Planning in London

PiL 54 LEAD STORY

Poor design skills threaten London
Research commissioned by Urban Design London is expected to reveal a severe shortage of urban design skills in the capital which could harm London’s growth prospects.
The research has been carried out by the Office of Public Management and should be made public in the next few weeks. UDL director Ludo Campbell-Reid expects the research to show that the shortages, which have been mapped nationally as part of the ODPM’s Sustainable Communities policies, but not in the capital before, are ‘endemic across London’.
Reid met recently with a group of leading urban design professors and other academics to discuss the problem to find innovative ways of ‘bridging the skills gap’ so London can handle the population growth and increased housing provision required by the Mayor’s London Plan and all it implies.
Poor design skills threaten London
‘The research will set a base line for London’s skills. We will be looking for a series of training programmes that can meet the demand for better skills, and to indicate areas where further work is needed,’ said Reid.
‘Without improved skills, how are we going to deliver satisfactorily an urban environment that must accommodate an extra 800,000 people and 250,000 extra homes?’ he asked.
‘We are not talking about creating experts, but we want to create better clients in local authorities and bodies like Transport for London and throughout the public sector.
‘Councillors, traffic engineers, planners involved in development control – all these people need to have good skills to help deliver a better urban realm,’ said Reid.
‘We are engaging the universities to find ways of delivering [urban design] education in a better way – perhaps by providing training on the job. They could come together to fix the problem.’
Reid feels a big part of the problem is the image of planners and the job, which has given rise to a huge shortage of people prepared to do it – hence the employment of large numbers of Australian and New Zealand staff, who also may need extra training to deal with London’s problems.
‘There is a huge gap an entry level. Not enough young people are choosing to become involved in urban design and planning. We’ve got to convince people that planning is not done only by people who wear tweed and bake bread.
‘It is one of the most exciting professions there is. It is about making cities work and we are clearly talking the wrong language to the youth of Britain. We need a much more creative education delivery.’
London’s universities are expected to give their response to the research in the next few weeks.