- Towards a More Compact City - The Plan for London    227 kb by    Gossop, Chris | chris.gossop@pins.gsi.gov.uk    Short Outline Over the next 15 years, London's population is set to grow by 10%. The Green Belt will stay and the growth can only be achieved by making London a more intensively developed city. The paper outlines the strategies of the new London Plan and asks, will these work? Abstract In February 2004 the London Plan was adopted. Produced by London's Mayor, this is the first of a new breed of spatial strategies for Greater London and it is hugely ambitious. It seeks to work with, and manage change imposed by national and international forces - forces driving the economy as well as demographic and technological change. At the same time, it addresses climate change and other aspects of the green agenda. The Mayor's vision is to develop London as an exemplary, sustainable world city. The first of the six key objectives of the London Plan is `to accommodate London's growth within its boundaries without encroaching on open spaces'. The area to be protected includes the Metropolitan Green Belt that for six decades has prevented London from growing ever outwards. Within those constraints, London will have to provide new homes to accommodate eight million people, a 10% growth of population, all within 15 years. This can only be done by making London a more compact, more intensively developed city. The intended strategies for delivering this more compact city are one of the two themes of this paper. Those strategies embrace major investment in key regeneration areas and a new emphasis on mixed use and higher density developments. Also, there will be a focus on London's many town centres and the areas that are best served by public transport. Among other things, the paper describes the policy approach of `Sustainable Residential Quality', a framework for assessing appropriate densities in different parts of London. The second theme is the London planning process and its performance. There is once again a strategic planning authority for London and a strategic plan. It is on the effectiveness of the London Plan and its successors that the new planning arrangements will largely be judged. So how sound is the Plan and can its broad vision be translated into practice? Will it make London a better place in which to live? Keywords sustainable world city, demographic and technological change Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2004: Management of Urban Regions   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper