Cars as the new horses, high streets as the new high streets: Reinventing London’s high streets in the age of Amazon
The original version of an essay supporting the Mayor of London’s guidance for London’s high streets, but with questions, and suggestions, for cities elsewhere.
(Ed. I’m one of the Mayor of London’s Design Advocates, a group of 50 designers and architects picked to advise the Greater London Authority as part of the Mayor’s Good Growth by Design strategy. I haven’t had much to do with London since moving to Stockholm though, so it was good of Fiona Scott, of Gort Scott Architects—another Design Advocate— to ask me to write a short essay supporting their research for the GLA on London’s high streets. It gave me a chance to locate and unpack some earlier thoughts about potential trajectories for urban mobility, futures for retail, the difficulty of planning versus a nod to the different design practices required to facilitate these complex questions, including new innovation practices like mission-oriented innovation; in short, many things of interest, to be updated and pointed at London’s high streets. This text is the original from which my submission was derived, and is written in a more exploratory mode, essentially without my MDA hat on…
