Property News · January 9, 2017

How a design for city living went wrong | Letters


Re your article (We need spaces to live but we also need places to make things, 7 January): twenty years ago Richard Rogers’ Towards an Urban Renaissance put sustainability at the core of a vision of compact cities where people worked, rested and played with minimum car use. Residential densification of central London and other large English cities would be delivered through regeneration and the judicious imposition of tall buildings. The result was a tall building frenzy driven by international capital, with many central London flats used as vacant safety deposit boxes. Meanwhile, a new population was sucked in to join Londoners who no longer wished to leave the thriving capital, and the housing crisis deepened.In desperation, successive mayors have identified over 40 “opportunity areas” for intensive housebuilding, involving a land grab of thousands of hectares. Unfortunately these are all key industrial areas where the nuts and bolts of the city are manufactured and many thousands of Londoners employed. For example, one company in the Vauxhall “opportunity area” – employing 100 “low skill” workers who live close by and work through the night preparing raw fish to supply many West End restaurants – is threatened with yet another tall speculative residential building. In the name of sustainability, we are building a city where ordinary people have nowhere to live and nowhere to work.Michael BallReclaim London Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…How a design for city living went wrong | Letters

You may also like...