ABSTRACT
The United Kingdom illustrates the paradox particularly well. All the key elements of British metropolitan management have been designed in and for London: green belts, urban development corporations, enterprise zones, the creation of metro-wide governments and their abolition. The greatest paradox is that London has retained the strongest tradition of conurbation-wide planning since the abolition of metropolitan governments in 1986 and has the greatest achievements of land-use change and infrastructure investment to show for it. The distinctiveness of strategic planning in London has four sources: scale, compactness, segmentation and cohesion. The global vision of London undermines comparability with provincial cities of Britain, placing the capital on an exclusive international stage along with cities such as New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris, a paradox given the polycentric character of its institutions. It remains to be seen whether the return of elective London-wide government in 1999 will reinforce the global vision or stimulate a new localism.
