and increasing the Mayor’s powers to decide planning applications are subject to a parallel, government, consultation.

The measures are proposed to be time-limited, up to 31 March 2028 (or the adoption of a new London Plan, whichever is sooner), but changes made now for new developments cannot be undone. Clearly the GLA’s hope is that developers will take speedy advantage of the changes and hasten to get permissions and commence a surge of schemes. Architect Tom Young points out that many investors and developers, seeing a policy retreat, may hold on in the expectation of yet further retreats, testing how far governments and planning authorities will go to support development profitability.[i] We should also expect many developers who hold permissions based on 35% or better ‘affordable’ housing proportions to re-submit for new permissions with lower percentages and make a start (perhaps just digging a trench) before these new permissions expire.

The comments below follows the order of the consultation.

Cycle Parking  

The Mayor’s London Plan requires a certain amount of cycle parking from new developments, according to how many larger homes there are.  The proposal is to reduce this from 2 spaces per larger home to 1.2 – 1.9 spaces.  London’s boroughs are also being divided into 3 tiers, with developments in some boroughs having to provide less cycle parking than others.  Some of the private development parking provision may also be sited on public land (i.e. pavements or the highway).

Objections       

  • No evidence is provided that this will make any great difference to scheme profitability. 
  • The physical impact will be on our already crowded pavement and streets.
  • No mention is made of the reason for existing cycle parking standards: to enable and encourage their use, to reduce reliance on the car, to create healthy streets

Dual Aspect flats 

The Mayor requiresnew homes to be dual aspect, unless this is exceptionally difficult. The current (2021) policy was a hard-fought compromise in the 2019 Examination in Public. The proposal is to remove this requirement.

Objections

  • Dual aspect flats are better ventilated, give more light and ventilation so are happier places to live in than single aspect flats: better able to cope with overheating in summer and to ventilate against condensation and mould year-round.
  • There is no evidence from the Mayor of how much removing dual aspect will improve scheme profitability.

Number of flats per core 

The Mayor requires no more than 8 flats per floor of each core.  The proposal is to remove this limit.

Objections

  • This change raises safety concerns.  No upper limit of flats has been proposed.
  • The number of flats should not depend solely on fire safety regulations about distances from flats to core exits.

Affordable Housing

TheMayor now requires 35% of housing to be ‘affordable,’ with 50% required for developments on public land.  The proposal is to reduce this to 20% ‘affordable’ housing for private land developments, with 35% on public land, (of which 60% social rent in both cases).

Objections

  • Developers will still be able to give less affordable housing, if they can justify it with a viability assessment
  • The clear need is for the most ‘affordable’ housing, especially social rented housing; these proposed measures would give us more (unaffordable) market housing instead, when the demand for this has collapsed.
  • The Mayor does not show, with evidence, how these measures will work in practice and  makes no estimate of how many homes or affordable homes they will provide.
  • The proposals do not address other factors such as increased build and labour costs, a sluggish national economy, distrust of safety and quality standards; the whole burden of improving profitability falls on affordable housing.
  • The Mayor does not consider whether developers’ profit levels at 15%-20% of Gross Development Value are too high.
  • These proposals will not speed up delivery of completed new homes, just their start. Developers will be able to wait until the market improves, before completing the homes, cashing in on the ‘emergency measures’. 
  • If these measures were to ‘succeed’ it would mean four out five homes would be unaffordable market homes beyond the means of most Londoners.
  • Reducing the ‘affordable’ housing in developments could increase land values, making viability problems worse when the priority should be bringing land values down through density controls and other measures.
  • Developments with high levels of market housing and low ‘affordable’ housing can often increase local prices and rents and displace local people.
  • The massive carbon footprint of housing developments demands that they should provide housing affordable to most people, not housing that cannot be afforded.

Grant funding 

Schemes thatoffer the new lower levels of ‘affordable’ housing will be eligible for grants of between £70,000 and £220,000 per affordable home, beyond the first 10% of affordable housing, with the most grant for social rented housing.

Objections

  • Grants, along with CIL relief, would be better spent improving the viability of schemes and maintaining the present level of 35% and 50% affordable housing.

Viability reviews These are used to ensure schemes do not make extra profit at the expense of affordable housing.  They should guarantee that super-profits (beyond 20%) are used for additional affordable housing.  The proposal is that there is no review of schemes if the first floor has been built by 31 March 2030. Otherwise there will be a late review once 75% of homes are occupied. 

  • The viability reviews that are supposed to make sure that developers speed up delivery are even weaker than those in force at the moment.
  • The proposed reviews allow the developer to keep too much of any extra profit
  • Viability reviews are essential, there must be early and late stage reviews with additional profit going towards additional affordable housing
  • The reviews will not speed up delivery of completed new homes, just their start.

Conclusion on the London Plan prospects.

For some time it has been clear that City Hall knows that low rent housing. is what matters most and has been hemmed in by conservative national governments insistence on the maximsiation of total outputs. The new Labour government has adopted the previous government’s approach to an extreme degree. The Mayor already has an evidence-based response to himself in the form of the Greater London Authority’s own submission of July 2025 to the Government on Planning Reform Working Paper ‘Speeding Up Build Out’, which contradicts the rationale behind these proposed emergency measures. These July pproposals are explained by Robin Brown in his submission and I am indebted to him for the insight.  [ https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/planning/who-we-work/working-government/mayoral-responses-government-consultations ]   

I strongly support Mr Brown’s comments on the MHCLG components of this consultation:


CIL Relief:Removing up to 80% of Borough CIL is a direct attack on local infrastructure funding. The GLA emphasises infrastructure’s role in enabling development; this measure sabotages it. It will subsidise developer profits and inflate land values without a guaranteed increase in housing supply or affordability.

 Expansion of Mayoral call-in powers:

Democratic local decision-making is essential for legitimacy and place-making. Extending call-in powers to smaller sites (50+ homes) and Green Belt/MOL sites centralises power and threatens local oversight, enabling inappropriate development against community wishes.

[i] The concessions proposed by the Mayor now have a remarkable similarity to the list of concessions which the Homebuilders Federation (HBF) sought in their response last autumn to the Mayor’s Towards a New London Plan.

Thanks to all those who commented on yesterday’s draft. The consultation responses of Just Space and some others are listed and can be downloaded from Just Space. I’m struck by the fact that the Homebuilders Federation (James Stephens) effectively responds by welcoming the proposals but saying that housing developers need even more government support.

Draft for tomorrow

Personal response to GLA consultation on ‘measures to support housebuilding in London’ from Michael Edwards, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL and Just Space, January 2026

to londonplan@london.gov.uk before 23.59 on 22 Jan 2026

The draft GLA consultation document can be downloaded here.

This draft will change before the submission deadline tomorrow..

This response…

…is from an experienced scholar of London planning, especially of the economic aspects of housing. I have contributed to group responses sent by Just Space (a network of community activist organisations in London) and the Highbury expert group on national housing supply but this personal response is necessary because the friends and colleagues in these organisations – from whom I have learned so much – are not adequately stressing the benefits of the collapse in speculative housing sales and output.

Key point: celebrate

Policymakers at all levels of government in Europe and the UK, down to London boroughs, or most of them, have subscribed to the mistaken belief that the housing affordability crisis is mainly the result of an inadequate supply of housing relative to demand and that the policy solution must be for public policy to boost supply. This leads to weak regulation of private developers and landlords and massive public subsidy to developers and landlords. Housing and land price escalation are key processes in the whole urban system, in family savings strategies, banking stability and the growth of regional disparities. Housebuilding firms and landed interests invest heavily in promotion of these strategies through think tanks like the Centre for Cities and London business organisations. It is made to seem like common sense and is echoed by GLA research and the London Boroughs. Challenges to this orthodoxy are still mainly within the research community.

The London planning and housing system, since at least 2000, has tried to maximise the output of housing rather than doing what was most needed: maximise the stock of council housing which is where the GLA’s own figues show that the need is greatest and the backlog always growing. Not enough council homes are built while much is lost through the Right-to-Buy policy, sell-offs and estate regeneration.

Believers in this strategy have trouble demonstrating where and how the production of housing for market sale helps lower the housing costs facing low income households and homeless people. (With income and wealth inequality now at unprecedented levels it would be remarkable if it worked.) The world’s research literature is scoured for examples but the GLA have to admit that nothing is so effective as direct production of low-rent homes. 

At best, the build-build-build strategy in a de-regulated planning environment might lower house prices by a few percentage points if sustained for a decade. But that effect has been swamped by price increases often averaging many times that, year after year. Until recently. The slowdown of sales and new production in London in the last year or two is the first sign that greater affordability may be on the way. Developers, who resist lowering prices if they can, will be driven to do so and will reduce their land holdings, eventually stabilising and even lowering the prices they pay for sites. This should all be welcomed and encouraged. 

If public authorities are concerned, as they should be, to avoid permanent damage to housebuilding capacity they can take advantage of falling prices to acquire unsold homes from developers and commission more council homes.

Thus we should celebrate the ‘crisis’ of London housebuilding and adopt thoughtful ways to manage it to – finally – secure the housing London needs.

Futher observations

There will be resistance to this radical approach. The following comments are designed to make the best of a bad job: to avoid making things worse. They draw heavily on the formulations by Michael Ball and the people at Just Space.

London has an entirely unrealistic housing target of 88,000 new homes per annum. Only once have over 80,000 homes been built in a year, in 1933 when most of today’s GLA area was green fields.  The average number of new homes built each year, for the past twenty, is 35,000.

Last year panic set in when there were only 2,158 new home starts in the six months to June.  In response the government and Mayor announced this set of ‘measures to support housebuilding in London’, which they said ‘…responds to the current challenging macro-economic circumstances and the changing national regulatory landscape which have led to a reduction in housebuilding in the capital’.

But there was no real analysis why speculative housebuilding had come to a juddering halt.  Landbanking (300,000 homes permitted but not built) and developer profit (£2bn for top-five housebuilders in 2024-25) went unexamined. So did the flat-lining UK economy which underpins domestic demand; so did people’s loss of confidence in new-build safety and quality and the leasehold system.

Instead, the measures take aim at affordable housing, a long-standing target of the housebuilder lobby, and also at standards for better quality and safer homes, post-Grenfell.  The proposals’ centre-piece is a reduction in the affordable housing requirement, with the hope that this will kick-start stalled developments, by making them more profitable.  Other changes proposed include reducing cycle parking, permitting more single-aspect flats, and increasing the number of homes served by each building core. Reductions in borough CIL and increasing the Mayor’s powers to decide planning applications are subject to a parallel, government, consultation.

The measures are proposed to be time-limited, up to 31 March 2028 (or the adoption of a new London Plan, whichever is sooner), but changes made now for new developments cannot be undone. Clearly the GLA’s hope is that developers will take speedy advantage of the changes and hasten to get permissions and commence a surge of schemes. Architect Tom Young points out that many investors and developers, seeing a policy retreat, may hold on in the expectation of yet further retreats, testing how far governments and planning authorities will go to support development profitability.[i] We should also expect many developers who hold permissions based on 35% or better ‘affordable’ housing proportions to re-submit for new permissions with lower percentages and make a start (perhaps just digging a trench) before these new permissions expire.

The briefing below follows the order of the consultation.

Cycle Parking  

The Mayor’s London Plan requires a certain amount of cycle parking from new developments, according to how many larger homes there are.  The proposal is to reduce this from 2 spaces per larger home to 1.2 – 1.9 spaces.  London’s boroughs are also being divided into 3 tiers, with developments in some boroughs having to provide less cycle parking than others.  Some of the private development parking provision may also be sited on public land (i.e. pavements or the highway).

Objections       

  • No evidence is provided that this will make any great difference to scheme profitability. 
  • The physical impact will be on our already crowded pavement and streets.
  • No mention is made of the reason for existing cycle parking standards: to enable and encourage their use, to reduce reliance on the car, to create healthy streets

Dual Aspect flats 

The Mayor requires new homes to be dual aspect, unless this is exceptionally difficult. The current (2021) policy was a hard-fought compromise in the 2019 Examination in Public. The proposal is to remove this requirement.

Objections

  • Dual aspect flats are better ventilated, give more light and ventilation so are happier places to live in than single aspect flats: better able to cope with overheating in summer and to ventilate against condensation and mould year-round.
  • There is no evidence from the Mayor of how much removing dual aspect will improve scheme profitability.

Number of flats per core 

The Mayor requires no more than 8 flats per floor of each core.  The proposal is to remove this limit.

Objections

  • This change raises safety concerns.  No upper limit of flats has been proposed.
  • The number of flats should not depend solely on fire safety regulations about distances from flats to core exits.

Affordable Housing

The Mayor now requires 35% of housing to be ‘affordable,’ with 50% required for developments on public land.  The proposal is to reduce this to 20% ‘affordable’ housing for private land developments, with 35% on public land, (of which 60% social rent in both cases).

Objections

  • Developers will still be able to give less affordable housing, if they can justify it with a viability assessment
  • The clear need is for the most ‘affordable’ housing, especially social rented housing; these proposed measures would give us more (unaffordable) market housing instead, when the demand for this has collapsed.
  • The Mayor does not show, with evidence, how these measures will work in practice and  makes no estimate of how many homes or affordable homes they will provide.
  • The proposals do not address other factors such as increased build and labour costs, a sluggish national economy, distrust of safety and quality standards; the whole burden of improving profitability falls on affordable housing.
  • The Mayor does not consider whether developers’ profit levels at 15%-20% of Gross Development Value are too high.
  • These proposals will not speed up delivery of completed new homes, just their start. Developers will be able to wait until the market improves, before completing the homes, cashing in on the ‘emergency measures’. 
  • If these measures were to ‘succeed’ it would mean four out five homes would be unaffordable market homes beyond the means of most Londoners.
  • Reducing the ‘affordable’ housing in developments could increase land values, making viability problems worse when the priority should be bringing land values down through density controls and other measures.
  • Developments with high levels of market housing and low ‘affordable’ housing can often increase local prices and rents and displace local people.
  • The massive carbon footprint of housing developments demands that they should provide housing affordable to most people, not housing that cannot be afforded.

Grant funding 

Schemes that offer the new lower levels of ‘affordable’ housing will be eligible for grants of between £70,000 and £220,000 per affordable home, beyond the first 10% of affordable housing, with the most grant for social rented housing.

Objections

  • Grants, along with CIL relief, would be better spent improving the viability of schemes and maintaining the present level of 35% and 50% affordable housing.

Viability reviews These are used to ensure schemes do not make extra profit at the expense of affordable housing.  They should guarantee that super-profits (beyond 20%) are used for additional affordable housing.  The proposal is that there is no review of schemes if the first floor has been built by 31 March 2030. Otherwise there will be a late review once 75% of homes are occupied. 

  • The viability reviews that are supposed to make sure that developers speed up delivery are even weaker than those in force at the moment.
  • The proposed reviews allow the developer to keep too much of any extra profit
  • Viability reviews are essential, there must be early and late stage reviews with additional profit going towards additional affordable housing
  • The reviews will not speed up delivery of completed new homes, just their start.

The Mayor already has an evidence-based response to himself in the form of the Greater London Authority’s own submission of July 2025 to the Government on Planning Reform Working Paper ‘Speeding Up Build Out’, which contradicts the rationale behind these proposed emergency measures. These JUly pproposals are explained by Robin Brown in his submission and I am indebted to him for the insight.  [ https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/planning/who-we-work/working-government/mayoral-responses-government-consultations ]   

I strongly support Mr Brown’s comments on the MHCLG components of this consultation:


CIL Relief:Removing up to 80% of Borough CIL is a direct attack on local infrastructure funding. The GLA emphasises infrastructure’s role in enabling development; this measure sabotages it. It will subsidise developer profits and inflate land values without a guaranteed increase in housing supply or affordability.

 Expansion of Mayoral call-in powers:

Democratic local decision-making is essential for legitimacy and place-making. Extending call-in powers to smaller sites (50+ homes) and Green Belt/MOL sites centralises power and threatens local oversight, enabling inappropriate development against community wishes.

[i] The concessions proposed by the Mayor now have a remarkable similarity to the list of concessions which the Homebuilders Federation (HBF) sought in their response last autumn to the Mayor’s Towards a New London Plan.

London Plan (Towards…)

16 September 2025 Ian Gordon has published a blog post about all this, reviewing 6 submissions. A good read. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lselondon/towards-an-effective-london-plan/

22 June (closing day for responses to the GLA document Towards a New London Plan). This is my personal submission. Ill health has greatly reduced my capacity and all I have been able to manage is a response to part 1 of the survey. I tried to pack in all my main concerns. (Much has also fed in to the Just Space submission which Michael Ball is finalising right now.)

It is still not too late for anyone to make their own submission – to all or part of the Towards… document. All the links you need to read it and reply are at JustSpace.org.uk/towards

1.  Paragraph 1.1: What is the London Plan?

GLA often argues that LP can only deal with town and country planning matters. That’s arguable. But this Towards… document is not constrained in this way and should have ranged across all the linked proceses: economy, housing, environment and so on.
Its scope is utterly unfit for the multiple crises we confront.

3.  Paragraph 1.3: How many homes will it plan for?

Towards… is based on the same completely mistaken interpretation of the crises which we all agree the city confronts; the belief that the affordability problems would be solved by dramatic increases in supply. This myth has been roundly debunked as a national strategy and, for London, successive London Plans have attempted to apply the remedy of maximising total output. Not only has this failed to slow the growth of rents or prices but it has led to a growing unmet backlog of need for low-rent council homes and caused great damage to other aspects of the city: diverting employment land, eroding greenspace, overloading social infrastructure and – now – threatening green belt as well. It has also eroded the stock of council homes through the estate regeneration process and permitted other disposals. Not only does Towards… fail to recognise this massive failure, but it proposes to make matters worse by chasing the impossible output target set by an equally misguided national government.

4. Paragraph 1.4: Viability and delivery

The coalition government’s decision to make ‘viability’ the make-or-break criterion for development decisions has been a disaster. While outside the GLA’s control, much more could have been done to minimise its impact, especially its impact on land values and on S106 negotiations.
New approaches are now essential: to lobby government more effectively on Right to Buy, on rent controls, on AHP budgets; to adopt policies aimed at moderating land price growth and to force land prices down to the levels at which council-level rental housing proportions can be accommodated.

5. Paragraph 1.5: What is this document about?

The Towards… document is profoundly inadequate. Ill health is preventing me from responding to later sections of this survey which I would normally want to do.

6.Paragraph 1.6: Legal and procedural requirements

I am profoundly dissatisfied with the conduct of the London Plan team since work ended on the 2021 Plan.

You should have analysed the effects of the radical policy changes embodied in the 2021 Plan. The density matrix was criticised for not being enforced. Instead of enforcing it, and thus probably damped land values, the GLA insisted on scrapping it, relying instead on boroughs to use ‘design considerations’ to develop density policies and (related) tall buildings policies. What effect has this had on densities and land prices? Other novel policies in the 2021 plan should also have been evaluated. No such analyses are visible.

A second key activity for the LP team should have been to evaluate the possible futures for London opened up by climate change and by the mounting inequalities of income and wealth generated by the London economy and housing system. The pandemic made some of these processes very visible and dramatised the inequalities experienced by Londoners, especially those in low paid and insecure jobs, in transport, retailing and distribution and those from certain ethnic groups.

A further set of futures needing exploration are the consequences flowing from Brexit.
Instead of informing London through this kind of research and fostering a better-informed and engaged population, the LP team seems to have been keeping us at arm’s length while they have conducted a one-way harvesting of opinions and experiences through the Planning for London programme. They are behaving like control freaks.

7. Paragraph 1.7: Integrated Impact Assessment (IIA)

I and Just Space and others were very critical of the GLA last time around for the many inadequacies of the Equalities Impact assessment. The Panel of Inspectors in 2019 insisted repeatedly on the GLA doing more work on this topic – which revealed in the end how regressive were many or most of the Plan’s policies. We had argued that the London Plans were dominated by property and investor interests and this tardy and reluctant analysis proved us substantially right. But nothing could be done then to deal with the criticism that the equality studies should have started at the beginning of the planning process and it bodes very badly for this new plan that the long-promised consultation on the draft IIA scoping report will begin ‘later in the year’.
The same issue arises with the SEA which should already be evaluating alternative strategies for London.

10. Paragraph 1.10: Good growth objectives

The mayor clearly feels the need to trumpet growth out of respect for the new national government leadership, and perhaps as a means of levering funds to support the ‘engine of the nation’. But his London Growth Plan is just a marketing document which appears to be written by estate agents and contains no serious analysis.

Seriously, though:
Towards… does not confront the fact that London’s economy is a machine which sucks in investment in transport and other infrastructure, pumping up central area commercial property values and city-wide house prices and rents. Thus landlords, owner-occupiers and property interests benefit from massive asset value growth while renters have seen their real incomes (after meeting housing costs) static or shrinking. This is not an economy to be proud of and it is hard to sustain in the light of the regional disparities to which it contributes.
While it is welcome that the term “good growth” still survives, this treatment of growth remains very weak indeed.

Disciplines and comparative work

This blog post started as an abstract, put together in response to a plan by colleagues Susan Moore and Michael Short at the Bartlett in 2025 for a round table meeting on Critical Dialogues in Comparative Urbanism. The abstract was:

My enthusiasm for the project of dissolving disciplinary/professional boundaries in the Bartlett in the 1970s. Building student experiences to replace architecture, building and planning and knit a lot of ’science’ in the mix.

The highlights in my experience, notably the work of some individual students and the survival until [date] of the first year undergraduate module in which students studied the gestation of one London building and then took their methods on an overseas field trip

A research outcome in the Bartlett International Summer School on the Production of the built environment (BISS) which ran from 1979 to 1996, annual colloquium of scholars, trade unionists and a few activists built round an explicitly Marxist programme, leading to the International Network for Urban Research and Action INURA, founded in 1991 and still going strong as a network and annual meeting but never quite consummating its theoretical texts under the banner of The New Metropolitan Mainstream – though some of it appears in the work curated by Christian Schmid and Neil Brenner on Planetary Urbanism.

My personal effort from about 1990 to build BSP’s first new Masters programme European Property Development and Planning, initially parallelled by initiatives in Newcastle (Patsy Healey), Turin (Mazza, Ave), Venice (Folin) and … It struggled to become quorate for want of students with critical appetite but became a massive ’success’ as it later filled up with more business-oriented students from global elites and the newly capitalist countries. The international university partners faded away. UCL, BSP and many of the students got rich on the basis of what became IREP. A waste of 20 years, I think from my point of view.

Passages in red are bits I would like to mention in the round table session.

The UCL School of Environmental Studies

When I joined UCL as a lecturer in 1969 Richard Llewelyn-Davies was in the process of forming a new department with this title by merging the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Department of Town Planning and various research units. Part of the project was to break out of the blinkered framework of professions, enabling teaching and research to draw on urban history, engineering (his original discipline) and other social and physical sciences. There was no particular orientation to international comparative study in this programme but the staff body included eminent people from European traditions of the Architect-Engineer: Bruno Schlaffenburg, planning officer of the new borough of Camden, Walter Bor who had been planning officer of Liverpool together with Ruth Glass, sociologist from Berlin and Duccio Turin. I was an enthusiast for all this, having just spent some years in my first job in the master planning team for Milton Keynes which was great mix of ‘disciplines’ and boundary-crossing. I wrote about the stirring atmosphere of the 1970s (and its defeat by resurgent professions) in the festschrift for historian Adrian Forty: Yes, and we have no dentists (2014).

The 1970s did not, for me, generate ideas about critical comparative study but we already did international field trips – always to Bologna – so a lot of comparative work went on, albeit without much explicit analysis.

Research: BISS

Through the 1980s, as neo-liberalism was extending its reach and penetration everywhere, some of us were developing critiques in the Bartlett International Summer Schools on the Production of the Built Environment BISS. This was an annual gathering of more-or-less Marxist and radical researchers, trade unionists and professionals in which class relations in the production process were centre-stage. Much of the work was international-comparative in scope developing explicit Marxist framings for this. It was captured in a 1985 book edited by Michael Ball, myself and others and recently reprinted. For just one or two memorable years we ran a Bartlett MSc on Production of the Built Environment, using this material. [The annual proceedings of Biss have been scanned by Jake Arnfeld and are now online at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QwqDhyeiothvxt_Z5GVDiWjNhBSy2vVV]

Some of these ideas were revisited in a teach-out on Rent in 2019 and a reading group in 2021. The production-focused research continued in the work at the University of Westminster where Dr Linda Clarke moved from the Bartlett.

I was reflecting on this material recently when asked to write a chapter on a book which had influenced my teaching most. I chose David Harvey’s Urbanization of Capital and writing it helped me distill some clear principles of analysis. Rent theory à la Marx offers us powerful analysis of conditions under which rents of various kinds can be appropriated in capitalist society but is not a simple or blanket determination of what always happens. What actually happens is the outcome of underlying structural forces interacting with the particularities of landed property, tenure forms, tax regimes and so on in the place under study, and in the particular conjuncture being studied.

1990s: Roles and Relationships in the production of the built environment

The potentialities of international comparative study for teaching were most explicitly developed in a module which we ran through the 1990s, compulsory for all students in the Bartlett (now a faculty comprising departments with names like architecture, planning, construction). Fortunately it is well written up and preserved online though the journal in which it appeared is dead.

Reading it again is so refreshing. It was designed to engage new students in the analysis of London developments, looking at the interplay of finance, planning and other public policy, private capital(s), professions, unions, users. Working in groups, students covered the London Eye, More London, Barbican and so on. Finally the whole year went on a field trip to a foreign city where 3 days were spent trying to make sense of what we saw, without the use of documents or much language, simply learning to look, using the concepts developed in London. We didn’t call it critical comparative study, but it was.

Research: INURA

As the BISS was wilting in the 1990s ascendancy of neo-liberalism, we launched a new network in which activism was meant to be as important as research: The International Network of Urban Research and Action INURA. Like the BISS it was headquartered in Switzerland and has annual meetings, though without its own scholarly publication. Its ‘method’ consists of a few days of listening and exploring in a host city with local activists, interspersed and followed with informal workshops which engage with the research and theoretical interests of participants. An attempt at publication of a systematic study of multiple cities has foundered as the unruly crowd of contributors failed to meet the high ambitions of the main leaders, notably Christian Schmid. Under the banner of The New Metropolitan Mainstream, some of it appears in the work curated by Christian Schmid and Neil Brenner on Planetary Urbanism. Most of the work sits like an iceberg on hard drives around the world. It contains valuable attempts to define variables and episodes common to multiple cities and thus generate principles for critical comparative study.

EPDP

My personal effort from about 1990 to build BSP’s first new Masters programme European Property Development and Planning, was initially paralleled by initiatives in Newcastle (Patsy Healey), Turin (Mazza, Ave), Venice (Folin) and ?? It struggled to become quorate for want of students with critical appetite but became a massive ’success’ as it later filled up with more business-oriented students from global elites and the newly capitalist countries. The international university partners faded away. UCL, BSP and many of the students got rich on the basis of what became IREP. A waste of 20 years, I think from the point of view of developing critical comparative analysis.

I thought of adding instances of students, and student dissertations, which have represented the achievement of these aspirations over the years. F

Adesope, G. (1993) Public-private relations in two major station redevelopments MPhil, London UCL compared the King’s Cross railway lands with Paris Rive Gauche, both ‘regeneration’ schemes above and around major stations and both hit by the same crash of the speculative office markets. The thesis examined how the London project evaporated while in Paris the municipality just kept on building decking, running up mounting public debt but harnessed the new Biblioteque Nationale to occupy some of the space.

Reference list

Edwards, M, Campkin, B and Arbaci, S (2009) Exploring roles and relationships in the production of the built environment Centre for Education in the Built Environment (CEBE) Transactions 6, 1, 10.11120/tran.2009.06010038 http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/15579

Edwards, Michael (2014) “Yes, and We Have No Dentists.” In Forty Ways to Think About Architecture: architectural history and theory today, edited by Iain Borden, Murray Fraser and Barbara Penner, 280 pages. London: Wiley, ch 28, 2014. http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118822617.html
[ e-print Edwards for Forty ]

Ball M J, Bentivegna, V, Edwards, M, and Folin, M, Eds (2018) Land Rent, Housing and Urban Planning: a European Perspective Reprint of 1985 book in Routledge Revivals series. https://www.routledge.com/Land-Rent-Housing-and-Urban-Planning-A-European-Perspective/Ball-Edwards-Bentivegna-Folin/p/book/9781138494435

2022, Michael Edwards, Harvey’s Urbanization of Capital: why it helped me so much, in Camilla Perrone (ed) Critical Planning & Design: Roots, pathways, and frames, pre-print as accepted: edwards-on-harvey-v1   Book now published. Details and ordering at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-93107-0…

BISS. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QwqDhyeiothvxt_Z5GVDiWjNhBSy2vVV