How to design a city?

I'm going to throw an idea into the mix and say that London is probably the perfect city already. That's because it hasn't been designed. It has grown up over a couple of thousand years organically, to suit the needs of Londoners. It has been shaped by its people and has adapted as new needs have come along - e.g, some wider roads, underground sewers, tube trains, expansion, industry, suburbs. We may not like all of it, and there may be an awful lot of things that do not suit us, but it suits most of the people most of the time, and that makes it as good as a city can be. Start with a clean sheet of paper and you can't hope to get a city that people can connect with on a personal level. However inconvenient certain aspects of it may be, people over the centuries have loved London. I can't imagine anyone is similarly passionate about Milton Keynes.

You address a very important point. However, if we stay on the subject of transport planning for a moment, when you say that London hasn't been designed, this is only true in the sense that until the 20th century there weren't big masterplans trying to encompass everything. But what was already there before were powerful interests that strongly determined what was done.

Take the root causes of why London is such an over-dominant megacentre that sucks the lifeblood out of large swathes of the rest of the country. London's patterns of suburban railway development are overly radial, which causes crippling over-centralisation, as powerful interests dictated the over-development of the centre.

In theory, London is one city the size of Berlin and about four cities the size of Munich (say, one centred at each of the cardinal points of the compass). But because its transport patterns effectively prevent the cohesion of the outer parts, it is more like a city the size of Berlin and hundreds of villages. This draws disproportionately many people into its over-congested centre.

I really wish that London had been shaped 'by its people' but the reality is that it has largely been shaped by business interests. Planning law is heavily skewed in favour of developers, or take Crossrail now--another railway line smack bang through the centre of London, which will cause further over-centralisation. Business considers this line so important that it is even willing to contribute to its costs (a little).

You're absolutely right that the kind of blank slate planning that has produced Milton Keynes isn't an ideal way, either, but London is just too extreme in almost every way to serve as a template for desirable city development, and certainly don't agree that it has grown up to suit the needs of Londoners (and I do take your point that we can't have it all to suit us ideally). There are places that I for one really like in London, and I'm sure everybody has those places, but I can very rarely feel much of a sense of ownership of these places. London is something that fills me more with a sense of awe than with love.

It's a difficult balance to achieve between over- and under-determining things, and perhaps putting in place a basic template on which people can subsequently exert their own creativity in a sustainable way is impossible. In the meantime, we have to make do with what we've got and do exactly what you say: change London to make it suit the needs of Londoners:

http://www.transitiontowns.org/

http://www.localworks.org/

And, of course, London needs more walking and cycling, to knit those local places together with a proper social network and enable more sustainable living.