Michael Edwards
Just Space community-led recovery plan for London
In order to create a future that differs from the past, sixty diverse London groups have worked together to construct a post-pandemic recovery plan. Students at Bartlett have played a key role in encouraging this process and are now supporting its execution.
Cover of Just Space Recovery Plan. Drawing by Lucinda Rogers
The Just Space Recovery Plan calls for a radical change of course
More than 60 community groups and campaigners contributed to the Just Space Recovery Plan, being published on Monday 4 April 2022. It calls for a radical change of course in London’s planning: less a developers’ city, more a city for its people.
The Just Space network was formed to bring together a diverse range of groups to participate in London planning, which is usually dominated by town planners and developers. During Covid19 the network created its own community-led Recovery Plan, a set of policies that is a call for action for a positively different post-pandemic London: people-centred rather than development-centred. The Plan aims to reverse the inequalities that the pandemic has brutally exposed.
A Pluriversal Recovery Plan In keeping with Just Space principles of seeking consensus, great care was taken to record diverse and divergent positions through a series of workshop debates. Designed to minimise bias, this innovative approach used an empathic understanding of each other’s different knowledge and lived experiences, which was distilled into a collective vision and coherent set of policies. One workshop participant named the approach ‘pluriversal’.The document ranges from the personal to the collective, from the neighbourhood to the city-wide. The 44 policy positions converge on strong demands for
• A Caring City
• Visibility & Influence For All
• A City Of Local Neighbourhoods
• Priority For Climate And Nature
The Recovery Plan calls for action by community organisations as well as the Authorities. The way development takes place needs to change radically: planning and building can’t continue as the servant of a small minority of financial interests at the expense of existing communities and the things they value.
Michael Edwards who is an Honorary Professor, the Bartlett School of Planning, stated:
‘What is needed is an emergency programme: something like post-war reconstruction. Special measures are called for and this is recognised by the many who say the future must be different from the past.’
WHO
Name Michael Edwards (he/him)
Role Staff
Department The Bartlett School of Planning
LABORATORY
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