Agenda, slides and supporting papers at  https://justspace.org.uk/2024-new-plan-inputs 

Click here to download a PDF version of the poster

Direct link to Eventbrite booking page

Join us to create a manifesto for a London planned for people not property.

conference on Saturday March 2nd 11am-4pm

Are you affected by the housing crisis?

Do luxury blocks appear in your neighbourhood and stay largely vacant? 

Are you losing local shops, green space and local services? 

Why are councils demolishing estates? 

Why are families moving out to find homes they can afford and space for children, so London schools close?

Why is the planning process so murky, and local councils little help?  

We’ll tackle reasons why the growth plan for London doesn’t work for most of us, or the planet. We’ll question common assumptions about growth and developers’ profits, and present alternatives.

With elections coming, a better London Plan is urgently needed – one that tackles the problems in a new way for London’s people and all of its communities.

Join us to create a manifesto for Just Space – sign up here on Eventbrite to reserve a place

Hosted by Just Space, the London-wide network of community groups and campaigns at Coin Street (near Waterloo).

Some position papers in draft at https://justspace.org.uk/2024-new-plan-inputs with more to come 

Just Space is meeting on Saturday morning 18 November to progress our preparations for the next London Plan. Details are in our first Newsletter here:

https://mailchi.mp/652e987abd5c/just-space-gathering-sat-18th-nov?e=90885f5a36

You’ll also find details of the many events which the GLA is holding in the coming weeks and links you can use to reserve a place at each.

UCL’s prof Pablo Sendra has published an article on how the tricky term co-design should properly be defined and used. He writes “There is a lack of definition in policy of the term co-design, and yet local authorities and developers are increasingly using it. To avoid this term becoming meaningless, it is essential to define how to run co-design processes ethically. Building on case studies, professional experience, collaborations with communities in Just Space and elsewhere, and a Participatory Action Research approach, this paper defines a set of principles on how to run a co-design process ethically and genuinely including communities in decision-making. Departing from the legal Principles for Fair Consultation in England and Wales, the paper expands them and results into ten ethical principles for co-design.

The article is free to read at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13574809.2023.2171856 and has been short-listed for the @RTPIPlanners Research Awards for the “The Sir Peter Hall Award for Excellence in Research and Engagement”.

The ten principles are summarised as follows:

The enormous importance of street markets is often not appreciated. They provide the cheapest food, often the freshest food, social engagement among customers and traders and employ a lot of people. But they have been coming under relentless pressure from developers and often from the councils which manage or regulate them. This conference is supported by Just Space and should help those all over London in the defence of their markets.

Learning from East End Street Markets

1-day conference

Date: Monday 21st August 2023, 10am-5pm

Place: Hason Raja Centre, Whitechapel E1

One-day conference learning from the historic East End Street Markets: the threats, the challenges and what community value means today

The post-Covid 19 cost-of-living crisis has shown the importance of street markets for economic resilience in London’s embedded communities, yet East London’s historic street markets are increasingly under threat due to land speculation, changing public policies and shifts in consumer behaviour.

This conference follows on from June 2019’s ‘The Future of London’s Street Markets’ held in Brixton. We will hear from East London’s longest standing market campaign, the Friends of Queen’s Market (Newham) to identify future threats and key issues facing markets in ‘ethnic majority’ areas of London.

The Just Space Network’s Community-led Recovery Plan and the University of Leeds research findings on the community value of street markets (2022) will set the grounds for afternoon workshops, with input from East End campaigners facing pressures from the financial city and hardline gentrification.

Afternoon group workshops will examine the current position of street markets in understanding the historic East End, its diverse communities and evolving landscape, as places that foster community cohesion to address isolation, provide affordable food for healing and wellbeing and examine the threats to market livelihoods today.

BOOKING: Free to attend. Booking essential. Limited places. Book your place through this Eventbrite link: http://streetmarkets.eventbrite.com and there is a video at

14 July 2023: there is news from City Hall which is important for Just Space members.

Draft guidance on ‘Affordable’ housing and on Viability Assessment: consultations close on 24th July.

The Mayor produced two new London Plan Guidance (LPG) documents in draft and seeks comments before they are finalised. These documents cannot, by law, change the policies which are embedded in the London Plan but they can and do elaborate them and toughen them up through the details of implementation.

The London Tenants Federation (LTF) has submitted their very careful and detailed commentary on both LPGs and has kindly agreed that we can share it with other members of Just Space who may be preparing their own submissions, or who may want to write to the GLA supporting the LTF.

The LTF makes a refreshed and powerful case for focusing planning policy as much as possible on maximising the production of social housing at council rents and not the other, more expensive, forms of so-called “affordable” housing. It refers back to the latest GLA study of London’s housing needs in 2017 which showed how overwhelming was the need even then for secure, low rent, housing which only social/council housing can provide and it points to the extremely low levels of actual production which have been achieved since then, suggesting many ways in which more could be done.

The response welcomes some of the GLA proposals to tighten up loopholes which enable developers to avoid or minimise their obligations and pushes for a bolder insistence on delivery of at least 50% ‘affordable’ housing on land previously in public ownership.

The Viability analysis LPG is all about the details of a rotten system which the LTF and Just Space have always criticised – establishing developer profitability as the dominant criterion governing what gets built and for whom. But for the moment the provision of most social housing depends on private developers and housing associations being forced to provide it as a condition for getting planning permission. The rules and procedures for testing what developers can afford are the subject of this LPG and the Tenants Federation is very shrewdly pointing out further ways in which developers’ manipulation of the figures could be limited and the whole process be made more transparent.

The LTF response to the two LPGs is here and will also be on their own site LondonTenants.org

The GLA’s draft LPGs are at Affordable Housing and at Viability along with means to comment.

Remember: 24 July is the closing date for comments.

Planning For London programme

Just Space and many community groups consider that the last London Plan was a bad plan and it’s is now very old. Drafted in 2016, it would have been adopted in 2020 (though it was pushed into 2021 by the Secretary of State) and has in many ways become even more irrelevant to London’s real needs as a result of the pandemic, the fresh round of austerity, now a recession and the accelerating reality of climate and biological breakdown.

We argued that the City Hall planners could and should have got down to some urgent work to get a new plan under way but the Mayor apparently decided that no start should be made until after the next mayoral election in May 2024. So instead City Hall has devised this Planning for London programme in which they are gathering the views of citizens and organisations while declaring that this is not part of making the next plan.

They have just held the first two events at which they met with citizens and organisations (we are called “stakeholders’) and they promise to publishe what that have gleaned from listening to the many round-table discussions they orchestrated. They are also going to publish their learnings from an earlier series of focus-group-type (‘deliberative’) events to which they invited a statistically representative selection of Londoners. The whole programme is set out on the City Hall web site here. There will be a stage where they invite our inputs on how they should do impact analysis. That’s a process which they made a serious mess of last time and had to try to make good in the middle of the public Examination so it is very important that we all help.

Just Space told its member organisations about these two recent public events so quite a few of us took part and we are gradually comparing notes about what happened. We’ll post our summary here. Meanwhile one of our members wrote a personal blog post here which you might want to look at.

If you have comments or observations or took part in these events and want to offer your reactions, please get in touch or use the comments below.

Many of the strongest calls for change in London planning have, in effect, been criticisms of Opportunity Areas, the mechanisms which govern major physical developemnts in the city and are so often spurned as just Opportunities for Developers.

Taking stock of many years of engagement, Just Space has just produced a draft document to help members decide what to do next.

The term Opportunity Area has been in use since the 1990s, applied to areas where very large scale change through development is planned. This report summarises the big shifts in how the designation has been used, initially for the modernisation of employment in under-used industrial, port or railway land, but now for many ordinary parts of occupied London, the aim nowadays being mainly to create development sites for housing through intensification.

Community groups in and around the affected areas have criticised and resisted many of these schemes for decades and tried to secure changes to the London Plan policies which govern them, with scant success. The criticisms have been that the designation, planning and target-setting of OAs have lacked transparency and democracy, as have the mechanisms for implementation. Areas have been planned without the necessary understanding of the social and economic life of the affected areas and the outcomes have mostly been detrimental to working class, including minoritised, communities and to many businesses. Just Space continues to argue that there should be no further designations until a serious review of the programme has been completed and digested.

In the last 2 years Just Space has collaborated with the Planning and Regeneration Committee of the London Assembly which, in turn, has put pressure on the Mayor of London (the planners in the GLA) and secured a new policy document and web site. This represents modest progress.

The aim of the new Just Space report is to bring a scattered narrative up to date and form a basis for Just Space member groups to consider what further steps, if any, to take on this issue in the wider context of how London will be planned in the current emergencies. It thus complements the Community-led Recovery Plan for London prepared during the worst of the Pandemic.

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Because this report was facilitated by UCL Bartlett School of Planning’s knowledge exchange with Just Space, it is being presented initially to students before the summer term ends. The meeting is open to all. Friday 12 May 1600h-1800h, mainly face-to-face but with a zoom option.