This book addresses what, on the face of it, seems a straightforward question: who is governing London and how? Similar questions are being asked in cities and societies across the world in an era that is shaped by relentless processes of globalization, multiple crises and insecurities. The book is therefore an assessment of the governance arrangements that shape the city's planning and development, who controls them and whose interests they serve (and whose they do not). We show that over recent decades there has been a slow but steady corrosion of the public realm, in which powers, resources and responsibilities have been voluntarily ceded to a range of players at multiple scales, found mainly in the private sector. There is a lot to be learned from London. It is a context in which there has been a deliberate and purposeful agenda to generate dependency on private finance and service providers. All planning deliberations and political choices are now conducted in the shadow of the market, with an eye to what these new groups of players – what we term the parastate – want and need. There is nothing inevitable about what has happened. We begin by setting out the “simple story” that dominates policy and (some) academic thinking about London before turning to some of the wider difficulties that policymakers, businesses and citizens increasingly face in the wake of decades of change.

London's simple story: from the city of decline to the triumphant city

During the 2000s many hailed London's economic and demographic expansion as an archetype of a broader narrative of urban triumphalism. For a range of commentators, politicians, academics and planners its recent experiences can be captured in a simple story of change that explains the much- lauded transformation from an earlier period of structural decline. The story begins with a view of its imperial past that acted as a driver of growth in the early modern and industrial eras but left the city ill- suited to the demands of post-war economic and social change. Its urban environments were characterized by poorly planned and maintained infrastructure, with dilapidated housing and commercial property stock and a misfunctioning post war welfare state that had been responsible for the delivery of poor- quality modernist estates and declining private sector dynamism.