The city planner’s crazy plan to solve the UK’s housing crisis

2024-08-05 06:44:20

While the British government has developed a new plan to deal with the housing shortage across the channel, Ian Mulcahey, an urban planning consultant, plans to build a new city on artificial islands.

The British are cramped. The United Kingdom resisted “to the greatest housing crisis in living memory”, to use the words of the government across the channel. The problem is such that it would be necessary to build a city the size of London to solve it, according to estimates from the Anglo-Saxon economic media. Bloomberg . Faced with the emergency, the British Ministry of Housing published on Tuesday July 30 an amendment to its road map for “Correct the mistakes of the past and put us on the right path to deal with the housing crisis”. This new plan involves building 1.5 million homes across Britain.

And why not build these houses on the water? This is the idea proposed by Ian Mulcahey, a British urban planner from the architectural firm Gensler, to respond to this shortage. The entrepreneur plans to build a new city 70 km east of London, on a sea of ​​artificial islands in the mouth of the Thames.

Ian Mulcahey, who has already developed city plans for Dubai and Abu Dhabi, envisions a city in the style of Amsterdam or Copenhagen. The city manager has the idea to form a similar one “London Manhattan” was connected to the British capital by a fast train. “In terms of density it can be like Paris or Barcelona, ​​​​​​​​or it can be a low density city like London, with houses and gardens”, he explained in the column of Bloomberg. On paper, the project meets various criteria. “That’s where the demand and activity is the highest, and that’s where the viability is probably the greatest.”, noted the merchant. The shallow bed of the estuary could also facilitate the establishment of this new city. “It’s something the Dutch have been creating for years”Ian Mulcahey argued.

Underwater limits

However, such a project is exposed to various pitfalls. First of all, ecology. The Thames Estuary is home to marshes and mudflats which provide important food reserves for many species of migratory birds. In 2012, the architectural firm Gensler had abandoned its airport project on the London estuary for the same reasons.

An airport project proposed by Gensler architecture firm in 2012.
Gensler

The project will also be threatened by rising seas. The question has already been asked in estuary towns in the south east of England such as Newport or Bristol. “By 2100, parts of the Bristol Channel could experience a water level rise of up to half a metre”warns Grahame Madge, spokesman for the British meteorological office in March 2024 in the columns of the local newspaper Bristol Post. In addition to its environmental issues, the project will also have to receive approval and financial support from the British government. Without it, the city envisioned by Ian Mulcahey may not be out of the water.