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Thousands of “micro-homes” should be built as part of a nine-point plan to tackle London’s housing crisis, one of Britain’s leading architects said today.

John McAslan, whose work includes the redevelopment of King’s Cross station and Crossrail at Bond Street, said “radical” changes were needed to prevent the capital’s housing shortage from undermining its ability to remain a leading world city.

In “pocket” or “micro-housing” schemes, residents would live in spaces as small as 250 square feet. Mr McAslan said the idea would double the number of younger Londoners able to buy property, and was already being tested in projects in Willesden and Stratford.

He added: “We should promote the concept of micro-housing. In [London and New York], micro-housing formats are being designed and tested, recalling theories first explored in Europe in the Twenties and developed in legendary architectural projects such as the 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower [in Tokyo] and Habitat 67 in Montreal.”

He proposed a series of reforms he said would enable London to cope with a potential shortfall of at least 500,000 homes by 2020 without encroaching on the greenbelt. They include:

Relaxation of planning rules to allow more space above offices and shops to be used for housing;

Construction of a new wave of “medium-rise” buildings, modelled on New York’s tenements or London’s Peabody mansion blocks;

“Co-housing” projects, under which small groups of people are helped to buy land to build homes with shared facilities;

Greater cooperation between local authorities and private developers to raise the number of low-cost homes in new projects, and the creation of “community land trusts”;

Maximising use of brownfield sites.

Mr McAslan, whose work includes the restoration of the historic Iron Market in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and buildings in Rio de Janeiro, Doha, Istanbul and Moscow, will set out his plans in a lecture at the British Library on Monday.

He warned that without radical action the capital’s prosperity risked being undermined as talented young people find it increasingly difficult to live here: “Unless London resolves its affordability crisis, it will begin to lose its appeal as a place to live in and will sacrifice its pre-eminence.

“More people will be forced to live further from work, or outside London, and the number of homeless families and individuals will rise. Some £24 billion a year is spent on housing-related benefits, and unless the housing shortfall is reversed, this will increase. There has been a failure of successive governments.”