Urban age

LONDON EUROPE’S GLOBAL CITY?

GOVERNING THE UNGOVERNABLE?
Deyan Sudjic he single most arresting fact about London is that it is growing. After decades in which, like every other major European and North American city, it was haemorrhaging people, the victim of the hollowing out doughnut effect, London has turned around. The forecasts now point to sustained and substantial population increases; much of it through migration. Something remarkable has happened here. A combination of an ageing population beginning to understand that the only source of the young and able-bodied that will be needed to care for the baby boomers in their declining years, and to pay the contributions needed to fund their pensions will have to be from outside, and of the booming opportunities for the highly skilled in everything from banking to the art market, have between them transformed the character of the city, and its prospects. The transformation is both reflected in, and in part the product of, a transformed system of city government for London. Recently, London’s only remaining evening newspaper carried a front page story to the effect that the first directly elected mayor in the city’s history, Ken Livingstone, was so exercised by the thought of his legacy that he intended to run for office for two more terms so as to be able to preside over the opening ceremonies for the Olympics of 2012. The story does not have to be literally true to pose real questions about the impact of the singularly un-British approach to local government that Livingstone represents. After two or more decades of drift, and ambiguity, London as an urban entity now has a clear focus of power. It is a development that is the most startling product of Tony Blair’s local government reforms. They were intended to change the face of all the country’s big cities. London is the one success story of a reform that has elsewhere failed to take root. It should have been the most difficult, and the most unmanageable,