ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the recent experience of strategic planning and the governance of growth and development in London, a city that is experiencing many of the socio-economic and physical problems facing world cities today. It provides an insight to the unique nature of governance and planning within London, one of the world’s foremost global cities. The institutions of change are constantly undergoing reform and modernisation, in order to set a strategic framework for growth and investment. But choosing an appropriate governing and institutional framework for London has always been problematic. As Travers (2004: 1) has remarked
Governing London is a complex business. The city’s vast population, its geography and history conspire to make the British capital an unusually diffi cult place to govern . . . The regularity with which London’s government is reorganised suggests there is something unusual about the pressures that affect successive systems.
