Mayor appoints design taskforce for London

Mayor Sadiq Khan has assembled a diverse task force of experts to improve the design of London’s built environment, as part of his plans to accommodate the capital’s rising population.

The mayor this week launched his Good Growth by Design programme with the help of architectural, design and built environment professionals.

To ensure development is high-quality, socially and economically inclusive and environmentally sustainable, the mayor has employed 50 Design Advocates to work with City Hall and councils on the programme. The diverse team includes Sir David Adjaye OBE, Sadie Morgan, and Wayne Hemingway MBE.

Half of these design advocates are women and a quarter are BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic).

In a speech at the London School of Economics, Mr Khan said: ‘We’ve already seen examples of where good growth can lead to a host of other benefits such as better social integration amongst different communities and generations, and new transport links transforming areas and local economies.

‘The way I want to apply the principles of good growth is to re-balance development in London away from the high-price homes in central London towards more genuinely affordable homes for all Londoners.’

A target in the Mayor’s manifesto is that half of new homes across London are ‘genuinely affordable to rent or buy’.

To keep up with the demands of a rising population, London needs to provide space for 46,000 new jobs and 50,000 new homes a year.

City hall says that the programme will:

• Set ambitious design standards
• Apply these standards and undertake rigorous design reviews
• Increase capacity by launching a new social enterprise - ‘Public Practice’ - that will place talented designers and planners in local authorities for up to a year
• Support diversity by pushing the firms that City Hall commissions to do much more to tackle the under-representation of women and people from minority groups in the built environment professions
• Use open procurement processes such as design competitions to seek the highest standards for public projects