IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepcnp/432.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Trophy architects and the ‘dark matter' of London’s planning system

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Cheshire
  • Gerard Dericks

Abstract

A quarter of London's skyscrapers are designed by architects who have already won a lifetime achievement award and whose work thus has the imprimatur of 'iconic design'; this compares with just 3% in Chicago. According to research by Paul Cheshire and Gerard Dericks, employing such 'trophy architects' can get a London developer a valuable extra 19 floors on a representative site. Their study shows how in the highly uncertain world created by the UK planning system's decision-making method, it is worth spending a fortune to 'game' the system and get more space when you are successful. They explain the costs to society of these incentives to 'game' the system.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Cheshire & Gerard Dericks, 2014. "Trophy architects and the ‘dark matter' of London’s planning system," CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance 432, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepcnp:432
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp432.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Land use regulation; regulatory costs; rent-seeking; office markets;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents
    • J6 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
    • R52 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - Land Use and Other Regulations

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepcnp:432. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/centrepiece/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.