Who speaks for London?

摘要

The most significant crisis in current urban design lies not in our inability to design innovative buildings but in our inability to design a good mechanism for decision-making about what to build. The architects are way ahead of the lawyers, political scientists, and politicians in their creativity and in their ability to think through design problems. This is true not only in the United States and the UK but in many other places as well. I do not intend to discuss here the primary example of this crisis: the way political authority is fragmented in metropolitan areas around the world, including in the south east of England. I want to focus instead on two other problems of urban decision-making that apply across the UK and particularly in London.