"Towered cities please us then": the urban future after the pandemic
We are an urban society, and cities will drive our growth, prosperity and sustainability
We became an urban society in the middle of the 19th century. In the census of 1851, the population for the first time, by only a few tens of thousands, was greater in the towns and cities than it was in the countryside. It was an inexorable trend, and we now divide roughly 85/15 on urban/rural lines. It began with the Industrial Revolution, of course, as places like Manchester, Glasgow and, above all, London sucked in workers and their families from the surrounding villages and hamlets to serve the growth of factories.
It was a development in which the UK led the world, and now, as we face the 2020s and beyond, faced as we are with a society shaken by Covid-19 and the pressing dangers of climate change, we must find our salvation and our renewed growth in the urban environment. I wrote recently of the way in which I have become more and more fascinated by city development, and listed articles I have written over the past year on the subject. Urbanism provides so much scope for innovation and creative thought, and there are brilliant minds dedicated to making our settlements not merely more prosperous but more sustainable and, for want of a more specific term, better.
It is also a crowded field. In the capital, the work of the Centre for London, UCL’s Urban Laboratory and LSE Cities is always worth reading; more broadly, the Centre for Cities, Bristol’s Centre for Urban and Public Policy Research, the Manhattan Institute and Bloomberg’s CityLab produce policy ideas on a daily basis. It can sometimes seem difficult to keep up, but it should encourage us that so much work, so much intensive research and thought is being carried out into our urban future.
The city is a microcosm of society. It can be approached from any number of directions: housing, policing and crime, transportation, the retail sector, financial services, trade, manufacturing, sustainability, renewable energy. For anyone with a background in government or legislative affairs, it is perhaps the ultimate cross-cutting field, drawing in—in the UK—at least the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Department for Transport, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department for Education, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and, of course, the Treasury. Beyond Whitehall, there are layers of local government with which to contend, from the elected mayors of London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and elsewhere to individual wards and their representatives.
Tying these policy areas together can be impossibly daunting, and many, like those entering Dante’s Inferno, abandon all hope. But our world is utterly interconnected, and is becoming more so. While that makes policy-making more difficult and complex, it also opens up huge possibilities and allows the imaginative to create connections and virtuous circles.
Take health, for example. In London, there are 18 acute trusts, 16 community, mental health and specialist trusts and five clinical commissioning groups. If you run a hospital, you have to consider not simply the basic clinical care which you provide, but also workforce planning, social care, the demographics of your catchment area, transport links, funding and finances, professional accreditations, immigration policy and the needs of your physical estate. That touches on the policies of at least half a dozen government departments. You will also have to interact with the mayor and the Greater London Authority, your local borough(s), the health and care partnership and NHS England.
There is also a pincer movement of authority and responsibility. Co-ordination is key to progress, and that imposes a top-down desire to bring all the different authorities together and make sure their policies and priorities are aligned and coherent; equally success is impossible without the support and engagement of local communities, volunteer groups and charities, which often operate at a micro level (and can be all the more effective for it).
Perhaps in an ideal world we would have grand integrated strategies for our cities, presided over by benevolent dictators which would get things done. But in a democracy that is impossible, and so we are thrown back on the messy compromises of give-and-take, of committees and steering groups, of joint projects and working hand-in-hand with others.
I think from childhood I had something of the urban autocrat in me: Lego and, later, Sim City whetted my appetite for large-scale plans and grand prôjets. It is a quality—a weakness, perhaps?—I share with some politicians, from Michael Heseltine and his Merseyside task force to Boris Johnson and his Thames Hub Airport, known, with varying degrees of affection, as “Boris Island”. Like politicians, I am instinctively attracted by these ‘big bang’ projects, bringing together decision-makers from a. number of fields and departments; and they have a certain clout, able to act quickly and decisively to solve specific problems.
As a ‘small state’ conservative, however, I am also drawn to the involvement of the private sector and civil society, using government’s convening power to achieve efficient and innovative solutions with the creative and economic power of business, finance and the third sector. They offer not just innovation but the potential, in terms of the balance sheet, of getting ‘something for nothing’, taking on challenges without the blunt instrument of lavish state spending.
It is, as I say, a pincer movement. There must be a guiding vision, a plan at the macro level, but that may involve a thousand micro activities achieving incremental change and improvement.
Ultimately, of course, one must be ruthlessly focused on outcomes. The purpose of urban policy is to make life better for our city-dwellers, whether economically, culturally or psychologically. In that vein, therefore, I have identified four areas in which we could do something to improve the urban landscape as we face our new future.
1) Leadership
We like to look back to a late Victorian golden age of civic government, when cities were dominated by powerful, identifiable local bosses and city corporations. Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham is a shining example: as mayor, he brought together the gas supply under city control, cleared many of the worst slums and built the aptly named Corporation Street where they had once stood, engaged public and private money to develop Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and built the new Council House and Victoria Law Courts. It made his name and he moved from the local to the national stage, based on the success of what his biographer called “a model of "gas-and-water" or municipal socialism widely admired in the industrial world”.
In recent decades, this kind of dynamic city leadership has been in decline. Outside London, how many of you can name your mayor or council leader? If you can name them—and well done if you can—how much do you know about them, what their priorities are, what they’ve achieved? I’m willing to bet the number is small.
Partly this is a function of the undeclared war which the Conservative government of the 1980s waged on local government. Councils, often Labour-dominated and sometimes militantly so, were seen as the enemy, and it was a purely political move which saw Thatcher abolish the GLC in 1986, leaving the capital without a single strategic body for nearly 15 years. For her, the GLC and its headline-grabbing leader, Ken Livingstone, were an irritant and an embarrassment, an obvious focus of opposition just across the river from parliament in the old County Hall. She forgot, or didn’t care, that two of Red Ken’s four predecessors had been Conservatives. Instead the impetus of her administration was a centralising one, accreting power to the man from the ministry and stripping local government of power.
Whitehall is ill-equipped to govern the UK on such a regional level. However, the Greater London Authority Act 1999 and the Localism Act 2011 have created a number of directly elected civic leaders, not just in the capital but also in large cities like Manchester and Liverpool, and combined local authorities like the West Midlands and Tees Valley. The London mayoralty was a creation of Tony Blair (and Thatcher’s nemesis, Ken Livingstone, was the first office-holder from 2000 to 2008) but it was David Cameron who adopted the spirit of localism more broadly, after lobbying by the IPPR and the Bow Group.
Elected mayors have altered the centre of gravity for local government. The mayor of London is almost ex officio a national figure, holding the largest individual electoral mandate in the UK (Sadiq Khan received first preferences from more than a million voters in May), but other mayors have become recognisable political operators, such as Andy Burnham, a former MP and cabinet minister, in Greater Manchester, and Ben Houchen, the local Tory star, in Tees Valley (where he collected an astonishing 70% of the votes cast).
Why is this good? The advantages were those identified by Cameron when leader of the opposition. Their recognition gives them accountability: people know who is in charge in their city or urban area, and can vote for or against them every four years. They can also, in Cameron’s words, “galvanise action”, cheerleading for local projects like Houchen’s championing of the revived Teesside Airport, and using their formal authority and convening power to effect real economic change, like Andy Street attracting the development of a gigafactory for electric batteries in Coventry.
It may be ironic, in a post-Brexit world, but the principle of subsidiarity so beloved of the European Union, whereby decision-making is devolved to the lowest practical level, has much to commend it. Mayors by definition know their local areas. Unlike itinerant cabinet ministers, they live or die, politically, on their success as champions and leaders, and the recent local elections saw the truth of that in action, as Houchen, Street and Burnham were endorsed by their electorates.
This is clearly a success story on which we should build. Local politicians striving for progress for their communities, and creating power bases and reputations on that progress, gives cities prominent, accountable leaders, responsive to their needs. It also diversifies our political system, with careers being made not only in the House of Commons and ministerial office in London, but in city halls and council chambers.
Extending mayoral powers and creating more posts is an act of faith for Whitehall, because it inevitably involves giving up some control. While some departments will gratefully slough off some responsibilities to local leaders, the new mayors may not be drawn from the party in power at Westminster. Indeed, psephological trends being what they are, mayoral elections may often go the way of the opposition, as a handy way for voters to warn or punish the national government. But it must be done. Not only will it improve decision-making, it will give our cities a renewed sense of self and purpose, a greater degree of civic pride, and that is something we desperately need.
2) Reviving the high street
Anyone with an interest in retail will be familiar with the sorry story of decline which has afflicted our high streets in recent years. Online shopping has eaten into the profits of bricks-and-mortar stores, a trend which the pandemic and the restrictions it brought has only accelerated. Before Covid-19, online sales accounted for about 25% of all retail—less than people tended to think—but that has increased to 35% thanks to lockdown, and in some sectors the figure is even higher; 55% of clothing and footwear sales are now conducted over the internet.
The effects have been obvious. Department stores are in deep decline, as witnessed by the fate of some of our most familiar and beloved names; Littlewoods stores closed in 2004, House of Fraser went into administration in 2018 with the loss of many outlets, and Debenhams closed its doors in May 2021.
The government is alive to this decline. In 2019, it created the High Streets Task Force, a body run by the Institute of Place Management and consisting of experts from the public, private and community sectors tasked with “providing information, advice, training, knowledge and data—helping people to make a positive difference to their local communities”. Its chair is Mark Robinson, a retail and property entrepreneur, and the executive director is the long-time co-chair of the IPM, Simon Quin.
The mission of the High Streets Task Force is to provide tailored support for individual high streets. And there is serious funding behind this: the Future High Streets Fund currently stands at about £1 billion, of which a quarter has already been allocated to fifteen areas. There is an understanding that reviving the high street will not come without investment, and the taps are currently open at the Treasury, the generously spending chancellor, Rishi Sunak, riding high on the disbursement of financial aid.
Taxpayers’ money cannot simply be used as a pool of cash to support retailers, however. The pandemic has brought a cold Darwinian wind to the retail sector, and businesses with poor offerings or uncompetitive models have failed. The department store is a case in point: quite simply, it failed to reflect the way in which consumers wanted and expected to shop, providing neither the choice nor the value for money which was necessary for survival. More fundamentally, as anyone who has been into a Debenhams or a House of Fraser in the past few years will know, they simply looked and felt stale, old-fashioned and uninviting, reduced to a kind of retailer of last resort if all other options were exhausted.
Andrew Busby, a retail expert and founder of Retail Reflections, has identified some of the problems. “Old KPIs” he says, “like sales per square foot as an example, are pretty meaningless today.” Many retailers lack imagination, and have failed to grasp that simply creating a new website or opening a new store are not enough to stand out from the crowd or offer an attractive proposition. Nor is a strong brand enough, he continues. “We know what to expect when we shop with Group A or Group B. What actually matters to us now, is convenience. Who makes it easiest for us to shop with them?”
Retailers need to focus on the customer experience. This a drum that Martin Newman, a consultant with extensive boardroom credentials, has been banging for some time. His new book, “The Power of Customer Experience”, identifies poor customer service, amplified on social media, as fatal to retail brands.
“Increasingly, customers also pay close to attention to how a business behaves. How it treats its staff, its suppliers, whether it has a true sense of purpose or not. Failure to live up to expectations will drive customers away.”
So customer-focused, technologically aware, purpose-driven retail will bring consumers back to the high street, reviving tired shopping arcades and bringing a commercial buzz to our city centres. But that will not be enough. Successful stores must be part of a wider ecosystem, one which generates growth and vitality.
High streets need to be considered as shared urban spaces, locations where people come together not simply to shop, or eat, but to convene for a range of purposes. They must serve the whole community. They must also be distinctive, shaking off the curse of clone town syndrome, dominated by identikit branches of national chains and lacking any individuality or local flavour. (For more on this problem, see “Clone Town Britain: The Survey Results on the Bland State of the Nation” by Andrew Simms, Petra Kjell and Ruth Potts.)
The high street must also be a mixed economy. Retail must be complemented by hospitality, museums and art galleries, cinemas, beauty parlours, medical and dental practices, solicitors, estate agents and banks. It must become a multi-purpose centre, because only that will give it the edge over the online shopping or out-of-town superstores, bringing people in for multiple reasons and keeping them there longer. John Lewis’s Oxford Street flagship store, for example, has obtained permission to turn nearly half of its building into offices; city centre premises like this have hugely valuable real estate and retailers can leverage some of that to provide additional income.
The final key ingredient is residential property. If some redundant or underperforming retail space can be converted for living, it will provide high-value, prime-location apartments which will then serve the retail and services among which they sit. This creates a virtuous circle. Traditionally, planning regulations have made creating such residential property difficult and expensive. The government has simplified and streamlined this process by introducing Permitted Development Rights which allow the use classes of certain types of building to change without the need for a full planning application. It has also simplified the classification of buildings, creating a broad Use Class E which can be applied to retail, services and residential, obviating the need for time-consuming applications to local planning authorities.
This could kill a number of birds with a single administrative stone. Providing residential accommodation right in the heart of cities will ease the housing shortage, allow retailers to downsize as they keep less stock on-site, and provide customers for flagging stores, all combining to create vital, thriving high streets. City leaders need to pursue this kind of development quickly and with vigour.
3) Public transport
All but the most determined of drivers accept that pushing passengers from cars to public transport, cycling or walking is a desirable objective for our cities. The benefits are various: it is better for the environment, reducing emissions, it relieves congestion and therefore journey times, and in some cases it promotes public physical health by encouraging exercise.
A regulatory approach to this is already being implemented. Some of Europe’s biggest cities, including London, Rome and Amsterdam, plan to ban internal combustion engine-powered cars from their centres by 2030 as part of a wider move to prohibit the production of such vehicles altogether. And a recent YouGov poll suggests that these measures are popular across the continent.
Legislation seems like a blunt instrument, but transport habits are difficult to change. The mode of transport you use to get around, for work and leisure, will tend to be the mode you’ll stick to, unless you have a major upheaval in your life which encourages a change in behaviour. While it might be better and more civilised to provide positive incentives for people to leave their cars at home, the heavy but sure hand of prohibition achieves the objective.
Reducing the number of cars in city centres is only part of the issue. Public transport needs to be frequent, efficient and affordable. In London, it is easy to forget in fact what an extraordinarily high base we start from: the Tube is a remarkable network compared to any other similar city, and where the Tube does not run the city is well served by buses and surface rail.
We must bear in mind that behaviours have changed radically over the past Covid-wracked 18 months. One striking development has been the adoption of cycling; it has been driven partly by the suspension of some public transport, partly by fears of infection in close-packed trains and buses, and partly to improve fitness. And bicycle manufacturers have worked to catch the mood: Brompton, the legendary manufacturer of folding bikes, created the “Wheels for Heroes” programme to provide free bicycles for emergency workers which caught the public imagination and was heavily oversubscribed.
The mayor of London has sought to move in the same direction, with Transport for London creating new cycleways across the capital and “low-traffic neighbourhoods” to provide spaces in which cycling and walking can predominate and flourish. However, this push has not been without its problems. Earlier this year, the London Taxi Drivers’ Association challenged Sadiq Khan’s Streetspace project in the High Court and won the battle to have the plans curbed.
Public transport also needs to adapt to new patterns of commuting. As employees move towards hybrid models of work, spending fewer or less regular days in the office, the economics around a season ticket become more complex. Rail companies have responded by developing carnet-style ticketing by which passengers can be multiple tickets at a discount as an alternative to a season ticket. This will allow those who anticipate travelling into work two or three times a week, say, or on demand to save money. More work needs to be done once we have a long enough period of ‘normality’ to monitor how these carnets have been used, but they embody flexibility, which is going to be the key to public transportation.
More innovative ideas have been tested elsewhere are might serve cities well. In Boston, the MBTA has offered $60 transit credits to encourage people on to public transport, the idea, proven by psychological studies, being that once commuters have tried using a new mode of transport for free, they will be inclined to stay with it once they have to start paying. Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Commission used a programme called “Try Transit” to distribute free passes through employers to achieve the same goal. While Transport for London has deep-seated financial problems, this kind of giveaway would be helpful in driving more people on to Tubes, trains and buses.
Another idea from the US is rewarding passengers for using different types of public transport by giving out loyalty points. Miami-Dade Transit has worked with Canadian firm Velocia to award “Velos” digital points for activities like using public shared bicycles or travelling at off-peak hours. The points can then be redeemed for benefits like car rental or e-scooter hire. Again, the idea is to reward and reinforce habits, in this case across the spectrum of public (i.e. non-automobile) transport, while retaining a high degree of flexibility.
Flexibility and choice are the foundations of future public transport use. If car use can be reduced, and public transport made more popular (and more efficient), the rewards for our urban centres will be huge: emissions will be significantly reduced, congestion will fall, and many of our large public spaces can be reclaimed from the car for pedestrians. One feature of the pandemic in London has been cafés spilling out on to the streets and colonising road space for tables; this has been hugely popular, and it would be tragic to see the bustle of traffic creep back into these side streets and alleys.
These innovative ideas matter now in particular because we have a post-pandemic window of opportunity to effect real behavioural change. With all kinds of habits being challenged, the future is uncertain and open to influence, but this will not remain the case forever. The window of opportunity is closing, and it is vital that cities do not miss it.
4) Working with the private sector
In the UK, public-private partnerships have a reputational problem. A significant cause of this is the memory of the Blair-era private finance initiative (PFI) projects to fund construction of schools, hospitals and other facilities. Although the first PFI agreement was carried out by the Conservative government in 1992, it was the NHS (Private Finance) Act 1997 which really turbocharged the idea; Alan Milburn, the reformist health secretary, argued that “when there is a limited amount of public-sector capital available, as there is, it's PFI or bust”.
PFI was largely discontinued in 2018, but the huge costs associated with some of the projects have left a legacy of public sector debt and the notion has become a byword for corporate greed and the state being taken for a ride. Ten years ago, the repaymenty obligations by the government were a staggering £267 billion. Although PFI allowed the construction of much new and needed real estate, the cost has been, at least as far as the public is concerned, prohibitively high.
Yet it is obvious to any without an ideological animus against private enterprise that co-operation with the private sector can unlock huge advantages for government, at national and regional or city level. For reasons both good and bad, the public sector os more risk-averse and less agile than business, and it must take into account the views of and effects on a broader range of stakeholders. So partnerships must be carefully designed: the public sector should not lose income it would otherwise get without recompense, nor should it be left with unreasonable financial obligations. Contracts must be managed fairly and efficiently, on both sides. Basic procurement rules should be observed.
We know that the involvement of the private sector can bring efficiency, innovation and value for money. In 2011, the city of Denver set up the East and Gold Line Enterprise (Eagle) Public-Private Partnership to develop 122 miles of commuter and light rail. The cost of the project came in $300 million below budget. In Senegal, the Dakar Toll Road was built between 2013 and 2016 and has slashed congestion and travelling times, and opened up economic opportunities for businesses in and around the capital.
In essence, PPP offers access to sums of money which public authorities cannot contemplate spending from their own reserves. But it also allows the best practice of the private sector to operate in terms of efficiency. And there are few more attractive projects to global capital in the current climate than sustainable and ESG infrastructure. Green investment is the sine qua non in the financial world now, and the opportunity to put money into sustainable schemes like public transport, housebuilding, climate mitigation projects and other ‘goodies’ which mayors and city leaders might have on their wish lists will be snapped up.
This requires two principal actions by city authorities: planning and persuasion. Projects should be developed which complement each other and contribute towards an overall goal—for example, cycle infrastructure, commuter rail, and road improvements—so that investment is used as strategically as possible. But it is also incumbent on mayors and others to make the case for PPP. They must create a convincing narrative which shows the opportunities, not just economic and financial but environmental and societal, which co-operation with the private sector brings. It is not a matter of robber-barons plundering the public purse, but the electorate getting the best deal, the best value for money and the latest technology. If those two aims can be achieved, then genuine transformation of our urban landscape can be achieved.
Conclusion
These ideas are merely indications of what cities could do over the next decade or so. We are living through a time of intense and widespread change, but the opportunities for new and creative thinking are huge and too tempting to miss. Let us insist, as voters, on dynamic leadership to make the kind of progress we not only need but deserve.
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If you have enjoyed these letters so far, firstly, thank you; but secondly, do tell other people. Ideas are only powerful if they are communicated, and for that reason (yes, and a side dish of personal vanity) I want to get as many people reading as possible. This edition has been something of a leviathan—well done for getting this far—but they won’t all be so. If each of you could just pass it on with recommendations to two other people, and perhaps ask them to do the same, we can achieve exponential growth together. And my undying gratitude, of course. EDW