CASA Working Paper 230 | Re-thinking the Growth of London

Abstract

The Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford (CAMKOX) Corridor, is the fastest growing region in the United Kingdom. The UK National Infrastructure Commission proposes to add 780,000 housing units and 1,450,000 people to the existing CAMKOX population of around 3,300,000. The two-day workshop was organized among interested stakeholders by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis of University College London. The participants were 20 professional planners and academics with CAMKOX experience. It applied the three scenarios of early-, late-, and non-adoption of systems policy and project innovations, and it reported the impacts at three time-steps, 2020 (existing), 2035, and 2050.

Geodesign changes geography by design, by intentional change. It tightly couples the creation of proposals for change with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts and by systems thinking (Steinitz 2012). Coming to a politically acceptable planning strategy inevitably is a negotiation among the people of the place, aided by geographic scientists and design professionals, and supported by information technologists. The digital tools to enable a collaboratively negotiated consensus are based on diagrams of policies and projects, and produce an outcome which indicates only that “It can be…or might be… something like this”.

Author(s): Carl Steinitz

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