Design for London re-jigged and London's 100 public spaces project dropped by new London mayor

Plans to transform London's urban realm through the mayor's 100 Public Spaces programme have been abandoned and the 18-month-old organisation Design for London subsumed into a larger 'and and infrastructure' directorate.

The mayor's decision to subsume Design for London - the 18-month-old 100 Public Spaces sponsor - into the larger unit at the London Development Agency would be a 'disaster' for the capital, former mayor Livingstone predicted.

'Basically what they are saying is that design becomes secondary to whatever the immediate priorities emerge to be on the site,' he said.

'We specifically created Design for London… so that it wasn’t always subordinated to whatever the transport, planners or the LDA developers wanted. It had to have a direct line to the mayor. Until we did that most of what the LDA designed was unimaginative.'
The new directorate, to be led by DfL director Peter Bishop, has a £70-80 million budget compared with DfL’s £3.2 million. It will take responsibility for area planning, land holdings, and environmental and climate change programmes at the LDA, which is itself under review.

Livingstone also lashed out at Johnson’s key planning adviser, deputy mayor Simon Milton, who he said had 'insular views' on planning in the capital.

'Milton represents the most narrow interpretation of the boroughs’ view, which is broadly that the rest of the world should just go away and leave Westminster… on its own,' he said, in an interview with Building Design magazine.

BD also revealed this week that 100 Public Spaces was being quietly dropped by Johnson. Many prominent schemes, including Richard MacCormac’s Victoria Embankment project, are set to be shelved, although others such as Farrell’s Tottenham Court Road proposal are expected to go ahead as stand-alone projects.

The programme has been dogged by slow delivery, with just five projects completed to date, six years after it was launched by then mayor Ken Livingstone.

These latest moves cast further doubt over the future role of DfL chairman Richard Rogers, a fervent advocate of transforming London into a pedestrianised city akin to those in continental Europe.