City

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Debates

Kevin Robins , Michael Edwards & Doreen Massey

To cite this article: Kevin Robins , Michael Edwards & Doreen Massey (2001) Debates, City, 5:1,
77-105, DOI: 10.1080/13604810120057886

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Published online: 01 Jul 2010.

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CITY, VO L. 5, NO . 1, 2001
Debates
Becoming anybody
Thinking against the nation and through the
city
Kevin Robins
“One could become anybody. Some of the
great stories of London concern those who
have taken on new identies, and new
personalities; to begin again, to renew
oneself, is one of the great advantages of the
city. It is part of its endlessly dramatic life.”
(Ackroyd, 2000, pp. 775–776)
I
n the following discussion, I will be
concerned with some of the particular
dilemmas of contemporary British cul-
ture—they are dilemmas to do with the
growing complexity of cultural life in the
British space. I shall argue—somewhat
provocatively, perhaps—that much of the
difficulty in the way of a new cultural
settlement in Britain is a consequence of
the predominantly national way of think-
ing about the problems of the national
culture. I am concerned, then, with the
limitations (which are both intellectual and
imaginative) of the national vision—it is a
way of thinking that tends to consider
cultural complexity in terms of disorder
and loss of coherence. My aim, then, is to
work against the force of the national
cultural agenda. To think otherwise about
cultural complexity, I shall suggest, it is
necessary to think from another—a
counter-national—perspective. And this
will lead me eventually to the city, and to
London in particular—to that great prov-
ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/01/010077-30 © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI:10.1080/1360481012005788 6
ocation to the clarity and coherence of
British national culture. From London, I
will argue, it is possible to think differ-
ently —more productively —about cul-
tural interactions in contemporary Britain.
My discussion is grounded in the particular
circumstances of British culture, but I
believe that the core argument can easily
be extended to other national and urban
contexts.
The national imaginary
First, we should consider how the national
imagination has tended to understand and to
respond to the problems of the national
culture. A useful starting point is provided
by the work of the political scientist David
Miller, and I want to spend some time here
considering his arguments, for they seem to
me to offer a strong, clear and cogent
national response to the contemporary chal-
lenges to British cultural integrity. In his
book, On Nationality (1995), Miller reflects
on what he sees as a significant and problem-
atical decline in the self-confidence and self-
image of British people now. He seems to
thinks of it in terms of a weakening of
national affect. In the particular British con-
text, Miller suggests, one very significant
factor in this new national problem is a crisis
78 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
of historical continuity. ‘The post-war
experience of people in Britain’, he argues,
‘has directly undermined the main elements
out of which British identity was originally
constructed’: ‘indeed, the main problem of
British national identity today is that the
understanding of that identity which has
emerged over the past centuries seems no
longer appropriate to today’s world’ (1995,
pp. 172, 166). When he invokes this shared
historical legacy, Miller is thinking of the
early grounding of British imagined commu-
nity in anti-French sentiments (here he
invokes the work of Linda Colley, 1996); of
the associated historical importance of Prot-
estantism (and anti-Catholic sentiments); of
what was for long regarded by many as the
‘civilizing’ project of empire; and of the
symbolic ideal of ‘limited, constitutional
monarchy’. It is the binding and bidding
force of these cultural references and sym-
bols that has been dramatically eroded in the
post-war period, Miller suggests. These have
all taken ‘a severe bruising in recent years, to
the point where many Britons may wonder
whether there is anything distinctly valuable
left in British identity at all’ (1995, p. 170).
The vital narcissistic element in British cul-
ture has been diminished, in Miller’s account,
and the present time is one in which Britons
are consequently left with confused feelings
about their national culture and values. ‘On
the one hand’, he says, ‘there is a strong sense
that the British do have a separate identity,
and that this matters a good deal; on the
other hand, it is far from clear what this
separate identity is supposed to consist in’
(1995, p. 172). Britons are clinging to the
flotsam of their drifting historical identity.
But it is not just a question of Britain’s
relationship to its past. The national identity
is being subverted by other developments
too. What we now have to take into account,
says Miller, is ‘the impact of multiculturalism
internally and the world economy externally
. . . societies are becoming more culturally
fragmented, while at the same time they are
increasingly exposed to the homogenising
effects of the global market’ (1995, p. 185).
What are at issue here, then, are the con-
sequences for the nation of globalization.
Miller recognizes that the processes of glo-
balization, which are both cultural and eco-
nomic—involving accelerating global flows
of people and of commodities—represent a
fundamental challenge now to the ideal of
national cultural integrity —‘a challenge to
the idea that people need to have the kind of
map that a national identity provides’ (1995,
p. 165). First, there is the question of new
‘ethnic minorities’, as a consequence of new
patterns of migration, and the problems they
increasingly pose (or are imagined to pose)
for the cultural integrity of the nation. The
problems here are to do with the prolifera-
tion of discourses concerned with ‘the quest
for cultural diversity’—the desire, as Miller
disparagingly puts it, ‘to celebrate diversity,
bolster ethnic pride and encourage people to
pick and choose among the array of cultural
identities that global culture makes acces-
sible’ (1995, p. 186). And, second, there is the
matter of new global markets—the coming
into existence of a new economic order ‘in
which each operates solely as a free chooser’
(1995, p. 178). Miller profoundly regrets the
cultural consequences of such an order, in
which people
“are happy to think of themselves as
individuals who happen to be working in
this job, consuming these goods, married to
this partner, and so on . . . Along with this
goes a view of the world as a kind of giant
supermarket in which different goods and
services are on offer in different places and
in which it is perfectly reasonable for
individuals to gravitate to whatever place
offers them the best package. On this view,
national ties should count for nothing
except perhaps in so far as they affect the
range of cultural goods on offer in a
particular place.” (1995, p. 165)
This is a cultural prospect that, to Miller,
seems no less than ‘pathological’. What he is
drawing attention to, then, is the, for him
discomforting, reality that ‘national identities
now have to compete with a wider range of

other potential objects of loyalty’ (1995, p.
178). His problem is that there is a now a new
competition for loyalties, in which national
institutions are having to contend with both
new particularistic and new consumer identi-
ties. And, under these conditions of parti-
alized and fragmented allegiances, British
people are losing, or giving up on, ‘the deeper
resources of a common historical identity’
(ibid.)—with deeply problematical conse-
quences, Miller believes.
David Miller acknowledges the real and
very difficult challenges to national identity
in the contemporary era. ‘Nationality’, he
makes clear, ‘can no longer remain a diffuse,
taken-for-granted cultural matrix, some-
thing one acquires simply by living in a
place, breathing the air, being exposed to
particular ways of doing things’ (1995, p.
178). And, this being the case, Miller sets
himself the task of providing a reasoned and
coherent defence of ‘nationality’ (which he
carefully distinguishes from ‘nationalism’,
let us note)—a national agenda for national
cultural reintegration. As he does so —aim-
ing to establish ‘the appeal of national
identity to the modern self’—Miller seeks
to identify what he himself calls the ‘inner
logic’ of nationality (1995, p. 12). What
become apparent in his exposition, then, are
the established motifs and tropes of the
national imaginary—tropes that we must
consider as significant insofar as they have
indeed appealed to, and found resonance in,
the ‘modern self’. On Nationality is a useful
text because of what it tells us about —and
because of its commitment to—the dis-
cursive themes and images that have been at
the heart of the national way of thinking
and feeling—the images that have been
associated with the ‘emotional loyalty’
(1995, p. 160) demanded by national
belonging.
Among the core images of national dis-
course—and they are images to which Miller
gives his wholeheartedly approval—are ones
to do with wholeness, coherence and integ-
rity. The prevailing imagery within Miller’s
argument is one of bonds and binding: his
RO B IN S : BECO M IN G A NYB O DY 79
overriding concern is with a ‘common
national identity’ that ‘binds [people]
together in the face of their many diverse
private and group identities’ (1995, p. 188);
with ‘the ties that bind us to our fellow
nationals’ (1995, p. 14); with ‘the melding
together of “races” ’ (p. 25); with ‘what holds
nations together’ (p. 32); and so on. An
imagined community is a unitary commu-
nity, characterized by a common culture and
by mutual understanding—‘its existence’,
says Miller, ‘depends on a shared belief that
its members belong together, and a shared
wish to continue their life in common’ (1995,
p. 23). A national identity, in Miller’s view,
‘requires that the people who share it should
have something in common . . . a common
public culture’ (1995, p. 25). And this ‘some-
thing’ is not something that exists in the
present alone. The national community
should, we are told, be ‘solidly based in
history’ (1995, p. 36)—the shared character-
istics and common culture of the imagined
community should be sustained through
time. When we talk about the national
community,
“we are talking not merely about
community of the kind that exists between
a group of contemporaries who practise
mutual aid among themselves, and would
dissolve at the point at which such practise
ceased; but about a community that,
because it stretches back and forward across
the generations, is not one that the present
generation can renounce.” (1995, pp. 23–24)
‘People value the rich cultural inheritance
that membership of a nation can bring them’,
Miller asserts, ‘and they want to see continu-
ity between their own lives and the lives of
their ancestors’ (1995, p. 184). This concern
with the coherence and integrity of the
national culture also has a historical dimen-
sion, then, where it translates into a pre-
occupation with transmission and
continuity.
What is at issue in the imagined commu-
nity thus conceived is not only the stability
80 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
of a shared identity and belonging. A sec-
ond core theme in Miller’s defence of
national belonging concerns the relationship
between shared identities and the ethical
and political life of the community. The
point he makes is that it is the shared
culture and beliefs of the community that
provide the very basis for ethical and polit-
ical action. ‘A shared identity’, says Miller,
‘carries with it a shared loyalty, and this
increases confidence that others will recip-
rocate one’s own co-operative behaviour’
(1995, p. 92). The imagined community is ‘a
community of obligation’ (1995, p. 23). It is
in—and only in—a culturally homogeneous
order, then, that it is possible to create the
conditions of trust and reciprocity that are
necessary for collective life to function
effectively—through mutual commitments
and obligations. In the national community,
Miller is telling us, cultural sameness and
moral-political solidarity are interdependent
variables—‘people have an interest in shap-
ing the world in association with others
with whom they identify’ (1995, p. 88). The
national community is not only ‘the source
of personal identity’, then, but also ‘an
obligation-generating community’ (1995, p.
82). In the context of the imagined commu-
nity we come to know, not only ‘who we
are’, but also ‘what we stand for’.
A third set of ideas in Miller’s argument is
centred on the idea of necessity —the neces-
sity of national cultures as such, and also the
necessity of what particular nations have
become. Miller adamantly resists the idea of
national identities as arbitrary or fictitious. It
is simply not possible, he says that people
‘should regard their nationality as merely a
historic accident’ (1995, p. 184).
“It is incompatible with nationality to think
of the members of the nation as people who
merely happen to have been thrown
together in one place and forced to share a
common fate, in the way that the occupants
of a lifeboat, say, have been accidentally
thrown together. There must be a sense that
the people belong together by virtue of the
characteristics that they share.” (1995, p. 25)
There is a historical dimension to this sense
of necessity. ‘In national communities’, says
Miller, ‘people are more tightly bound to the
past than the denizens of our imaginary
lifeboat . . . Language, social customs, holi-
days and festivals, are all equally the sedi-
ment of a historical process which is national
in character. So one is forced to bear a
national identity regardless of choice, simply
by participating in this way of life’ (1995, p.
42). The weight of history exerts a compel-
ling force, then, binding compatriots
together into a transhistorical community of
fate. But Miller’s argument concerning neces-
sity is to do with more than just historical
gravity —there seems also to be an assertion
of what we might call the logical necessity of
national belonging. He is concerned with ‘the
part played by nationality in making some-
one the person that he or she is’, maintaining
that ‘national culture is in this sense con-
stitutive’ (1995, p. 86, my emphasis). Or as he
puts it later, again mobilizing the nautical
metaphor, ‘cultures, unlike ships, are not
vessels to be boarded and abandoned at
will’—a national culture is a ‘condition for a
person’s having an identity and being able to
make choices in the first place’ (1995, p. 110).
Without nationality, Miller seems to be
telling us, there can be no meaningful culture,
either collective or individual.
In the immediate context of what is
happening in and to Britain now—primarily
as a consequence of globalization, in both its
economic and cultural aspects—Miller’s
response is a conventional one; his suggestion
and proposals for cultural and political
reform are quite predictable, because pre-
ordained—because he responds precisely as
someone who could never regard himself as
the denizen of some imaginary lifeboat. To
be consistent with his own underlying beliefs
about the value of nationality, Miller’s
response must involve the defence of the
national culture, in the face of whatever new
cultural complexities are threatening it—for
‘everyone has an interest in not having their
inherited culture damaged or altered against
their will’ (1995, pp. 86–87). Miller must be

committed to conserving the sovereignty and
integrity of the national community. Unsur-
prisingly, then, what Miller envisages and
recommends, in response to the present
‘decline in confidence’ in British nationality,
is a ‘revived project of nation-building’
(1995, p. 180). But, in making his recom-
mendations, he is no dogmatic nationalist —
that is why I have felt that it is worth
reflecting on his careful arguments—and the
national response that he proposes to global
cultural change is reasonably open and con-
structive. National identity and solidarity are
the core values in Miller’s political philoso-
phy—nationality remains the most ‘appro-
priate’ form of social solidarity (1995, p.
184)—but, in order for these values to
survive, he recognizes, the national commu-
nity must ‘adapt’ to the new global environ-
ment. What Miller proposes, then, is a
reconstituted and revitalized national
order—one that incorporates (and thereby
domesticates, I would suggest) some at least
of the new cultural complexities: ‘A histor-
ically transmitted identity . . . must adapt to
new circumstances, especially to increasing
cultural pluralism’ (1995, p. 179). ‘The proj-
ect of nation-building, pursued so energet-
ically in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, must’, says Miller, ‘be carried forward
in a way that takes account of revitalised
ethnic, regional, and other such identities’
(1995, p. 182).
Solidarity and diversity
What Miller offers us is a clear and consistent
response to the new cultural complexities
from the perspective of nationality—a
response, that is to say, from the perspective
of what seems to be particularly under threat
from global change. And, through his argu-
ments, I think, one can very clearly see how
the national imagination organizes its think-
ing and orders its categories in response to
what is happening in the contemporary
world. The national mentality begins from
the point of view of singularity—unity,
RO B IN S : BECO M IN G A NYB O DY 81
integrity, coherence, consensus, common-
ality, and so on —which it holds to be a
positive value, both culturally and politi-
cally—a value to be protected and defended.
The imagined community—as ‘a source of
identity and as a source of obligation’ (1995,
p. 12)—functions most efficiently when it is
a unitary community. And given this com-
mitment to a foundational unity, the national
mentality—which may be taken as both a
way of thinking and a way of feeling—
regards diversity, difference and complexity
as a problem. Diversity is a problem because
it is associated with the (imagined) dangers of
cultural and political ‘fragmentation’ and
‘disorder’. But, of course, diversity is—
increasingly, it seems—a part of the every-
day reality that contemporary nations have
to live with and deal with. Mechanisms have
to be found, therefore, for managing and
containing plurality and its disorganizing
consequences. Miller’s discourse makes
apparent what has been the historical project
of the national community—to negotiate a
way between an ideal unitarianism and a
pragmatic pluralism.
This question of the relation between
solidarity and diversity has become one of
the key political and cultural issues of our
time—and it has a particular acuity in the
British case. And we may say that the
processes of globalization have made accom-
modation or reconciliation more and more
difficult. A variety of possibilities have been
suggested for how it might be possible to
sustain the national compromise, from both
conservative and radical perspectives. David
Miller’s own proposition, coming from the
moderately conservative end of the spectrum,
might be characterized as a revisionist cul-
tural nationalism. His argument is motivated
by a rejection of what he calls ‘radical
multiculturalism’. But Miller is certainly
prepared to recognize the significance of
cultural diversity, and he is open to the claims
of ‘ethnic minorities’ (‘Indeed’, he says, ‘it is
possible to regard ethnic mixing as the source
of a nation’s distinctive character’ (1995, p.
25)—a position that is put forward in some
82 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
quarters with respect to the historic creation
of a British collective identity). His moderate
concession to diversity is tempered, however,
by the more insistent and overriding belief in
the need for some kind of binding mecha-
nism—a ‘common ethos’ (1995, p. 74). In
going on to reflect on what this unifying
principle might be in contemporary, multi-
cultural Britain, Miller is quick to dismiss the
idea, put forward by some political thinkers,
that unity should be predicated on some
political principle, on some conception of
British citizenship, ‘where this is understood
in terms of subscription to a set of political
principles: tolerance, respect for law, belief in
the procedures of parliamentary democracy,
and so forth’ (1995, p. 175). Miller is out-
rightly rejecting the idea of a ‘constitutional
patriotism’, as a substitute for national iden-
tification of the more familiar and involving
kind.
Miller dismisses the principle of civic
nationalism as the basis for a common
identification because, he says, ‘the national
identities that support common citizenship
must be thicker than “constitutional patriot-
ism” implies’ (1995, p. 189). This civic
principle is, simply, too insubstantial: it ‘does
not explain why the boundaries of the
political community should fall here rather
than there; nor does it give you any sense of
the historical identity of the community, the
links that bind present-day politics to deci-
sions made and actions performed in the
past’ (1995, p. 163). There must be a more
robust bond, argues Miller, one that takes
into account citizens’ need for a sense of both
their historical location and their proper
place in the contemporary world. Histor-
ically, he maintains, a British identity was
forged ‘to aid the integration’ of Scots, Welsh
and Northern Irish populations, thereby
sustaining ‘a sense of common nationality
alongside an equally powerful sense of differ-
ence’ (1995, p. 173). Although the Scots,
Welsh and Northern Irish people ‘are not
properly described as ethnic groups’, Miller
goes on, ‘they may serve as a vivid reminder
of the fact that there are many distinct and
equally legitimate ways of “being British” ’
(1995, p. 174). What is being advocated, then,
is a renewed project of integration (on the
old basis, it seems), in which the ‘new
minorities’ are now given their ‘opportunity
to participate in the continuous redefinition
of national identity’ (1995, p. 180)—given
the opportunity of ‘being British’ in their
own ways. What Miller conceives as the
revitalization of British national identity
turns out to be an accommodating form of
cultural incorporation —a renewed and revi-
talized integrationism.
An alternative approach to the possibility
of reconciliation between the principles of
solidarity and diversity is that associated
with the idea of a new ‘constitutional patri-
otism’—the idea that Miller was so quick
to dismiss for its lack of emotional ‘thick-
ness’. This idea of ‘constitutional patriot-
ism’ has been developed particularly by
Jürgen Habermas, in his attempt to think
through the relationship between the
national and republican dimensions of dem-
ocratic culture in Europe. Habermas argues
that the republican principle is undermined
‘when the integrative force of the nation of
citizens is traced back to the prepolitical
fact of a quasi-natural people—that is to
something independent of and prior to the
political opinion- and will-formation of the
citizens themselves’ (Habermas, 1998, p.
406). Under conditions of increased diver-
sity in the European space, says Habermas,
the ‘organic’ nation, with its myths of cul-
tural homogeneity, has become ever more
problematical. The question occurs, then, as
to ‘whether there exists a functional equiv-
alent to the fusion of the nation of citizens
with the ethnic nation’ (1998, p. 407). Hab-
ermas’ answer is that a ‘constitutional
patriotism’ can be that equivalent. He rec-
ognizes that many political commentators
find this idea of constitutional loyalty to be
too weak a bond, but his own belief is that
democratic societies can be held together
by political culture if that political culture
is also inclusive of social and cultural
rights:

“The citizens must . . . be able to experience
the fair value of their rights in the form of
social security and the reciprocal
recognition of different cultural forms of
life. Democratic citizenship can only realise
its integrative potential —that is, it can only
found solidarity among strangers—if it
proves itself as a mechanism that actually
realises the material conditions of preferred
forms of life.” (1998, p. 409)
What is productive in Habermas’ argument, I
think, is the disentangling of the idea and
concept of the ‘real nation of citizens’ from
that of the ‘imagined ethnic-cultural nation’
(ibid.).
In the context of debates around British
culture and politics, a somewhat similar
approach has recently been put forward by
the historian Linda Colley (1999). Hers is a
less elaborated and a less consistent (and
sometimes fudged) argument, I think —in
large part, no doubt, because it was put
forward in a political policy context, at a
Downing Street lecture. Like Habermas,
however, Colley regards the distinction
between identity and citizenship as being
crucial. And she is anxious, too, to play down
the identity dimension of national culture, in
her case, of course, Britishness (‘which is
more ancestral and visceral’)—with partic-
ular criticism reserved for conservative and
nostalgic forms of historical consciousness,
with their often ‘erroneous and incomplete
views of [the] past’. ‘Instead of being so
mesmerised by debates over British identity’,
ventures Colley, ‘it would be far more
productive to concentrate on renovating
British citizenship, and in convincing all of
the inhabitants of these islands that they are
equal and valued citizens, irrespective of
whatever identity they may select to prior-
itise’. She goes on to suggest that British
history could now be rewritten to give a new
prominence to civic—rather than national-
mythical—events, arguing that a revisionist
history of Britain could and should find ways
of ‘connecting our radical and reforming past
with the extension of citizen rights being
implemented now’.
RO B IN S : BECO M IN G A NYB O DY 83
There is something positive, then, in Col-
ley’s idea of ‘a revivified citizen nation’ as an
answer to her question ‘What is Britain for?’
Her eschewal of a national culturalism, in
favour of a concern with ‘more inspiring and
more accessible definitions of citizenship’,
should be seen as constructive—particularly
if we take into account the audience for her
lecture. But in the end, I feel, Colley fails to
go the last mile. She raises the question of
diversity and multiculturalism, yet, in the
end, she seems reluctant to envisage the
possibility of that important ‘functional
equivalent’ (to use Habermas’ term) that
might replace the fusion of the nation of
citizens with the ethnic nation. Indeed, her
argument with respect to ‘ethnic minorities’
ultimately collapses into something that is
rather like David Miller’s position. In some
respects, says Colley,
“the position of ethnic minorities in this
country is a powerful argument for the
enduring utility of Britishness. Unlike
Englishness, Welshness or Scottishness,
Britishness is a capacious concept with no
necessary ethnic or cultural overtones.
Consequently, large numbers of non-whites
seem content to accept the label ‘British’
because it doesn’t commit them to much.”
At this point, it seems as if we might be back
to square one in the debate on British
national culture. Colley has opened up an
interesting possibility, but she is unable or
reluctant to push the argument forward
consistently, and to connect up with the
European republican agenda of Habermas
and others (in fact, she considers herself
‘radical’ for proposing a ‘a twenty-first-
century citizen’s monarchy’). Her Anglo-
Saxon compromise leaves Colley still caught
up in the dilemmas of the imagined ethnic-
cultural nation.
Beyond the revisionist cultural nationalism
of David Miller and the attenuated civic
nationalism of Linda Colley, I want now to
consider a third contribution to the debate
on the relation between diversity and sol-
84 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
idarity in the national culture. This is the
contribution made by the Runnymede
Trust’s Report on The Future of Multi-ethnic
Britain (2000), chaired by Bhikhu Parekh—
one of the most important and radical
contributions to the contemporary debate on
British culture. The Parekh Report comes at
the issues in a rather different way from the
other approaches to national culture and
identity that I have been considering. Most
discussions begin with the singularity of
national cultures and then move on to
consider the ‘problem’ of diversity and com-
plexification. The Parekh Report resists this
essentially national formulation of what is at
issue. It actually takes as its starting point
what it regards as the problem of (imagined)
singularity and homogeneity —the ‘shared
cultural meanings, the common national
story, [that] weld a nation of individuals into
a social unity’ (2000, p. 16). What it argues—
quite lucidly, and in contradiction to the
myths of integrity —is that ‘British national
identity has always been more diverse than it
is normally imagined to be’ (2000, p. 23).
And what it then recognizes is that contem-
porary global transformations are making
this diversity both more apparent and more
unmanageable: ‘They have shaken the unified
conception of Britishness hitherto taken for
granted and have injected a sense of fluidity
and uncertainty into what was formerly
experienced by many as a settled culture’
(ibid.). In these circumstances, say the mem-
bers of the Runnymede Commission, we
need to reflect on the state of our national
community:
“How has the imagined nation stood the
test of time? What should be preserved,
what jettisoned, what revised or reworked?
How can everyone have a recognised place
within the larger picture? These are
questions about Britain as an imagined
community, and about how a genuinely
multicultural Britain needs to reimagine
itself.” (2000, p. 15)
The report goes on to suggest that there are
fundamental difficulties in the way of this
necessary reimagination. ‘Britishness’, it says,
‘as much as Englishness, has systematic,
largely unspoken, racial connotations’; and
so long as these are not dealt with —so long
as the imagined ethnic-cultural nation is
treated as a sleeping dog—then ‘the idea of a
multicultural post-nation remains an empty
promise’ (2000, pp. 38–39).
The Parekh Report rejects the illusory
ideal of cultural singularity, and is constantly
working against the prevailing ideology of
‘One Nation’. Whilst they have a clear
awareness of the need to maintain shared
values and social cohesion (see 2000, chap. 4),
the Commissioners are keen to explore, and
put a positive value on, diversity and differ-
ence in British society. The Report thinks of
Britain as being a ‘community of commu-
nities’. What the members of the Commis-
sion want to convey is a sense of the cultural
complexities of everyday life in Britain—
complexities that actually make life here
more interesting now. As they do so, they
recognize that the language that we have
available to us is rather limited and limiting:
the language we use with respect to both the
national imagined community and ‘minority’
communities is problematical precisely
because it is a language of community —one
that conceives of cultural groups in terms of
‘bounded, homogeneous groupings, each fix-
edly attached to its ethnicity and tradition’
(2000, p. 26):
“There are two things wrong with this
mental picture of a large homogeneous
majority and various equally homogeneous
minorities. First, Britain is not and never
has been the unified, conflict-free land of
popular imagination. There is no single
white majority. Second, the ‘minority’
communities do not live in separate,
self-sufficient enclaves, and they do display
substantial internal differences. They too
must be reimagined.” (ibid.)
What is particularly valuable in the Report is
the attempt to shift the discourse of culture
in order to change the way in which cultures
are imagined and conceived. Cultures are

characterized as ‘interacting and overlapping’
(2000, p. 3); as involving ‘competing attach-
ments’ (p. 23); as being ‘more situational’ (p.
25); as ‘constantly adapting and diversifying’
(p. 27); as ‘open and porous formations’ (p.
37); and so on. The Commissioners are
searching for a more subtle and complex
language that will make it possible to reima-
gine community and communities in Britain
in terms of more cosmopolitan possibil-
ities—they are trying to stretch our imagina-
tion, at least, towards the possibility of new
‘post-national’ cultural arrangements in Brit-
ish society.
In this part of my discussion, I have
considered how some recent contributions to
the debate on Britain and Britishness have
been concerned with the tension between
diversity and solidarity (and I have chosen to
focus on contributions that are, in different
ways and to different degrees, open to the
possibilities of diversity). What is clear is
that—in the intellectual domain, at least —
new and interesting agendas are being devel-
oped (around the notions of constitutional
(or civic) patriotism and cosmopolitan multi-
culturalism, for example). But what is also
apparent—in both the intellectual and polit-
ical arenas—is the continuing force and
resonance of the imagined ethno-cultural
nation. The resilient appeal of the organic
nation was evident, for example, in the
critical and often hostile responses to the
publication of the Parekh Report. The New
Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw (2000),
reacted immediately and spontaneously by
‘standing up for Britain’, standing up for
‘patriotism’, standing up for ‘pride in our
country’, and standing up for the ‘enduring
British values of fairness, tolerance and
decency’. In a somewhat more measured
way, in the pages of Prospect magazine, Alan
Wolfe and Jytte Klausen (2000, p. 32) accused
Parekh of ‘underestimating the extent to
which social solidarity requires strong
national cultures’. In a period of change and
disruption, they argued, ‘Britons still need a
unifying idea of Britishness that can encom-
pass diversity but is not eclipsed by it’ (2000,
RO B IN S : BECO M IN G A NYB O DY 85
p. 33) (and, with this, we are back once again
to the discursive frame of David Miller). The
Report from the Runnymede Trust tried to
move our thinking about multicultural Brit-
ain on somewhat—the new migrant commu-
nities ‘are familiar strangers’, they argued,
‘not an alien wedge’ (Runnymede Trust,
2000, p. 36). What is more apparent than
ever, in the wake of their Report, is that
thinking on questions of culture and identity
in Britain does not move easily.
An urban perspective
I have reflected at some length on what is
being said at the present time about the
condition of British culture. My starting
point was the apparent predicament that the
national culture now finds itself in—what
some think of as a decline in confidence, and
others are inclined to characterize as some
kind of cultural crisis. What I have wanted to
put into focus is the national mentality—the
distinctively national form of thinking and
feeling. In its own ideal self-image, I have
suggested, the nation regards itself in terms
of singularity, as a unified and coherent
whole—‘the people’ bound together in a
single cultural and political body. To be part
of a nation is to participate (with one’s
compatriots) in a common culture and in a
community of trust and obligation—belong-
ing to that community is the fundamental
social relation and social value. And, whilst
the imagined community is to a large extent
an arbitrary construct, this arbitrariness is
always disavowed —the nation regards itself
as a community of fate, to be sustained in its
essential unity through the course of histor-
ical time.
But, of course, the nation can never
actually exist in the form of its ideal image
of itself. It is always bound to be compro-
mised by disorderly realities. Thus, the
imagined unity of the nation has always
been under threat—or has always been
imagined as under threat—from a real
world characterized by its multiplicity and
86 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
complexity. The imagined unity of the
nation has always struggled to cope with
actual diversity and difference. In recent
years, however, through the accelerating
logic of globalization, national communities
have felt themselves to be more and more
under siege, and they have found it increas-
ingly difficult to defend the integrity and
coherence—the always imagined integrity
and coherence, let us note—that is at the
heart of their narcissistic self-imagination.
As we have just seen, much of the debate
around Britishness in recent years has been
to do with a perceived conflict between the
claims of solidarity and unity, on the one
hand, and those of pluralism and diversity,
on the other. In recent years, the United
Kingdom has been struggling—increasingly
and vainly, it often seems—to deal with
issues of migration and ethnicization, trans-
nationalization and multiculturalism.
And it has been struggling, I suggest,
because these disordering transformations,
associated with the processes of global-
ization, simply cannot be dealt with in the
national frame. They cannot be made sense of
within the national mentality. And so, in this
final part of my discussion, I want to
introduce a shift of focus, and to move from
the national frame to an urban frame—and,
thereby, to move the discussion to London.
London is the hub for all the global flows
that are now profoundly complicating our
established models of cultural coherence and
order. London is where the processes of
global change that now appear to be subvert-
ing the integrity of the nation have their most
intense and dynamic existence. What is sig-
nificant for me is that London has generally
been left out of discussions of the national
culture and identity —as if London were not
properly, or purely enough, or manageably
enough, British (or English, at that). And on
those occasions when London has been
referred to, then it has commonly been with
feelings of resentment—resentment and hos-
tility towards a city that seems to have a
disproportionate share of national resources,
and that dramatically overshadows the eco-
nomic and cultural life of the rest of the
country. London has never fitted easily into
the national mould. Its nature has been
anomalous—and for that it has been resen-
ted. And now, in times of global change and
cultural disordering, it may be that the
national resentment is deepening. This is
certainly the message that Hywel Williams
(2000) conveys in a recent article in The
Guardian. London, he says, ‘has always been
seen as a foreign place—and one that is out
of synch with the English nation’s temper’.
And, says Williams, ‘to the settled political-
historical differences we must add London’s
present mood of capitalist glee and cultural
pride in which it imagines itself to be an
imperium receiving tribute from every sub-
ject race’. There is the clear sense here that
London’s foreignness is increasing: ‘The dif-
ferences between Londoners and the English
are now as great as those between the British
and the Italians.’ Now, that is an interesting
proposition! We really ought to reflect on
how it is that London could have come to be
such a foreign-seeming place. Hywel Wil-
liams’ observation here might help to put the
hostility towards London into what could
actually be quite an interesting and pro-
ductive new context.
I think that there are new kinds of
possibilities when we move on to London. In
and from London, you can gain a different
perspective on global change and its implica-
tions for contemporary British society.
Hywel Williams’ complaints are directed
against what he chooses to call ‘London
nationalism’. ‘This is not a city’, he says, ‘It is
a nation.’ But the point about London is
precisely that it is not a nation—but a city, a
metropolis. And, as such, it allows us to
reflect on the cultural consequences of glo-
balization from an other than national per-
spective—to extend our cultural and political
concerns from the national question to urban
questions. This is not at all a proposal for
abandoning the debate on national culture
and identity. My earlier discussion should
have made quite clear my concern with
British nationality—and my support for the

important challenges that are now being
made to nationalism of the ethnic-cultural
kind. I agree with Stuart Hall (2000) —who
was one of the Commissioners responsible
for producing the Runnymede Trust
Report—that it is ‘worth continuing to ask
the awkward question, how is the nation
imagined?’ The point about shifting to an
urban perspective, however, is that it permits
us to also open up some alternative cultural
and political possibilities—possibilities that
go beyond the limiting vision of the national
imagination. In the context of this quite
different kind of cultural space, I suggest, it
might be possible to pick up on the cosmo-
politan and post-national possibilities that
are briefly adumbrated in the Parekh Report.
From the perspective of London, there is a
certain potential to think about culture dif-
ferently, more openly, in more complicated
ways.
What I am trying to say, following Bogdan
Bogdanović (1995, pp. 64, 46), is that the city
can function as a ‘cognitive model’, as a ‘tool
for thought’. And that it can function as a
more interesting tool than the nation and the
nation state. Let me just be clear about what
I am not saying here. I am not saying that
people who live in London will necessarily
think about cultures differently—with more
openness towards cultural complexity—than
people living elsewhere in Britain. I believe
that London can actually serve as a cognitive
model for all of us—and that, in terms of
thinking cultures now, it might be that we all
have need of London. And I am not by any
means saying that London exists at the
present time as some kind of ideal cultural
space—an achieved cosmopolitan order. I am
all too aware of the coexistence, for example,
of both multicultures and multiracisms—of
‘the contradictions between the vibrancy of
hybridisation and the pervasiveness of
racism’ (Phoenix, 1998, p. 87; see also Sibley,
1998). What I am wanting to propose is that
London might serve as a tool for thinking in
different ways about questions of cultural
complexity, confrontation, interaction, nego-
tiation, and so on. Following Bogdanović’s
RO B IN S : BECO M IN G A NYB O DY 87
idea that the city has always functioned as ‘a
highly complex and highly fruitful epistemo-
logical model’ (1995, p. 46), I would argue
that now, in the context of the new order of
cultural complexity being brought about by
the processes of globalization, London pro-
vides a crucial intellectual framework for
British people to re-think and re-describe
their relation to culture and identity.
Let me try to evoke, in what can only be an
indicative way here, what it is that I mean
when I say that the city provides the possibil-
ity to think about cultures differently and
more productively. There are, I suggest, two
key aspects to what makes ‘being urban’
different from ‘being national’. The first
concerns the nature of our subjective engage-
ment and involvement with these different
kinds of cultural spaces. One does not exist
in the city in the same way that one exists as
part of the nation. If the nation is fundamen-
tally about belonging to an abstract commu-
nity, associated with what Paul James (1992,
pp. 332, 326) calls ‘relations of disembodied
extension’ or ‘disembodied-extended inte-
gration’, then the urban arena is about
immersion in a world of multiplicity, and
implicates us in the dimension of embodied
cultural experience. As Olivier Mongin
(1995, p. 44) puts it, urban culture is experi-
enced ‘at ground level’ ( à ras de terre), and
involves bodily engagement with the com-
plex realities of the urban space. What urban
experience entails, says Bogdanović (1995, p.
46), is ‘the consciousness of the actual pres-
ence of people in the city space that they
know and whose very existence . . . provides
them with the chance to give responsible
answers to eternal human questions like:
Who am I? What am I? Where am I? Why
am I where I am?’ (very different ques-
tions—particularly this last one—from the
national questions ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What
do we stand for?’). The nation, we may say, is
a space of identification and identity, whilst
the city is an existential and experiential
space.
If the first distinction between national
and urban frames concerns the nature of the
88 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
relation to culture, the second has to do with
what it is that is being related to. It has to do
with the crucial difference between abstract
community and the complexity and density
of the urban space. In reflecting on this
difference, we may usefully draw on the
cultural and political division that Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri foreground in
their book Empire (2000). Their concern is
with what is problematical about the idea of
‘the nation’ and ‘the people’. The category of
‘the people’—the national people—tends
‘toward identity and homogeneity internally
while posing its difference from and exclud-
ing what remains outside’ (2000, p. 103). The
identity of ‘the people’ has been constructed,
Hardt and Negri argue, ‘on an imaginary
plane that hid and/or eliminated differences’;
what it has involved has been ‘the eclipse of
internal differences through the representa-
tion of the whole population by a hegemonic
group, race or class’ (2000, pp. 103, 104).
Against this unifying cultural logic, they
counterpose the category of ‘the multitude’.
‘The multitude is’, for Hardt and Negri, ‘a
multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open
set of relations, which is not homogeneous or
identical with itself and bears an indistinct,
inclusive relation to those outside of it’ (2000,
p. 103). (The cultural logic of nationality—
and, even more so, nationalism, has involved
transforming the multitude into a singular
people.) Hardt and Negri’s insistence on this
division between the nation/people and the
multitude seems to me to be valuable and
productive—in the context of the present
discussion, it can help us to establish what
differentiates the urban space from the
national cultural space. For the category of
the multitudinous corresponds to the princi-
ple of urbanity: it is in the urban context that
people have continued to be able to experi-
ence their existence in terms of being a
multitude, an open and changing multiplicity.
The city is not a space that can be conceived
(actually, misconceived) as a unitary and
coherent entity (which is why, pace Hywel
Williams, it is not at all meaningful to talk
about ‘the London nation’). The city stands
for an entirely different kind of cultural
configuration and operation, which we have
more difficulty in grasping, both intellec-
tually and imaginatively. Zygmunt Bauman
captures something of what the city is about
through his image of ‘the clash between
independently composed and used maps of
the city space’. ‘The under-determination of
the city space’, he says,
“its amenability to many, also mutually
contradictory, interpretations, its hospitality
extended to many different and
uncoordinated cartographic efforts, and the
resulting opacity, ever negotiated yet ever
anew reborn, do not generate ‘chaos’ . . .
The ostensible disorder . . . is in fact a
specific form of equilibrium which is
perpetually created and reformed through
intermittent frictions and negotiations, in
the course of which the autonomous actions
of free agents are simultaneously the source
of initiative, the moving force and the
evaluating authority.” (Bauman, 1999, p.
184)
It is precisely the idea of a plane of singular-
ities, and of open sets of interactions and
relations, that is being evoked in this ground-
level understanding of the meaning and
resonance of urban space.
It is in terms of their multitudinousness
that cities are culturally significant. Because
of their multitudinous qualities, cities can
pose different kinds of cultural questions
from nations and states. And London —as
a multitude of multitudes—can articulate
these questions with particular dramatic
force. ‘It is in the nature of the city to
encompass everything’, says Peter Ackroyd
(2000, pp. 778–779). ‘It is illimitable. It is
infinite London.’ London—where 200 (and
growing) languages are now spoken, and
where there are around 50 different ‘ethnic
communities’, as well as numerous other
more or less transient populations—has
always been a city of migrant destination
(see Merriman, 1994; Hebbert, 1998, chap.
7). And now, as a consequence, says

Ackroyd (2000, p. 777), ‘there are different
worlds, and times, within the city’. As he
recounts, London has always been Babylon
(‘Babylondon’), ‘a city loud with many
disparate and unintelligible voices’. To
name London as Babylon’, he says, ‘was to
allude to its essential multiplicity’
(Ackroyd, 2000, p. 576). And, in the con-
text of these plural worlds and times, there
exist cultural possibilities of a kind that
national cultures cannot make available.
One can become a Londoner very quickly,
and one can easily cease being a Londoner,
too, if one wishes: one ‘belongs’ to the city
in a very different sense from that in which
one belongs to the nation. Urban cultures
and identities are more provisional, more
transitory and negotiable—less constraining
and less sustained than national ones. In his
‘biography’ of London, Peter Ackroyd
evokes this relative contingency and open-
ness of life and encounter in the multi-
tudinous city:
“The elements of innovation and of change
are subtly mingled, together with the sheer
exhilaration of being one among a
numerous company. One could become
anybody. Some of the great stories of
London concern those who have taken on
new identities, and new personalities; to
begin again, to renew oneself, is one of the
great advantages of the city. It is part of its
endlessly dramatic life. It is possible, after
all, to enter if only for a moment the lives
and emotions of those who pass by.”
(Ackroyd, 2000, pp. 775–776)
Here the concern is no longer with culture
as a binding mechanism—‘what binds [“the
people”] together into a single body’, as
David Miller (1995, p. 30) would have it:
London is regarded as a huge cultural reser-
voir and resource—valued for its numer-
ousness, its complexity and its incalcul-
ability. While the nation is about stability
and continuity, the city offers important
possibilities for cultural unsettling and
transformation.
RO B IN S : BECO M IN G A NYB O DY 89
London provides a vast space—bigger in
some senses than the nation —in which
cultures can be differently imagined and
conceived—and differently imagined and
conceived by all who are engaged with its
reality. And it is a space, consequently, in
which the relation between the diversity of
cultures might be re-imagined and re-con-
ceived on a more complex basis. My argu-
ment is not intended to idealize what Lon-
don is now —I take heed of Paul Gilroy’s
note of caution about the ‘automatic multi-
culture thesis’, and of his insistence that
‘London’s multiculture will not necessarily
take care of itself as a private phenom-
enon. . .’ (Gilroy, 1999, pp. 60, 59). What I
am suggesting is, rather, that London might
allow us to think differently and more
productively about issues and problems of
multiculturalism. The city poses ‘the eternal
impossible question of how we strangers
can live together’ (Donald, 1997, p. 182; cf.
Robins, 1997) —and, the metropolitan city,
Babylon-London, clearly poses this ques-
tion of coexistence most profoundly and
intensely. And, in the urban and metropoli-
tan context, I would argue, it is a question
that must necessarily be posed in ways that
are both more grounded and more complex
than the national imagination can accom-
modate. Trevor Phillips (2000, p. 19) puts
forward the image of multicultural London
in terms of ‘the sound of a hundred cul-
tures softly clashing, sometimes melding,
occasionally grating uncomfortably’. What
he is evoking here (with a certain romanti-
cism, admittedly) is a complex of spatially
distributed cultures, side-by-side, overlap-
ping, hustling, jarring, negotiating, con-
stantly moving and jostling—a physical and
embodied coexistence that defies any
abstract (national) schemes of integrationist
or assimilationist ordering. In posing his
objections to London, Hywel Williams
(2000) is aware of, but at the same time
resistant to, this kind of social and cultural
co-presence: ‘London is more tolerant of
eccentricity, of differences of race, faith,
colour and sexuality than the rest of Eng-
90 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
land. But it is a tolerance which is born of
indifference.’ What Williams here interprets
and dismisses as ‘indifference’ might, how-
ever, be interpreted differently—as some-
thing far more positive about the workings
of urban complexity ‘at ground level’. Per-
haps we might regard it in terms of the
opacity that Zygmunt Bauman regards as
necessary in the urban cultural scene,
involving ‘the readiness to accept new,
often unpleasant and sometimes painful . . .
meanings and to face up to the situations
not fully under one’s control and not likely
ever to lend themselves to one’s control’
(Bauman, 1999, p. 184). What is being
suggested here is a very different basis for
coming to terms with multicultural com-
plexities from the national basis—one that
moves beyond the comfort of identity to
an entirely different kind of social and
cultural project. For Bauman, the inherent
disorder of cities might help to ‘discourage
the doomed yet tempting attempts to fix
once and for all one’s own relation to the
world using the allegedly unchangeable and
non-negotiable traits of group identity as
the glue’. Cities might ‘prompt the effort to
define one’s identity in terms of the acts
that a person is capable of performing,
rather than in terms of a given and pre-
determined set of attributions and received
traits’ (ibid.).
Might we not productively consider the
city in terms of David Miller’s lifeboat
metaphor? In terms of Londoners as ‘people
who have been thrown together in one
place and forced to share a common fate’?
And where what matters is far more the acts
that they are capable of performing, rather
than the binding traits of collective identity?
What I have wanted to do in this discussion
is to question the self-evidence of the
national question, and then to suggest that
there are possibilities for transposing the
discussion about what is happening to cul-
tures and multicultures in Britain now into
a different—and more productive—register.
To see the nation through the prism of
London.
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order and creative chaos’, Citizenship Studies 3(2),
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(ed.) Balkan Blues: Writing Out of Yugoslavia, pp.
37–74. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
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Donald, J. (1997) ‘This, here, now: imagining the
modern city’, in S. Westwood and J. Williams (eds)
Imagining Cities, pp. 181–201. London: Routledge.
Gilroy, P. (1999) ‘A London sumting dis. . .’, Critical
Quarterly 41(3), pp. 57–69.
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past and future of sovereignty and citizenship’,
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Hall, S. (2000) ‘A question of identity’, The Observer,
15 October.
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MA: Harvard University Press.
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James, P. (1992) ‘Forms of abstract “community”: from
tribe and kingdom to nation and state’, Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 22(3), pp. 313–336.
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London: Museum of London.
Miller, D. (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Mongin, O. (1995) Vers la troisième ville? Paris:
Hachette.
Phillips, T. (2000) ‘London—the multicultural city’, The
Observer Magazine, 23 April, pp. 19–22.
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young people: contradictory legacies of Windrush’,
Soundings 10, pp. 86–96.
Robins, K. (1997) ‘The city in question: re-imagining
urban life’, Renewal 5(1), pp. 72–80.
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Kevin Robins is Professor of Communication
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nication Studies at Goldsmiths College, Uni-
versity of London, UK.
 EDWARDS : PLA NN IN G
Planning and communication in
London
Michael Edwards1
T
he aim of this short paper is to be
informative to an international
readership and to offer some reflec-
tions on the way urban questions are
communicated in contemporary England,
to comment especially on the planning
problems Londoners confront now they
have a new metropolitan government.
Communication is defined widely here
to include the ways in which people
obtain information and ideas about the
city, its past and future, the interchanges
between people and various levels of the
state and between all of them and the
corporate and other private interests
involved.
The paper outlines some key themes in the
English experience and then recounts the
experiences of Londoners in recent decades.
The main themes are:
1 Juridical—matters of rights and duties.
2 Economic—the structure of costs facing
those seeking to access information and
decision procedures.
3 Cultural and social—the ways in which
access to (and influence over) public plan-
ning is mediated by the multiple cultures,
class stratifications, languages, institutions
and other practices of the civil society.
4 The media—the technical, linguistic and
design features of the various media (plans,
meetings, print, TV, internet and so on)
used in communication.
These themes overlap and interact with
changing structure and practices of national
and local government and urban policy.
A N D C O M M U NIC ATIO N IN LO N DO N 91
Juridical issues
The UK has no written constitution; the
sovereignty of the parliament is formally
absolute so it can, for example, create or
extinguish ‘rights’ and entire local govern-
ments at will, subject only to European
Union law. The parliament is almost always
under the strong control of the ruling polit-
ical party.
There is no clear concept of ‘citizenship’:
we are all ‘subjects of the queen’ and the only
‘citizenship’ we have is that of the EU—so
far hardly tested. Most of our ethnic minor-
ity populations, however, have voting rights
for local—and many for national—elections.
The UK is resolutely outside the Schengen
Agreement and border-controls are tough
against migration and against refugees but
those who do enter and stay can obtain
British nationality after some years if they
can demonstrate a degree of assimilation and
a clean police record. The significance of this
is that most urban residents have full political
rights in (at least local) government—though
actual participation is very variable and often
very low.
The powers (indeed the very existence) of
forms of government at sub-national levels is
determined by the UK parliament: it was able
to abolish the Greater London Authority
and metropolitan counties in 1986, to create
assemblies recently for Scotland and Wales
and further major changes for London and
other regions are taking place now. The local
governments which we have are, however,
much less powerful and autonomous than
their formal constitutions would suggest
92 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
because the central government controls
their fiscal position very rigidly and specifies
their policies and practices to a high degree.
Councils are subject to a flood of ‘advice’ and
‘guidance’ from the centre on everything
from the school curriculum to cycling, from
housing policy to the protection of trees. If
they ignore this advice their decisions can be
overturned or their resources reduced.
There is no Freedom of Information Act
comparable to the USA’s and —apart from a
narrow group of documents like the minutes
of local government committees—public
access to the deliberation of public bodies
and politicians is uncertain, contentious and
variable.
Many decision-making processes which
have direct impacts on private (individual
and corporate) interests are subject to objec-
tion and appeal procedures. Historically2
these procedures derive from, and protect,
the land and real estate interests of property-
owners and they therefore apply to actions
involving expropriation of land by the state
or by private bodies and to major transport
and civil engineering projects. Other class or
group interests, and other types of state
policy and action are not similarly protected
by appeal and inquiry procedures (except
that individuals can appeal against their
treatment in certain social-welfare, educa-
tion, tax and other relations with the state).
Town and Country Planning is a unique
field in that extensive rights and obligations
for ‘public participation’ have been grafted on
to the legal system since 1968. These proce-
dures relate both to the making of plans and to
the detailed control of development permits
(‘development control’). They are now sup-
plemented by some requirements under the
EU environmental directive. Planning
authorities have to provide opportunities for
consideration, objection and public hearings
(‘inquiries’) at various stages in the prepara-
tion and adoption of development plans.
Local authorities vary a lot in whether they
maximize or minimize the effective public
participation through these channels. There
are further requirements that individual
development proposals should be advertised,
objections can be made and must be taken into
account by the planning authority when it
decides. These decisions are based only partly
on ‘conformity’ with the development plan
(though rather more so since a law of 1991),
instead they should be based on ‘all material
considerations’—a concept so imprecise that
a lot of work is generated for lawyers.
Lawyers are also heavily involved in the
various public inquiry procedures which
arise routinely in the preparation of plans,
where a developer appeals against a local
authority decision or in the few controversial
cases where the central government minister
(the ‘Secretary of State’) ‘calls in’ an applica-
tion for his own direct decision. It is notable
that there is a developers’ right of appeal
against refusal of development permission
but no right of appeal for injured parties
against the granting of permission.
In summary, I would say that citizens of
the UK and thus of London have quite good
voting rights, though these may not be worth
much3 and some rights to defend their
property interests against state action. The
town planning system is important because it
embodies further rights to direct democratic
engagement alongside the indirect right (to
vote for representatives).
The economics of communication
There is always a tendency for economic
conditions to constrain formal rights.
The commodification of information has
spread like a cancer since the 1970s and takes
many forms. Universities charge students
between £1000 and £10,000 per year depend-
ing on the level, the subject and the student’s
national origins. The government mapping
and statistical services charge high prices for
their ‘products’. Real estate data is gathered
by the squirrels of the private sector (mostly
chartered surveyors) and it becomes part of
their capital—at the expense of market effi-
ciency. We could multiply the examples. The
development of the internet has been, on the
one hand, aided by the strong computer
 EDWARDS : PLA NN IN G
culture initiated by the BBC 20 years ago but
also inhibited by the lack of un-metered
telephone calls (crucial to the US leadership
in this field) and by the extremely short-
sighted attitudes of successive governments
to the need for high bandwidth cabling to
homes and schools. In London the research
and intelligence unit of the former GLC
became a quasi-autonomous body when the
GLC was abolished in 1986 and has sup-
ported itself from its income until absorbed
into the new Greater London Authority in
2000. Thus it has been charging for its
services in disseminating statistical data and
in this way contributed to the very poor
dissemination of information in the city.
An equally important economic dimension
relates to the ‘public participation’ mecha-
nisms described above. To participate is
costly. For citizens to make effective repre-
sentations about the management or plan-
ning of their areas requires time and money.
To sustain these positions through the formal
procedures—especially the public inqui-
ries—costs even more. The recent record is
the inquiry into the proposed construction of
a fifth Terminal at Heathrow Airport which
closed after five years, 12 days of hearings
with dozens of advocates and experts
involved every day. Every one of the 32
London Boroughs has adopted a Unitary
Development Plan (and is expected to pro-
duce a revision within five years), with public
inquiries which have lasted from a few days
to a few months (Parkes et al., 1999). Public
inquiries into individual development pro-
posals number tens of thousands in the UK
each year, thousands in London, with a
duration ranging from a few hours to many
weeks. Meetings are almost always held
during the working day. Citizens and citizen
groups need massive resources of time, tech-
nical knowledge and skill (or money) to
sustain their positions in these conditions.
The last few years have seen an interesting
paradox: in a partial retreat from the
extremes of Thatcherist de-regulation, a new
Act of 1991 insisted that approved develop-
ment plans would once again become the
A N D C O M M U NIC ATIO N IN LO N DO N 93
main determinant of whether planning per-
mission would be granted on individual
projects. Excellent. But it meant that those
with land and property interests began to
take the formulation of plans very seriously,
sending their experts and lawyers to the
development plan inquiries to protect their
interests in detail. This has had the para-
doxical effect of increasing the duration and
cost of the inquiries for everyone—including
citizen groups.
The significance of all this is that rights
may exist but it is costly to exercise them.
And in a society with unequal and polarizing
income and wealth this means that rights are
mainly for the rich.
No legal aid is available to fight planning
cases. A few lawyers offer their services free
or cheaply.4 In London we also have the
London Planning Aid Service paid for by the
Royal Town Planning Institute which orga-
nizes professional planners and students to
offer voluntary expertise. The Royal Institute
of British Architects also has a ‘community
architecture’ section which tries to support
grassroots initiatives. Some universities have
contributed through the work of individual
staff or students but we have no sign of any
corporate commitment of universities to
their localities—as found in some North
American cities (Bender, 1998) or in Thessa-
loniki (Kotsakis, 1995) and elsewhere (van
der Wusten, 1998). All of these initiatives are
significant but they only scratch the surface
of the economic problem. Control of data,
formalized understanding and management
of urban processes lies essentially with capi-
tal and others have to buy their way in.
Cultural and social factors
The society is characterized by important
cultural features affecting political life and by
complex ethnic and other differences and
inequalities.
The role of political parties in the life of the
country has weakened in recent decades with
party memberships falling and with policy
94 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
increasingly being imposed by the leadership
rather than coming up through internal party
democracy. The Conservative Party moved
back towards the centre in some areas of
domestic policy after Mrs Thatcher’s dis-
placement in 1991. It retains enough right-
wing support effectively to prevent the emer-
gence of explicit fascist groups
(notwithstanding some extreme attitudes in
part of the population). The Labour Party has
been moved a long way to the right by the
Blair leadership but—so far—has retained
most of the voting support of the left (or at
least their abstention) and red/green parties
have yet to emerge significantly. A Liberal
Democratic Party also exists—traditionally a
party of the centre, but now distinctly more
radical than Labour on international, human
rights and fiscal issues—and it could become
a threat to Labour in the long run.
Popular participation in local representa-
tive politics remains weak in most areas and
party management has meant that, for most
Labour Party members, membership consists
of paying your direct debit and receiving
mail shots from Tony Blair in exchange.
The UK is known, however, for its highly
developed complex of informal resident,
tenant, issue-based and other campaigning
groups which are highly active in most
localities. It has been argued that active
members of such groups often out-number
those voting in local elections (Parkes, 1995)
and it is these groups which are most active
in local planning debates and formal public
participation processes, as well as in pressur-
ing local elected representatives.
This system has its strengths and certainly it
represents a strong body of organized local
knowledge, commitment and work. But it is
criticised for bypassing and thus further
weakening formal representative democracy,
giving disproportionate influence to knowl-
edgeable, rich and leisured strata and for
tending to local parochialism and nimbyism.
There is probably great variation in the
degree to which both the formal and the
informal politics of British planning repre-
sent ethnic and other segments of the society.
The cultural and ethnic picture is complex.
White people, mostly of UK origin, remain
dominant at 94% of the GB population
(about 77% in London). Of the 1.5 million
non-white people estimated to live among
London’s total of 7 million, about 38% are
black and 37% from south Asia (ONS,
1997). Most parts of the world seem to be
represented and there are very many mixed-
ethnicity individuals.
Certain communities are geographically
concentrated through, perhaps, a mix of
economic or religious interdependence
(Cypriots, orthodox Jews and some Pak-
istanis).5 Others tend to be clustered where
the poorest housing has been available and
this is often reinforced by exclusion mecha-
nisms in housing elsewhere (Bengalis in
Somers Town, Tower Hamlets and Newham,
some Afro-Caribbean people in numerous
estates and other clusters around the city).
Rarely, however, does any group dominate
its locality on the scale found in US cities and
a tolerant multiculturalism is still the main
experience of most Londoners, I suspect,
even though suspicion, mistrust, fear and
overt racism remain very prevalent and the
schools are often not resourced to cope.
The significance of all this is that effective
access to communication about planning
and urban issues and decisions are subject
to cultural and linguistic barriers which
probably tend to reinforce the economic
ones to a great extent. In terms of formal
communication, many agencies of central
and local government have, over the last
10–20 years, developed some adaptation to
the linguistic problem and translations of
welfare forms, information leaflets and
other documents are sometimes produced in
the languages spoken locally—notably
Gujerati, Chinese, Turkish, Urdu and
Greek. It is rare, however, for planning
documents to be translated except in very
brief form, or for interpreters to be available
in planning meetings. The more progressive
local authorities do now provide signing to
help deaf people in some meetings and
make allowance for other disabilities.
 EDWARDS : PLA NN IN G
Media and their use
What about the media used in communicat-
ing planning: the words, the plans, the
newspapers, TV, the internet?
The words are, of course, a major story in
themselves and there is no room to tell it
here. Briefly, one could say that the rather
technocratic and functionalist language of the
1970s gave way to a rather crude and raw
neo-liberal language of market demand, flex-
ibility and individual freedom in the 1980s.
The key government policy document was
‘Lifting the Burden’ (of state regulation) and
planning was to be based on the principle of
‘the market knows best’. The 1990s has been
characterized by some very imprecise domi-
nant words, ideal cover for the fragile con-
sensus-building of the period: sustainability,
partnership and (a 1980s word which lives
on) regeneration. Some very large cracks can
be papered over with such elastic words—as
we shall see.
Probably the central medium for com-
municating planning is the Plan. In Brit-
ain—as is well known and well-documen-
ted (Rydin, 1998) —the Development Plan
is a distinctive thing. It is essentially a long
text. The text often begins by setting out
some goals or aims of the planning author-
ity, or in modern parlance a vision, from
which the details of the plan are purported
to flow. There is often very little meaning
because the aims need to be both consistent
with government ‘advice’ and reflect the
priorities of the local authority. But nuan-
ces are detectable by the expert reader
amongst the apple pie, motherhood (and
sustainability).
The substance of the plan is a long
narrative, arranged under functional headings
like housing, environment, transport, shop-
ping, each leading to a series of policies.
These are the core of the Plan and the focus
of all the argument since it is these which will
influence development control. They tend to
express the desired direction of change (or
resistance to change) with little quantifica-
tion or precision. Much of the debate in
A N D C O M M U NIC ATIO N IN LO N DO N 95
public inquiries is over the degree of
precision.
Some of these policies apply to the entire
area of the plan while others apply to specific
places or designated zones or districts. The
only significant graphic is a key diagram,
coloured on a scale map-base, which shows
which policies apply to which area. There is
no attempt at visualization of the effects of
proposed changes nor at pleasing or motivat-
ing the reader. The graphic design is always
dull and the crucial policies are the least
appealing part, always being set in capital
letters. As exercises in communication they
are very poor—compared with those of the
1940s (Abercrombie etc.), the New Town
plans of the 1970s or the best European plans
of today. They are expensive to buy (costing
between £12 and about £80) and I suspect are
rarely read except professionally.
The significant paper communication is in
newspapers—for which planning stories are
a significant source of news and features.
Britain has a rich mosaic of local weekly
newspapers and some daily ones in urban
areas. These, and local radio and TV stations
carry frequent stories on transport issues,
parking, shopping policy, controversies
about conservation of heritage or country-
side and architectural styles. It is rarely
sophisticated or profound journalism but it is
plentiful and controversial. Editors seem to
think we like reading about threats to our
environment, to our house prices, to our
freedom to drive and park. Crime and the
fear of crime, especially in poor housing
areas, gets coverage too. Perhaps the editors
are right.
Urban problems can make good television
and most of the major controversies at
regional or national level are covered by
documentaries as well as news reports. The
high standards of British public service
broadcasting and of some commercial com-
missioning editors and independent pro-
ducers have been invaluable in this—though
there are strong pressures for these standards
to fall and in no sense is there any democratic
access to the production of TV. The internet
96 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
is not (yet) much used. Most local authorities
have web sites, either for marketing and
public relations or as directories of services
and responsibilities.6 Plans are beginning to
be disseminated on the web (e.g. http://
www.kingston.gov.uk/envsvcs/udp/stage_
04.html), but the web is not (yet) used
interactively as a forum for debate. So far the
web is used mainly by campaign and resident
groups to link their activities and to spread
their messages.7
There are some interesting experiments
from universities in virtual reality or map-
based representations but we have yet to see
applications as advanced as those reported by
Aurigi for Amsterdam.8
Two further dimensions of the media
used in planning discussion must be added.
First is the growing importance of market-
ing—of cities themselves and of develop-
ments, projects and localities within the
city. This is the work of the plethora of
real estate companies, private promotional
bodies and semi-state quangos which have
come to dominate urban development since
1980. These agencies use carefully targeted
media ranging from editorial space in
magazines and TV for general image-mar-
keting to lavish brochures mailed to poten-
tial customers world-wide. The prevailing
orthodoxy that prosperity of the country
depends upon attracting international foot-
loose investment has spurred heavy public
and private spending of this sort. This
brings us to the importance of architects
and their designs as a case both of the
medium and the message. We have a dis-
tinct culture here with architects playing an
increasingly cosmetic role (Ive, 1995). In
the intense struggles to develop and to
capture value in the city it is the architects
who are engaged both to cement the real
estate projects into tangible form and to
produce images which win—both in the
struggle for permission and in the struggle
for investors and occupiers. There are mod-
ern, post-modern and retro skills available,
all skilled in the production of images and
communication.
London: a story
These themes can be seen in the unfolding
story of London planning in the last 20 years.
The 1980s were characterized by highly
conflictual planning discussions. The
Thatcher government came to power in 1979
in a context of recession and committed to
radical neo-liberal reforms and a project to
weaken and circumvent the powers of elected
local government—especially in London.
In the early 1980s we saw the first of the
marketing communications of the London
Docklands Development Corporation —set
up to take over the land, planning powers
and development rights of public and private
agencies in the port. The LDDC, from the
outset, spent heavily on marketing, aiming to
attract investors and residents to waterside
environments, converted warehouses and
new houses and open spaces ready for
development. The message to developers
emphasized the benefits of minimal planning,
proximity to the City and the new tele-
communications infrastructure. The message
selling the housing tended to emphasize
planning—in the sense of urban landscape
design frameworks exploiting (or in the
Surrey Docks re-inventing) the water +
history combination (Malone, 1996; Florio
and Brownill, 2000).
The LDDC and the simultaneous weaken-
ing of planning in the rest of London met a
strong response from the GLC (Greater
London Council, the government for most of
the core metropolis inside the green belt).
The GLC both articulated resistance and
initiated its own counter strategies. There
was a strong grassroots orientation to its
‘popular planning’ which generated a mass of
manifestos, technical documents, multi-lan-
guage publications and plentiful press cov-
erage. Most remarkable perhaps were the
meetings: the GLC would frequently hold
consultations and debates with citizens
groups, women’s organizations, ethnic
minority and trade union groups in the heavy
oak-panelled splendours of the Edwardian
County Hall. The salons and anterooms
 EDWARDS : PLA NN IN G
would fill with the poor, with militants, with
black and Asian people—and always with
crèches for children, translators and signers
for the deaf. This ‘Winter Palace’ atmos-
phere, passionate but also often humorous,
enraged the right and was certainly part of a
powerful communication.
The main material actions of the GLC,
before it was abolished in 1986, were:
1 a major reduction in public transport
prices which began to reverse the switch to
cars before it was ruled improper by the
courts, and
2 strong organizational and financial sup-
port to grassroots campaigns in the work-
place and in the neighbourhoods—which
had lasting effects after abolition.
These initiatives led to some important docu-
ments—the highly innovative London Eco-
nomic Strategy and London Labour Plan,
well researched, written and designed as
highly communicative attempts to show that
there were alternatives to Thatcher’s thinking
(GLC, 1985a). Also of great importance was
the Community Areas Strategy and related
proposed modifications to the Greater Lon-
don Development Plan (GLC, 1985b). These
were the product of the work with local
groups in the areas around the centre, most
vulnerable to central business district (CBD)
expansion: Coin Street, King’s Cross, Pad-
dington, Spitalfields and so on. All these
documents were supremely well produced
and very widely distributed—cheaply or
free.
It will probably be said by future histor-
ians that the GLC’s communication strategy
and its intense interaction with parts of the
society normally outside politics had a last-
ing effect on planning and urban affairs, at
least through the rest of the decade.
In the period from 1986 the vacuum of
London planning generated a bizarre pro-
liferation of new organizations to take over
its functions from fire fighting to garbage
disposal, from cultural affairs to supporting
community groups (Ryser, 1987). This had
A N D C O M M U NIC ATIO N IN LO N DO N 97
led to very important changes in communica-
tion. For the overseas visitor (businessman,
researcher, student, study group) there was
nowhere to go to be told about London,
stand round the city model and collect
brochures. For systematic data and research
the vacuum became very severe. Part of the
GLC’s research activity became the autono-
mous London Research Centre and re-
oriented its work to servicing the 33 bor-
oughs who subscribed its main costs and to
serve a new category of commercial users. Its
dissemination work has reduced, its services
were priced and even students had to pay to
use the library. The economics team was
disbanded and since 1986 there has been no
entity working systematically on the London
or regional economy.
The partial success story of the period was
LPAC, the London Planning Advisory
Committee, reluctantly set up by govern-
ment in 1986 to ‘advise the Secretary of State’
on behalf of the 33 boroughs which now
became the only planning authorities, each
combining ‘strategic’ (!) and local functions.
LPAC was widely expected to be paralysed
by political disagreements among the 33,
reinforced by its initial marginalization in
Romford, an eastern working-class periphery
beyond the London telephone area and the
Underground. Somehow, however, the Bor-
ough politicians and the officials held it
together and it became quite a powerful
force, voicing a surprisingly critical con-
sensus privately to government and publicly
to Londoners. Its communicative influence
had been out of all proportion to its tiny staff
and to its publications (hard to get and no
pleasure to read).
LPAC documents, like most official UK
planning documents, were essentially text,
occasionally enlivened by charts. Many of
LPAC’s reports contain only one map: the
London Strategic Diagram. This was a
graphic of compromise—a sketchy diagram
showing the approximate location of con-
sensus proposals: the green belt of course,
primary axes or areas for development and
so on. It also embodied a fantasy, however,
98 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
showing a set of shopping centres one of
which was required by every Borough —
normally one close to the centroid of its
arbitrary territory. For fear of trespassing
on the competence of Boroughs for devel-
opment planning, the LPAC scheme was
also unable to indicate the concrete config-
uration of transport lines, development
zones and opportunities which could make
London work much better. The diagram
both reflected and reinforced the inability of
this committee structure to engage politi-
cally or creatively with the spatial planning
of the metropolis.
The other important planning communica-
tions in the later 1980s were from the
community action and local movements,
now operating without GLC funding. These
groups, with their various campaigns (on
housing estates, transport, defending local-
ities from the property boom of the late
1980s) were often adept at communication,
capturing press and TV coverage, aided by
some creative use of ‘planning-for-real’ and
some actual alternative plans (Parkes, 1991).
One outstanding case was the Coin Street
project where local groups were able to take
actual ownership of land in the last days of
the GLC and use revenues from car parking
on empty land to finance work on their
alternative plan and for a significant infor-
mation campaign based on the slogan ‘There
is another way’ (Brindley et al., 1989;
Edwards, 1994). No other grouping was
able to capture land ownership or such a
resource flow. However, the King’s Cross
Railway Lands Group was able to mount
alternative plans, give the local politicians in
Camden Council added confidence and evi-
dence to resist giving a quick decision to
developers of an office city designed by
Foster Associates—and thus to delay the
project until the property boom crashed.
This kind of highly effective communication
involved continuing negotiation and hag-
gling among local politicians and activists,
some financial support from Camden, from
the Royal Institute of British Architects
(RIBA) and local private interests and mate-
rial inputs from the author of this article
and students of the University of London
Bartlett School.
Many of these experiences are chronicled
by Michael Parkes, the planner who has done
most to give technical support in these
conditions (Parkes, 1995).
Starting in the late 1980s and continuing
into the 1990s has been a further growth in
communication as marketing. This activity
was fuelled by the consensus view—
scarcely challenged —that the future of
London depended on its success in (an ill-
defined) global competition aimed at visi-
tors and foreign investors (Edwards and
Budd, 1997). That consensus fitted well
with the wider assumption that the pros-
perity of Britain depended on the uncon-
strained growth of London. (Lipietz (1995)
has explained and criticized an identical set
of assumptions prevailing in Paris.) The
LDDC had set the tone for this work in
the early 1980s but it grew and proliferated
as a variety of London-wide, sub-regional
and local agencies were set up to sell their
territories. This was not about planning but
it was about the city and its parts and
sometimes architectural images and schemes
have been part of the message.
Since the early 1990s we have had a re-
orientation of government policy towards a
regime of competition between localities
for a limited fund of public money. This
competition is managed by a Government
Office for each region, bringing together
civil servants from various ministries in an
unprecedented attempt at co-ordination,
sometimes compared with the office of the
Prefect in France. In London we have the
Government Office for London (GOL).
These offices operate with all the usual
secrecy of government ministries and the
process of competition between localities is
based on bids by locally constituted ‘part-
nerships’ of private, public and non-profit
bodies. These bodies are constituted as pri-
vate companies and the significance of this
for communication is that —while they per-
form important public policy functions—
 EDWARDS : PLA NN IN G
they are free to operate in the private way
characteristic of other firms.
This retreat of public decision into private
confidentiality has also been a feature of
negotiation about development permits
throughout the city. Increasingly through the
1980s and 1990s local authorities have tried
to negotiate ‘planning agreements’ with
developers alongside the grant of permission.
These agreements are a matter of confidential
bargaining and thus not open to public
scrutiny.
In all these respects it could be said that
communication about planning in London
has been increasingly shrouded in privacy
and confidentiality, reinforced by the eco-
nomic problems of access to information.
News about the city and about planning has
been increasingly ‘managed’ by government,
private and semi-private bodies.
But we now have a new situation: since
June 2000 London has had a directly elec-
ted Mayor and (for the first time since
1986) an elected Assembly. The mayor has
the duty to prepare strategies for the econ-
omy, for the environment, for transport,
for culture and for ‘spatial development’.
All this offers an opportunity for a remark-
able new opening in democratic commu-
nication about London and its problems. In
the early months of this new system, how-
ever, the signs are that politicians and inter-
est groups are busy forming essentially pri-
vate agendas to put before the Mayor and
that the offices of the new organizations
have been staffed largely by the same peo-
ple who did the work before. Ensuring that
this new regime becomes really a demo-
cratic one, and that communication opens
up, is a great challenge. The danger is that
communication could be even more cen-
trally managed.
In particular, it appears that the various
strategies, as they appear in their draft
forms during the year 2001, will constitute
pre-digested compromises rather than set-
ting out the crucial choices which Lon-
doners confront. Some of the key choices
are:
A N D C O M M U NIC ATIO N IN LO N DO N 99
1 In the economy, between passive accep-
tance of the corporate orthodoxy that
everything must give way to global com-
petition and a drive to raise the quality of
work and the equality of access to it (see
Doreen Massey in this issue of City );
2 On transport, whether to put massive
resources into regional metro systems
which would help central employers and
commuters in the outer suburbs or con-
centrate instead on orbital transport routes
and on the buses, used mainly by the poor
and for most suburban public transport
trips (Edwards, 2000); there is also, of
course, the high-profile question of
whether to accept any degree of privatiza-
tion of the Underground;
3 The spatial development strategy will (or
at least should) pose the key question of
whether to continue the excessive central-
ization of London or refocus development
into the suburbs, especially in the poorer
east.
Notes
1 I am very grateful to Giorgio Piccinato for asking
me to think about this, and to Antonia Layard for
comments on juridical issues—but the responsibility
for the text is mine alone. An earlier version of this
paper was published in Italian (in 2000) as
‘Pianificazione e comunicazione a Londra’, in G.
Caudo and A. Palazzo (eds) Comunicare
l’urbanistica, pp. 39–51. Firenze: Alinea Edizioni.
2 Offer (1981) and McMahon (1985).
3 The last leader of the GLC chose carefully in titling
his autobiography: If Voting Changed Anything
they’d Abolish it (Livingstone, 1987).
4 David Harter is an example of a lawyer who has
done this—in his support for the King’s Cross
Railway Lands Group and related bodies. Jeffrey
Jowell is an example of a barrister (advocate) who
has also assisted. Many radical lawyers do this kind
of work on a modest scale. The Environmental Law
Foundation assists with environmental cases.
5 See the chapter by Malcolm Cross on ethnic
minorities in Thornley (1992).
6 A good example is Hackney,
http://www.hackney.gov.uk
7 The Land is Ours is a good example, with links to
many others, http://www.oneworld.org/tlio/
8 http://www.dds.nl (Aurigi and Graham, 2000).
100 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
References
Aurigi, A. and Graham, S. (2000) ‘Cyberspace and the
city: the virtual city in Europe’, in S. Watson and
G. Bridge (eds) A Companion to the City, pp.
489–502. Oxford: Blackwell,.
Bender, T. (1998) ‘Scholarship, local life and the
necessity of worldliness’, in H. van der Wusten
(ed.) The Urban University and its Identity: Roots,
Location, Roles. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Brindley, T., Rydin, Y. and Stoker, G. (1989) Remaking
Planning: The Politics of Urban Change in the
Thatcher Years. London: Unwin Hyman.
Edwards, M. (1994) ‘Developments at King’s Cross and
Coin Street: community alternatives’, Regenerating
Cities 6, pp. 34–37.
Edwards, M. (2000) ‘Towards a joined-up London’,
Planning in London 32 (Jan–Mar), pp. 41–42.
Edwards, M. and Budd, L. (1997) ‘Confirming
conforming conventions’, City 7, pp. 171–181.
Florio, S. and Brownill, S. (2000) ‘Whatever happened
to criticism? Interpreting the LDDC’s obituary’, City
4, pp. 53–64.
GLC (Greater London Council) (1985a) London
Industrial Strategy. London: GLC.
GLC (1985b) Community Areas Policy: A Record of
Achievement. London: GLC.
Ive, G. (1995) ‘Commercial architecture in 1980s
London: value engineering or conspicuous
investment’, in I. Borden and D. Dunster (eds)
Architecture and the Sites of History: Interpretations
of Buildings and Cities, pp. 372–386. London:
Butterworth.
Kotsakis, D. (1995) Open School of Technology: A
Statement. Thessaloniki: Aristotelian University.
Lipietz, A. (1995) Avoiding megapolization: the battle
of Ile-de-France, European Planning Studies 3, pp.
143–154.
Livingstone, K. (1987) If Voting Changed Anything
they’d Abolish it. London: Collins.
Malone, P. (ed.) (1996) City, Capital and Water.
London: Routledge.
McMahon, M. (1985) ‘The law of the land: property
rights and town planning in modern Britain’, in M.
J. Ball, V. Bentivegna, M. Edwards and M. Folin
(eds) Land Rent, Housing and Urban Planning: A
European Perspective, pp. 87–106. London: Croom
Helm.
Offer, A. (1981) Property and Politics, 1870–1914.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ONS (1997) Regional Trends. London: HMSO.
Parkes, M. (1991) Kings Cross Railway Lands: Towards
a People’s Plan. London: KXRLG.
Parkes, M. (1995) Good Practice Guide to Community
Planning and Development. LPAC.
Parkes, M., Mythen, E. and Dobson-Mouawad, D.
(1999) Your Plan, Your Future: Getting to Grips
with your UDP and its Review. London: Docklands
Forum.
Rydin, Y. (1998) Urban and Environmental Planning in
the UK. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Ryser, J. (1987) Transformations dans la gestion urbaine
et mutations institutionnelles: le cas de l’abolition
du Conseil du Grand Londres. Paris: MELATT.
Thornley, A. (ed.) (1992) The Crisis of London. London:
Routledge.
van der Wusten, H. (ed.) (1998) The Urban University
and its Identity: Roots, Location, Roles. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Readers wishing to follow developments can
make use of the new Greater London
Authority’s website http://www.london.go-
v.uk and City will ensure that links to key
documents and debates are available in its
online sister publication Urban and Regional
Regeneration Bulletin http://www.ncl.ac.uk/
curds/urrb/
Michael Edwards is in the Planning Depart-
ment of the Bartlett School, University Col-
lege London, UK. http://www.bartlett.ucl.a-
c.uk/staff/edwards.htm
 MA SSEY: OPPO RTUN ITIES FO R A WO R LD CITY 101

Opportunities for a World City

Reflections on the draft economic
development and regeneration strategy for
London

Doreen Massey

Before Margaret Thatcher abolished it in 1986, the Greater London Council did some of
its most creative work in re-thinking what an urban economy is, how it can be
conceptualized and transformed in the interests of labour. Its London Industrial Strategy
and London Labour Plan of 1985 are still read around the world as pioneering exercises in
economic democracy. In the subsequent 15 years London has had no democratic city-wide
government and the vacuum was only partly filled by a series of self-appointed experts,
bodies and campaigns. These were mostly dominated by business interests—indeed by
major corporate interests in the City of London and the real estate sector. Some of the issues
were discussed by Leslie Budd and Michael Edwards in their article ‘Confirming
conforming conventions’ in City number 7 1997 and by Will Hutton ‘What does the City
do for London?’ in our predecessor Regenerating Cities number 7 1995. The Labour
government of Tony Blair developed a scheme to create non-elected ‘Regional Develop-
ment Agencies’ across England except that in the case of London this was to be fitted in as
one of the agencies making up the new Greater London Authority. In the meantime an
interim non-elected agency The London Development Partnership was set up as a shadow
body to prepare the ground. Its reports were handed over to the new Authority when it was
created in 2000. The London Development Agency (LDA) was thus able to publish a draft
strategy document1 in November 2000: the subject of Doreen Massey’s comments below.

F
or a whole host of reasons we should
begin by welcoming this draft strat-
egy.2 It has been produced quickly
and with the genuine intent that it
should be the focus of debate and sub-
sequent alteration. It is also a million
miles away from much that we have
witnessed in recent years. Its intent is to
be inclusive, to consider London as a
whole, to make serious moves towards
redistribution and sustainability. The
arguments that follow must be read
against that background. I want to argue
that the strategy could easily be more
innovative and path breaking than it
currently is.
Some very simple thoughts lie at the
heart of my case. London is a World City,
by almost everyone’s reckoning one of the
three in the world through which most
economic power is articulated. Moreover,
over recent years much research has been
done on the structures of the economies
and societies of these cities. We know quite
a lot about them. The opportunity to
produce a serious strategy for one of them
(however limited the associated powers) is
therefore a significant occasion.
102 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
In its present draft state the strategy is a
sequence of nine rather separate chapters,
each addressing different issues, the recom-
mendations from which are then added
together in a final, tenth, chapter. There is
much that is of interest here but what it
misses, crucially, is any serious consideration
of the shape of the whole. And it is the
structure of the whole which, in World
Cities, is problematical.
There are three crucial points. First, that
there are tensions within that structure which
must be addressed. Second, that the aggregate
wealth of the city must (be made to) provide
opportunities for serious redistribution.
Third, that rather than simply adding up all
the different recommendations there is a
serious need for priorities. Not to address the
tensions, or to fail to prioritize some parts of
the economy over others, would be to fail to
make political choices.
Tensions
The key tension at the heart of London (and
of other World Cities) is that it is enor-
mously “successful” and yet riven by pov-
erty and inequality. That suggests a number
of things:
1 First, it suggests that we might pause to
think about what is meant by “success”.
2 Second, it implies that the kind of growth
which has produced this result might have
to be questioned. Clearly it makes no sense
to go on promoting “growth” in the same
way. “Growth” can take different forms.
3 Third, and perhaps most significantly, it
points to the structural fact that much of
the growth which has been successful
(finance, professional services, elements of
tourism, the media industries—in other
words much of what is seen as forming
the core of London’s World City status)
actually places constraints on, and pre-
sents obstacles to, growth—sometimes
even survival—in other parts of the
economy.
In other words, there is a contradiction at the
heart of this economy/society which needs to
be addressed head on. Nor can it be
addressed by living in hope that, eventually,
everyone will be drawn into these World
City sectors. If Londoners all worked in the
City or were busying themselves in the so-
called “creative” industries, then who would
empty the dustbins, nurse the sick and
provide those endless services and manu-
factured goods that a city needs to survive?
The effects of the expansion of finance,
professional services and suchlike on the rest
of the urban economy are now well docu-
mented. There are benign and positive
effects, of course, but there are also, after a
certain point, troubling tensions. London’s
manufacturing has suffered from the rise in
land prices. The land market forces out
otherwise profitable sectors, and has had
serious spatial effects. In a whole range of
elements of the city economy, but perhaps
most noticeably transport, there are real
capacity problems. The extremely high sala-
ries in parts of World City sectors produces a
city (and city-region) with a greater degree of
economic inequality than anywhere else in
the country, and the knock-on effect on, for
instance, house prices and rental levels
(together with government policy on public-
sector wages) leads to a real difficulty in
sustaining a public sector.
There is, in other words, a real tension at
the heart of this World City model of
growth.
Now, it is to the great credit of the new
London strategy that many of these struc-
tural tensions are noted (I counted 14 men-
tions), but what the document does not yet
do is draw out the implications. My argu-
ment is (1) that not to address them is to fail
to address a central political issue and (2) that
the very wealth of the city overall provides
an opportunity to do so.
Implications
A first and broad policy implication must be
that there is no point in expending a lot of

energy supporting this growth further. This
does not imply acting against it (though see
below); it does mean that limited public
sector resources in all senses should be
focused elsewhere than on the World City
industries themselves.
Second, London really must be thought
about also in the context of the UK as a
whole. All the government’s arguments
about “greater inequalities within regions
than between” amount to nothing because
they do not address the dynamics of the
situation. The dynamics in London are
immeasurably different from those in other
cities. Moreover, a good bit of the poverty in
London is produced and exacerbated pre-
cisely as a consequence of the concentration
there of a particular World City set of
sectors. If there is a problem region in the
UK then it is the South East. Simply to
provide help for “hot spot” public sector
workers (though maybe necessary in the
immediate term) is actually to fan the flames.
What is needed is a longer-term structural
decentralization of the economy. It has been
remarked by a number of scholars that while
the economic problems in cities other than
London is one of regeneration, in London it
is more one of redistribution. I would add to
that that the redistribution needs to be both
within London (see below) and between
London and other city regions. London
needs there to be a strong regional policy, but
a regional policy which focuses on precisely
those sectors (including government depart-
ments, headquarters, and so forth) which are
producing the tensions within the city itself.
A number of the present difficulties of
London and Londoners could be eased were
the UK economy to be more evenly spread
between its regions.
Third, and given all of that, addressing the
tensions in the London economy while at the
same time trading on the opportunities
offered by the city’s immense wealth, must
imply that the priorities of an economic
strategy for London, and the shape of its
strategic vision, should focus around “the
other sides” of the economy (and thereby
MA SSEY: OPPO RTUN ITIES FO R A WO R LD CITY 103
society). The present document talks encour-
agingly of “a holistic view”. This cannot
mean another “Big Tent” in which the
already-powerful benefit yet more. In prac-
tice, it will have to mean concentrating
attention and resources fully on those parts
of capital and labour which are presently
either excluded from the “success” or actu-
ally suffer its side-effects.
Recommendations
There is much in this strategy document
already, but the following recommendations
would begin to address the arguments just
laid out. They are not utopian; many of them
are quite small; they are all practical—any
difficulties facing them will be political.
1 There should be an overall emphasis on
redistribution, both socially and spatially.
“Redistribution”, moreover, should not
just be post hoc. It should involve a
readjustment of the functioning of the
economy.
2 Support should focus on “the other” sides
of the economy: social enterprises, small-
and medium-sized enterprises in particular
sectors (possibly manufacturing, though
this is a bigger issue), ethnic minority and
women-owned businesses.
3 There should be reciprocity. If help and
advice is given to firms then they should be
required to reciprocate for labour and for
Londoners. (A significant refrain in central
government’s mantra, after all, is about
responsibility. This is all that “reciprocity”
is asking from business.) Thus:
d in the case of small/medium firms it
should be required that they achieve
required standards on wages and condi-
tions, equality, lack of discrimination;
d in the case of large firms, ditto, plus
other initiatives to demonstrate their
integration into, and commitment to,
London as a society. (An example
around local schools is given in the
104 CITY VO L . 5 NO . 1
document (p. 44 section 4.2). Many
more initiatives could be imagined and
encouraged. And firms could score
brownie points—a logo “Working for
London”?!—for participation.)
4 At present the strategy is bulging with a
myriad of bodies and initiatives for “busi-
ness”. Perhaps there could be an equivalent
range for labour?
5 London is a “World City”, a focus of some
of the most powerful networks of global-
ization in its current form. But global-
ization can take many forms. There is, for
instance, an emerging movement (suitably
international) exploring the possibilities of
“globalization from below”. This might
include such things as:
d aiding ethnic minority firms with their
international links;
d providing resources and facilities for
international links between trades
unions;
d actively encouraging, for instance, fair
trade organizations;
d promoting public debate on London’s
place within current globalization, and
on how we might address the inequal-
ities it is currently producing.
6 There could be projects to get London’s
success to work for all of London. There is
an excellent example in the current draft
(Chapter 1) which talks of encouraging the
City to establish bodies to promote more
sustainable and egalitarian forms of
investment.
7 There could be more attempt to enter the
policy arena of economic democracy. It is
now frequently pointed out that the major
democratic contest of the 21st century will
be to address the power of major corpora-
tions. Every opportunity needs to be taken
to begin to work out how this is to be
done. Strategic plans for World Cities are
one such arena.
8 Finally, towards the end of the present
document there are “Benchmarks”: a set of
measures by which the progress of Lon-
don as a successful city should be judged.
At present they include nothing which
refers directly to labour or to equality.
They should.
All I have been doing here is drawing out
from recent research some policy implica-
tions for the present document. It suggests
that London could put itself on the map in
yet another way by becoming a World City
which addresses in a progressive manner the
tensions and the opportunities inherent in
that very status.
Notes
1 This article is based on a talk at a meeting of
SERTUC (The TUC in London, the South East and
Eastern Region) organized through LURN (London
Union Research Network). For details of LURN
contact Jane Wills at J.Wills@qmw.ac.uk
2 The report introduces itself as follows:
The creation of the post of Mayor of London restored
democratic self-government for the city and the new
London institutions have economic development and
wealth creation as one of their key objectives. There
is now a unique opportunity to establish a new
consensus on the economic agenda for London. The
London Development Agency is the economic
development arm of the new London institutions. With
a business-led Board, its initial task is to draw up a
strategy. This will be one of the Mayor’s eight London
Strategies, which together will lay out a blueprint for
the future of the city. The other statutory strategies
cover spatial development; transport; culture; ambient
noise; air quality; waste management; and
biodiversity.
Mission
The mission of the London Development Agency
(LDA), working with the Mayor, business and the
community, voluntary, and public sectors, is therefore:
d to develop and enhance London as a world centre
for business
d to ensure that London’s strengths are used to
promote the regeneration of its disadvantaged
communities
d to ensure that economic opportunity is open to all
London citizens
d to ensure that London’s development is socially,
economically and environmentally sustainable.

The members appointed to the London Development
Agency (as at April 2001) were:
Victor Anderson–elected Assembly member (Green
Party)
George Barlow (chair)–chief executive of the
Peabody Trust, a non-profit housing agency founded
in the 19th century and now again very active.
Honor Chapman (vice-chair) International Director of
Jones Lang LaSalle. Non-executive director of Legal
and General Group plc and a Commissioner of the
Crown Estates.
Mick Connolly–secretary of the South East Regional
TUC (SERTUC)
Len Duvall–elected Assembly member (Labour Party)
Michael Frye–businessman
Tamara Ingram–Chief Executive, Saatchi and Saatchi
George Kessler–businessman
Judith Mayhew–leader of the Policy Committee of the
City of London Corporation and a member of the
Mayor’s cabinet
Kumar Murshid - a member of the Mayor’s cabinet
Lord Paul–businessman
Andrew Pelling–elected Assembly member
(Conservative Party)
MA SSEY: OPPO RTUN ITIES FO R A WO R LD CITY 105
Sally Powell–a London Borough councillor, deputy
chair of the Association of London Government–the
body representing London 33 Borough councils.
Mary Reilly–head of the ‘outsourcing unit’ of Arthur
Andersen and a member of the london regional
committee of the Confederation of British Industry
(CBI)
Yvonne Thompson–director of ASAP Communications
Lts, Choice FM Radio in London, president of the
European Federation of Black Women Business
Owners.
The chief executive is Michael Ward.
A special issue of City’s electronic sister publication is
devoted to debates and discussion on the London
strategies:
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/planning/news/sds/
and the Strategies themselves may all be found at
the GLA site:
http://www.london.gov.uk
Doreen Massey is Professor of Geography at
the Open University, UK.