Sustainable London? explores the rise of sustainable development policies as they relate to London, and evaluates their relevance and role in sustaining people and the places and environments in which they live. The contributors to this book show how sustainable development discourse has permeated different policy fields in London, including transport, housing, property development and education, and highlights the uneven impacts and effects, including the creation of new social inequalities and extending and deepening existing ones. The book is not a conventional textbook in that it does not seek to review, in any exhaustive sense, the spectrum of debates about sustainable development, planning, or the global city. This is a task beyond its scope, and such topics are already well covered in other texts in relation to London and other cities. Rather, our focus is the contradictory, and tension-laden, nature of sustainable development discourse, and the ways in which the term has filtrated into, and is shaping, aspects of London's socio-spatial futures. Such futures are, more often than not, presented as ‘good news’ stories, in which the rise in property values, and the appropriation of low-income housing areas by wealthy investors, is heralded as part of a city on the move, creating the basis for social and economic wellbeing.

This may be so for some, but the notion of sustainable development in London is closely aligned with a ‘growth first’ agenda, and the propagation of the market as the purveyor of London's infrastructure, ranging from the privatisation of its housing stock, to the supply of new public hospitals and educational facilities by private sector corporations. There is an elision between privatisation and sustainability, where one is more or less indistinguishable from the other, and the promotion of political rhetoric that Londoners’ wellbeing depends on people's activation as self-making individuals. The understanding is that whatever a person's status in London, with regards to access to a job, income and housing, it depends, in large part, on their individual characters and personal attributes, reflecting a roll back to social pathology.