ABSTRACT
The London Docklands redevelopment provides an extreme case of the removal of local users’ and residents’ control over the fashioning of the built environment. Three underlying themes seem to characterise what has happened there – an externalised setting-up of the development ‘groundrules’ allied with large-scale financial support direct from central government; a speculative regime for the individual development projects; and a massive scale of operation. It has been argued that to a degree these characteristics are predictable manifestations of the neo-liberal political framework in which the events have taken place. The LDDC is a centralist body because the Thatcher administrations could not expect locally elected administrations to carry out the damaging transformations required, and because in any event there has been a generalised drive to undermine the power and financial capability of local authorities since the fiscal crises of the mid-1970s. Individual development decisions have been speculative rather than planned because, as the discussion in Chapter 8 implies, it is fundamental to neo-liberal thought that investment decisions should be taken by the risktakers themselves, untrammelled by any external authority or regulatory ‘planning’ framework. The scale has been massive partly because of the sheer size of the ‘hole’ to be filled but also because multi-national capital, attracted by the intriguing combination of heavy state support and a ‘free for all’ development regime, thinks and works at a far larger scale than local authorities and local citizens’ groups.
