Why London Should Stop Trying to Be New York and Start Trying to Be Paris

[Syt]

For Londoners, old and new:

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/03/london-stop-nyc-start-paris/386435/?utm_source=atlanticFB

Why London Should Stop Trying to Be New York and Start Trying to Be Paris

The U.K. capital doesn't need a transatlantic role model. It actually has a far more relevant one closer to home.

Watch out New York, London is coming for you. This was a key message of the Long Term Economic Plan for London launched by the U.K. Chancellor and London's mayor Boris Johnson last week. Among a host of new plans for the city, Johnson vowed that he would see London's economy overtake that of its great rival across the Atlantic. He won't do so in office, of course—he's stepping down next year—but it's certainly true that London's powers-that-be have been taking many cues from its transatlantic sister city recently. Whether it's building higher and flashier, rebranding its neighborhoods, or aping food trends, New York has been cited as an influence and, among a small elite at least, a benchmark against which progress can be judged.

Is this a good thing perhaps, an example of friendly sparring between two great cities? Probably not. For a start, the crush is a little one-sided. As a New York exile acquaintance aptly put it: "People in New York don't give a rats about London." To them, it's a faraway city that's expensive to travel to, where politics is conducted and solutions are forged under very different conditions. The thing is, regular Londoners actually feel much the same way about New York. It's just that the elite of London are so intertwined with the finance industry that, in their narrowed vision, The City and Wall Street are just two ends of the same short alley. New York, meanwhile, is actually an inadequate role model for London. Not because it's a terrible city (personally, I've always loved it), but because when it comes to bright ideas for London to overcome its problems, it offers close to nothing.

If that sounds harsh, let me outline the difficulties the U.K. capital faces. London's property prices are spiraling, products of a housing drought that's turning decent apartments affordable on a working class wage into urban legends. The city's inequality chasm is widening inch-by-inch, and once economically diverse neighborhoods risk becoming monocultures. This has helped to deaden and marginalize aspects of the city's cultural life that made London vibrant in the first place—a lesser point than displacement, no doubt, but a problem nonetheless. Meanwhile, the city's regenerative energies are ignoring the small print of daily livability and being channeled into ridiculously flashy grand projects that see the city as a mere display cabinet in which to cluster expensive, largely functionless infrastructural tchotchkes.

Does this all sound familiar, New Yorkers? When it comes to big city stresses at least, Londoners and New Yorkers might well be siblings. NYC's steps towards building genuinely affordable housing seem to fall far short of actual need, and it's been cited as a "capital of inequality". Its art scene has been pronounced doomed, while it also has its fair share of flashy, superficial infrastructure proposals. It might not be worse off than London, but when it comes to solutions, it looks just as stuck as we are.

What makes Johnson's NY-LON obsession more frustrating is that London actually has a far more relevant role model closer to home. It's a place that has strong historical connection with London, a city whose architecture and cultural life London long strove to emulate. Obviously, I'm talking about Paris.

France's capital may long have been damned as a deadened, divided museum city, but when it comes to new measures to tackle urban problems, right now it's pretty much on fire. It's working hard and fast to overcome its divisions, broaden housing access, streamline its transit, and clean its air. It's too early to see the effect, but Paris' political will and forward thinking are currently putting London to shame.

Just outlining all of Paris' plans is a marathon. Since mayor Anne Hidalgo gained office last April, the city has set aside €3 billion to build new public housing over the next six years, at a rate of 7,000 units a year. She's tabled a new law to fine office owners who choose to leave their properties empty rather than convert them to residences—a plan designed mainly to convert formerly residential older real estate back to its original use. Hidalgo is also trying to prevent total gentrification of formerly working class areas by establishing a list of earmarked apartments that the city would have a "right of first-refusal" to buy should they go up for sale. The idea there is that the city can increase its social housing stock in a given neighborhood if it wants.

Paris' pollution, meanwhile, is being attacked by plans to phase out diesel fuel and make central Paris a residents-only zone for drivers by 2020, by which time cycle lanes will have been doubled. New nationwide laws to create city rent rise caps and clamp down on exploitative letting agent charges are also helping the city make progress. And finally, the unhealthy division between Paris and its suburbs is being bridged by the Grand Paris project, through which greater regional cooperation will be boosted by a massive expansion of the metro and suburban train network. To make the city more accessible to poorer suburbanites, the cost of transit fares from the far periphery to Paris' core is also being slashed.

This level of state intervention might make some people's hair fall out. Certainly it would be extremely hard to get a mandate for in New York. That's kind of the point. Solutions that might be impossible across the Atlantic still have a fighting chance of acceptance in London, making Paris a close, instructive example. But rather than make comparisons that might be both relevant and uncomfortable, Britain's public conversation is often dominated by trivial, puerile French-bashing, whose attempts to assert superiority actually reveal a perplexing inferiority complex. This is a huge missed opportunity. New York's vibrancy will always have a magnetic pull, but right now London doesn't need another Manhattan-esque High Line Rip-off. It needs a Parisian New Deal.

I've never been to London or New York, so I can't compare. I liked Paris well enough; it felt like a (much) larger version of Vienna in some ways.

[Monoriu]

Dubai is our role model. 

[Eddie Teach]

Oil money and vanity? Not such a great role model IMO.

[Gups]

London doesn't have Paris's problems (such as the central/periphary division) and so doesn't need its solutions. London's primary problem is excessive housing costs which its government has no powers to do anything about.

London doesn't have a role model. The reason BoJo talks about it is that NYC has far greater powers of self-governance than London and we need something similar so that we can deal problems which are unique to the city (compared to the rest of the UK).

[garbon]

I've always mixed feelings about public housing. While it is good to make sure that service workers, that cities need to function, don't have to spend an arm and a leg getting to work, it seems to have a pernicious effect on continuing the escalation of housing prices for everyone else. Which, of course, hits the middle class the most.

[Syt]

It works reasonably well in Vienna. About 1/3 of the people live in apartments owned by the city, and Vienna is one of the biggest landlords in the world. Though the quality can vary depending on how new a building is, or where it's located. There's not one area where these buildings are, but they're rather spread throughout all districts and neighborhoods. The entry monetary requirements are more relaxed than public housing in other cities, and it's not generally considered too odious to live in a "Gemeindebau" (depending on which one you're actually in, of course, but there's plenty "normal" apartment buildings that are worse than public housing).

The projects were built since the 20s (and they were revolutionary at the time, with bath rooms for each apartment, and very avant garde in its design), but the last one was finished in 2004. Since then the city rather subsidizes development projects to make new property cheaper to buy/rent.

[mongers]

It works reasonably well in Vienna. About 1/3 of the people live in apartments owned by the city, and Vienna is one of the biggest landlords in the world. Though the quality can vary depending on how new a building is, or where it's located. There's not one area where these buildings are, but they're rather spread throughout all districts and neighborhoods. The entry monetary requirements are more relaxed than public housing in other cities, and it's not generally considered too odious to live in a "Gemeindebau" (depending on which one you're actually in, of course, but there's plenty "normal" apartment buildings that are worse than public housing).

The projects were built since the 20s (and they were revolutionary at the time, with bath rooms for each apartment, and very avant garde in its design), but the last one was finished in 2004. Since then the city rather subsidizes development projects to make new property cheaper to buy/rent.

Sounds like a rather workable long term solution to some of the problems.

Meanwhile back in Blighty, the conservatives are considering selling off the remaining social housing to occupants as a quick fix election bribe. 

[Syt]

The most famous one is the 1000 meter long Karl-Marx-Hof:

Karl Marx-Hof was built between 1927 and 1930 by city planner Karl Ehn, a follower of Otto Wagner. It held 1,382 apartments (with a size of 30–60 m² each) and was called the Ringstraße des Proletariats, the Ring-road of the Proletariat. (Vienna's principal Ringstraße, dating from the 1850s, surrounds the city centre and had been intended as a showcase for the grandeur and glory of the Habsburg Empire). Only 18.5% of the 1,000 metres long, 156,000-m² large area was built up, with the rest of the area developed into play areas and gardens. Designed for a population of about 5,000, the premises include many amenities, including laundromats, baths, kindergartens, a library, doctor offices, and business offices.

A model:

[Martinus]

And if it doesn't work, you can always use it as an inspiration for cool music videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE

[Valmy]

(such as the central/periphary division)

Really?  The article makes it sound like poor people are being driven from London in droves.  Where else would they go but the suburbs?

[Monoriu]

It works reasonably well in Vienna. About 1/3 of the people live in apartments owned by the city, and Vienna is one of the biggest landlords in the world. Though the quality can vary depending on how new a building is, or where it's located. There's not one area where these buildings are, but they're rather spread throughout all districts and neighborhoods. The entry monetary requirements are more relaxed than public housing in other cities, and it's not generally considered too odious to live in a "Gemeindebau" (depending on which one you're actually in, of course, but there's plenty "normal" apartment buildings that are worse than public housing).

The projects were built since the 20s (and they were revolutionary at the time, with bath rooms for each apartment, and very avant garde in its design), but the last one was finished in 2004. Since then the city rather subsidizes development projects to make new property cheaper to buy/rent.

In HK, the percentage is closer to 50%, and we are a city of 7 million, so I think the HK government is a bigger landlord than the Vienna government.  It isn't really a choice here.  If the government doesn't provide public housing, the working class will simply build their own squatters in the hillsides.  That was what happened half a century ago, and there were all sorts of problems, including fire hazard.  Hundreds of deaths later, HK government decided to build the towers. 

[Valmy]

In HK, the percentage is closer to 50%, and we are a city of 7 million, so I think the HK government is a bigger landlord than the Vienna government.  It isn't really a choice here.  If the government doesn't provide public housing, the working class will simply build their own squatters in the hillsides.  That was what happened half a century ago, and there were all sorts of problems, including fire hazard.  Hundreds of deaths later, HK government decided to build the towers. 

And they say colonial governments are not responsive to local concerns

[Gups]

(such as the central/periphary division)

Really?  The article makes it sound like poor people are being driven from London in droves.  Where else would they go but the suburbs?

London's suburbs are more homogenously middle class than the rest of the city. London just doesn't have a geographical split like that. In the central and inner suburban area, neighbourhoods are generally mixed. Frequently a row of million pound houses will be directly opposite a block of council houses. Even very rich areas like Chelsea and Notting Hlll have large blocks of social housing.

[Syt]

In HK, the percentage is closer to 50%, and we are a city of 7 million, so I think the HK government is a bigger landlord than the Vienna government. 

Which is why I wrote, "one of the biggest," and not "the biggest."

[Valmy]

London's suburbs are more homogenously middle class than the rest of the city. London just doesn't have a geographical split like that. In the central and inner suburban area, neighbourhoods are generally mixed. Frequently a row of million pound houses will be directly opposite a block of council houses. Even very rich areas like Chelsea and Notting Hlll have large blocks of social housing.

So where are the poor going to go when central London boots them all out?