A Radical Fix for Britain’s Housing Crisis: A New Offshore City
The new government’s promise to build 1.5 million homes in the next five years will only start to ease the situation. How about developing a new London next to the one already there?
High-rise apartment buildings under construction in the Canada Water area of London on July 10.
Photographer: Betty Laura Zapata/BloombergThe answer to Britain’s housing problems might be to build an entirely new city offshore in the Thames Estuary. So suggests Ian Mulcahey, Global Leader of Cities & Urban Design practice at global architecture practice Gensler.
With the UK’s housing shortfall so acute that it would need to construct another London-sized city to meet it, Mulcahey believes that the new government’s building plans — which involve new towns, peripheral urban expansion and infill — risk neither solving nor necessarily easing the problem. The river waters and banks just to London’s east could provide enough space to genuinely tackle the issue, while also being located in the part of the country whose economic vibrancy means such a plan could be implemented without heavy government subsidies. Mulcahey says the cost is that of building a new city, but he’s still working on an estimate.
The idea of locating urban expansion on artificial islands has been tried with some success — notably in Amsterdam and Copenhagen — but the Thames Estuary remains a challenging and controversial site. The river mouth’s low-lying banks are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, while the area’s mudflats are vital stopping off points for migratory birds — factors that led then-London Mayor Boris Johnson’s advocacy for a new airport located in the estuary being dismissed as impractical. Add to this concerns around the over-concentration of investment in Britain’s southeast at the rest of the country’s expense and the concept of a new island city does seem to be one that faces major challenges.
Bloomberg CityLab talked to Mulcahey — who has led the design of masterplans for areas of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Cairo — to find out why he nonetheless thinks it could be Britain’s best hope to beat the housing crisis. This conversation has been lightly edited.
Why do you think now is the time to build an entirely new city?
In the UK we’ve lost the ability to build houses at volume. We’ve never really been able to keep up with demand since the war. As much as I love the government saying they’re going to build 1 .5 million homes in office, they’re going to need three terms of office just to clear the backlog. The real estimate of Britain’s housing shortage is in fact 4.3 million units, more or less the equivalent of another London. So we need something more radical, more ambitious if we’re going to solve the housing crisis in a meaningful way.
We’re now past London’s historic largest population peak, which was in 1939. If you look at London internationally, it’s pretty modest in size — most of the big international cities are pushing into the 12 to 15 million region, while a lot of cities Gensler is working in are 18 to 21 million. So a notably enlarged city it isn’t inconceivable.
The southeast already heavily dominates the UK. Is it really the best location?
I’m not saying we should provide all the housing Britain needs in the southeast, but it’s the one place you can really provide a lot. There is already the most demand and high employment there, and therefore the viability is probably greatest. If we built on that scale elsewhere in the country, it would require subsidized housing schemes. That in part is what Britain’s late 20th century new towns were, and it could be done — but it’s a tall order, politically. The chances of then meeting your target would be seriously reduced, because we don’t have the resources in place in other locations. The New London concept could also be a blueprint for development elsewhere. If the project worked there, why not do it in the Mersey, the Bristol Channel or the Forth of Clyde?
Thames Estuary development would fundamentally change the shape of London, creating a whole new neck of urban space extending to the east — and might require displacing the port and industrial facilities that are already there in place. Why would this be desirable?
This wouldn’t be a completely new trend — London has been mainly developing eastwards since the 1980s. There have been pockets of major development elsewhere, such as in Wembley, but London’s residential expansion has mainly been eastwards through repurposing industrial and port land around the Isle of Dogs and the Royal Docks. Currently, the fastest population growth in Europe is actually in Newham — that’s been happening because London’s historic dock locations can no longer take big ships. Even Tilbury, the current location of London’s container port, is now in the wrong place. There’s pressure to move yet further east right onto the English Channel — the busiest shipping lane in the world, from which it’s a big detour to get off and sail upriver.
Isn’t the Thames Estuary a particularly challenging, environmentally sensitive site?
The estuary’s low-lying marshy terrain actually gives it some advantages. When you go north, south or west of London, you find fantastic agricultural land, beautiful villages, little old churches and ancient oak trees. East along the river, however, you find docks, industrial infrastructure, power generation and storage, big overhead cables and a lot of landfill sites.
It is absolutely true, however, that marshlands there are very environmentally sensitive. They’re important feeding grounds for both migratory and indigenous birds. That’s why older rejected schemes such as Norman Foster’s for an airport in the estuary really struggled, because it proposed a site that was partly on the Isle of Grain. There is land on the island that — on a map at least — looks available but is actually substantial mudflats that are bird-feeding grounds replenished by the tide.
What might work better are islands out in the water, unattached to the land — that’s something that the Dutch have been creating for years. We are using these sites increasingly for offshore energy production already, and the river bed is actually quite shallow. It already has to be dredged regularly in fact to keep it open for shipping.
But surely these sites, which lie outside the Thames Barrier, are especially vulnerable to sea level rises and flooding?
The barrier is just one part of the Thames flood protection system. Downstream you already find mile after mile of earth embankments to prevent inundation — they have to be there to contain floodwaters that are blocked by the barrier. Meanwhile, we know that the Thames Barrier — and this entire system — will need to be re-engineered in the next 20 to 30 years due to sea level change, and we will need to build a new barrier further east regardless of whether or not the area is developed. By building that new barrier, we could also harness it to generate tidal power, for example, provide a much needed crossing point between Kent and Essex, and possibly to route a high-speed rail link from the north of England directly to the Channel Tunnel. So it could be a way of solving several problems at the same time.
What kind of urban form would the city take?
I would propose a new satellite city that’s connected by fast rail into central London. There are about 600 square miles of suitable site out there, enough to fit islands the size of Manhattan several times over. Density-wise it could be like Paris or Barcelona, or it could be low-density like London, with houses and gardens. I think there’s still an attraction to having a bit of both.
The British planning system is notoriously restrictive. How could developers navigate that?
The biggest barrier to solving our housing problem is the planning system — and I think the government concurs with that. There’s an unholy alliance between property and planning industries to maintain the status quo because it suits housebuilders to limit supply.
Politicians have the desire to drive through change but rarely have the determination. The one or two exceptions to this postwar state of affairs were actually new towns, which set up this methodology of development corporations that the Treasury bought into. They set up development corporations and gave them planning powers, so that they could switch land use from agricultural to residential, and the treasury could pay for infrastructure, and developers could recoup the investment in 50 to 60 years later. That achieved the quantum change that everyone thought, but the methodology was there — later revisited by the Docklands Development Corporation.
This could deliver without changing the planning system — especially if it’s an offshore development corporation model, where there is no need to compulsorily purchase land, reform local planning processes and so on.
This sounds like a massive undertaking.
If you accept we’re in a housing emergency, why not think of a solution to solve the crisis? Why try to just muddle along with the system you’ve got?
No comments:
Post a Comment