Where there’s a will, is there a way? Reflections on the institutional afterlife of the London Docklands Development Corporation

In planning systems across the world, there has been a renewed interest in time-limited agencies as vehicles for delivering urban regeneration. While widely promoted for their effectiveness and efficiency, such organizations also raise important questions about the long-term governance of place. This paper makes a conceptual and empirical contribution to debates about urban development and time-limited planning. It introduces the notion of an ‘institutional afterlife’ to explore how development corporations behave when faced with their own demise. We draw on interviews, policy documents, and archival material to examine the case of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), which operated from 1981 to 1998. The paper explores how the LDDC approached its ‘institutional death’ and sought to shape its afterlife. It reveals how exit strategies were shaped by temporal awareness, inter-institutional conflict, and political and reputational concerns. We argue that a deeper understanding of the relationship between death and afterlife in typically time-limited organizations can help clarify the temporal dimensions of urban governance and planning.