What is Ken doing to London?

“I really want to be open and inclusive. I am making it very clear. We are at a time when we really do need people with ideas and thoughts about what sort of London we want in the future and how to shape it. And I am encouraging people to write in with ideas and arrange meetings with me.”

When Ken Livingstone took office on 3 July, he decided to concentrate on transport, as chair of the board of Transport for London. He delegated to Gavron responsibility for developing the Spatial Development Strategy, the framework for the use of the mayor’s strategic planning powers, by September 2002. The SDS will include a new framework for land use and development in Greater London, to which all the borough unitary development plans must conform as they are revised. It will also set priorities for the future economic and social development of London and improvements to its environment.

Gavron has a big job and lofty a sense of her responsibility. “Ken sees the SDS as the overarching strategy, the one that binds all the other strategies together.” She adds: “It will be able to integrate and link up spatial dimensions across all the mayor’s strategies and policies. Through a mixture of using planning powers, economic regeneration strategy and funding, transport strategy and funding, you can make a really big difference.”

So what kind of difference will it make? Since 3 July, a handful of key policy directions has emerged from the mayor’s office: a commitment to reducing traffic congestion and improving public transport; support for more tall buildings in financial centres and on transport hubs; and addressing the affordable housing crisis. Livingstone’s appointment of Lord Rogers as adviser on architecture and urban strategy is an endorsement of the urban taskforce’s blueprint for design-led, high-density, mixed-use, mixed-tenure communities near transport interchanges.

As for Gavron, what has she been doing since 3 July? Gavron is big on broad-brush themes, short on detail. She explains that this is because the GLA’s strategies are work in progress, being developed through exhaustive consultation. “At the moment, the most exciting opportunities come round feeding into the development of policies and ways of making them happen, working out how strategies can be delivered through complex implementation mechanisms that combine financial, fiscal, regulatory and planning powers,” she says. Gavron has had a constant round of meetings with “all the stakeholders” in the spatial development of London: housebuilders, architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects, academics, English Heritage and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. She invited 50 of them to a four-hour think-tank of the SDS policy directorate in July, understood to have been attended by Lord Rogers, planner Sir Peter Hall, Peabody Trust chairman Dickon Robinson and architect Piers Gough, although Gavron is reluctant to name names. She adds: “I tried to get a good cross-sector interdisciplinary group together. I don’t want people to think there is a closed group of people who are involved.” Several more brainstorming sessions are planned before the end of October.

Despite her protests, it is clear that a few people’s input has been particularly influential. Gavron is a devotee of Rogers’ urban design vision. She is reluctant to discuss the names of those that Rogers has enlisted to advise Livingstone, saying only: “There will be a core. I know that Richard is keen to invite [urban designer Oriol] Bohigas from Barcelona.” And Ricky Burdett, chair of the cities, architecture and engineering programme at the London School of Economics? “It would be crackers not to use someone like Ricky Burdett. But these things aren’t fixed. It is not to be exclusive.” However, she reveals: “Richard and I are very impressed with Jan Gehl’s work in Copenhagen. He is a very good architect and urban designer who has written some superb books on the public realm.”

She says one of her aims is “to transform the way the street can be used in the next decade, thinking about the next generation of public transport”. Potential initiatives include time-managed pedestrianisation of busy zones such as Soho and town centres across London. “Have you heard of Curitiba, the fastest-growing metropolis in Brazil? That has influenced me enormously. We should have express radial and orbital buses like they do there, and smaller hail-a-ride ones in the suburbs.”

Gavron is already laying the groundwork for some of these initiatives. “We’ve been talking to Alistair Morton [of the Strategic Rail Authority] to discuss the orbital rail network,” she says. “It will mean better signalling, better interchanges, a bit more track on existing east-west, north-south lines, and a seamless integration between rail and tube. The Strategic Rail Authority is willing to invest £450m in the network.”

And what of the mayor’s planning powers? The planning decisions unit, chaired by Giles Dolphin, former head of development control at the London Planning Advisory Committee, has a caseload of 78 planning applications, 14 of which were statutory referrals and 32 informal referrals from the boroughs.

Developers’ fears that the new tier of planning review would mean more bureaucracy and delays were plain by the flurry of applications rushed under the wire before the 3 July cut-off date. Yet after this indecent haste to escape Livingstone’s scrutiny, his first strategic planning interventions were in support of high-rise schemes. Gavron rolls her eyes: “Uncertainty breeds speculation and paranoia. But I do think people are aware now of the GLA being inclusive. Everything we are doing is predicated on partnership and you can't achieve the things we are trying to achieve unless you work closely with the boroughs, CABE and English Heritage and with the private sector.”

Livingstone’s latest comments condemning the £500m Battersea Power Station and £440m Project Vauxhall developments for not including enough social housing are clearly a taste of things to come. So, was Tony Carey, managing director of developer St George, part of the joint-venture team behind the Project Vauxhall estate redevelopment, vexed by Livingstone’s intervention in the scheme that he has spent two years developing in consultation with the local community? “Not really, because it is a major issue. We do have to find practical ways to provide more affordable housing,” he says.

Gavron admits that Livingstone’s vociferous support for tall buildings opened the floodgates to a rush of informal approaches from developers with tower proposals. This has caught the planning unit somewhat on the hop, as the opinions expressed by Livingstone are a departure from the tall buildings policy in the London Planning Advisory Committee’s “endowment to the mayor” – the blueprint for the SDS. Gavron intends to draft an updated policy urgently. “I am very keen to agree an up-to-date, robust policy framework for tall buildings in advance of the completion of the SDS.” The policy will include “introducing clusters of tall buildings” in mixed-use developments around transport interchanges.

Gavron says sensitive design is crucial. “You’d be looking very much at the scale of the development, its impact. To date, tall buildings have not created a good environment for many people who live and work at the feet of them. I want to be clear that when we look back from the future, we have got it right.”

How in practice is the mayor and the GLA going to make sure London gets it right? “We change the climate, we set standards, we provide incentives, have competitions, all sorts of ways. We are going to work closely with CABE, and English Heritage is currently seconding help to our planning team.”

Gavron also stresses the mayor’s determination to redress the imbalance of investment in areas most blighted by the 1960s planning regime and industrial decline: “The SDS, working with the London Development Agency, can address this great crescent of deprivation that goes all the way up the Lee Valley, out towards the East Thames Corridor.”

One of the tools Gavron intends to use is to involve the wider public in debate about proposed new development. She has been persuaded by the Architecture Foundation of the value of having an architectural information centre in central London. “I think it’s a very good idea. It would be an architectural design centre where Londoners can see proposals in a model form or in a virtual form.”

Gavron is also charged with helping Livingstone make an impact on London’s affordable housing crisis, despite having no statutory powers.

“I always say, ‘He who has the gold, has the rule’, and for the mayor it really is unfortunate that he doesn’t have control over the funding sources for housing. But an enormous amount can be done through his planning powers and through the whole planning framework and by working with the other players, particularly the housebuilders.”

Gavron has met twice with the House Builders’ Federation in the past couple of months. Julian Smith, the HBF’s director of public affairs, said discussions had focused on “how to get the planning system in London working more efficiently, particularly on developments needed to meet the government’s brownfield targets. And how to tackle the shortage of affordable housing, by creating balanced communities with a mix of private, private rental and innovative low-cost solutions like shared ownership.”

A new Housing Commission, headed by Chris Holmes, director of the homeless charity Shelter, has been set up to enquire into and set targets for London’s affordable housing needs. It will report by 31 October. “The Housing Commission will have to open up a dialogue with government about London’s housing need. We might not have all the mechanisms we want – financial, fiscal and regulatory – but when the commission reports, we will be talking to government about our findings.”

Although Gavron laments the GLA’s lack of powers over housing, she is gung-ho about what it can achieve with the resources it has. “The London Development Agency has inherited land from English Partnerships, so we have land, planning power, regeneration moneys, transport moneys, and a growing partnership with the Strategic Rail Authority, which has money. So, we have a unique package of partnerships, powers and influence with which to start doing something about disparities of wealth and opportunity and to start improving the built environment, the street scene and the quality of life of Londoners.”