When Boris Johnson first ran for London mayor, in 2008, he promised not to create “Dubai-on-Thames”, the parade of riverside towers intended by his rival, Ken Livingstone. Oh no, of course not. What the city is actually getting, as he prepares to leave for possibly higher office, is a Dubai-on-Westbourne, -on-Lee, -on-Effra, -on-Bollo Brook, -on-Quaggy, and indeed on most of the obscure tributaries and secondary rivers of the capital, as well as on the Thames, and many of the spaces between them. For, as is possibly now dawning on a wider public, it is hopelessly naive to believe that Johnson believes something when he says it. You didn’t think he really meant it, did you? Ha ha ha. What a card he is.

It’s not just about tall buildings, although the number of towers higher than 20 storeys proposed for London now stands at more than 400. It’s also about bloated, bulging, light-blocking buildings of medium height, and about the limited attempts to insist on design quality, or to get new developments to create neighbourhoods that are more than a sum of their parts, or have any meaningful relationships with the areas into which they are inserted.

The Whitechapel Sainsbury’s plan has the makings of a half-decent piece of urbanism if it were 15% or 20% less greedy

In the dying days of the Johnsonian empire, several proposals indicate the sort of city he is leaving behind. Some are hoping for a final signoff before he goes, in the manner of outgoing American presidents pardoning their disreputable mates, or to benefit from the inattention of the election and interregnum. Some will be in the in-tray of his dazed successor.

They include a hefty tower in Chiswick, west London, almost certainly a harbinger of other as-yet-undisclosed lumpy towers around it, which as objectors say will wreck the setting of the nearby Gunnersbury Park. As is usual in such proposals there is no indication of the collective effect of this and the other future towers that would follow, no vision of the radically altered district they would create, or suggestion of how such things as schools and transport would handle the new numbers. There is the recently approved redevelopment of New Scotland Yard, close to Westminster Abbey, with strident blocks rising to 20 storeys that significantly increase the scale of development close to the venerable monument. On the Isle of Dogs is a planned tower, which along with others contributes to a bizarre, half-accidental urban experiment whereby the district called South Quay might end up with the highest residential densities in the world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A phalanx of towers that will cast land to its north in almost permanent shadow’: the planned development in Bishopsgate Goodsyard, east London.

In Whitechapel, east London, on a site owned by J Sainsbury plc, a close-packed set of blocks culminate in a 100-metre tower that has attracted more than 5,000 signatures in opposition. They object to its effect on a nearby conservation area and Grade-I listed almshouses of the style and time of Christopher Wren. On 18 April a public hearing starts to help the mayor decide on Bishopsgate Goodsyard, also east London, where a phalanx of towers is proposed that would cast a swath of land to its north into almost permanent shadow.

In some there are signs of what might be called good architecture struggling to get out, but it’s not enough to overcome weak planning. The Chiswick Curve and Alpha Square both have a sort of curvaceous stylishness thanks to their architects, Egret West and Pilbrow and Partners. Whitechapel Square, as the Sainsbury’s project is called, is in the sober, gridded style of current critically approved architecture. The perspectives show pleasant-looking open spaces, miraculously sunlit in what are canyons between the blocks, presumably made possible by the sort of occasional solar alignment that causes Stonehenge to light up at the summer solstice. The plans show that these spaces follow something like a traditional street pattern. But then you realise that they are actually raised on a podium two storeys high, so as to slide a supermarket underneath, which reduces their resemblance to actual streets.

Density is necessarily in itself bad, but it requires a degree of skill in planning and design that is not on offer

In all cases the arguments for development are similar: that London is growing, that it needs more homes, that change is in the city’s nature, that the unacceptable alternative would be to build on the green belt, that the city should be open for business and investment. All sound reasonable. The issue is whether the proposals in question are the best ways to achieve them.

For, as is by now well known, the majority of apartments created by such schemes are priced too high to be much use in addressing London’s most pressing needs, but are at best clumsy mechanisms whereby a diminishing tithe of “affordable” housing can be extracted from developers. The definition of “business” to which London is “open” tends overwhelmingly to be the quick bucks to be made from property speculation, rather than places offering long-term employment, which tend to be squeezed out by the rush for residential development. As for the green belt, it is now a pressing question how much the public spaces of London, and parks like Gunnersbury, should be compromised in the name of sometimes indifferent and inaccessible fields in Surrey. It is also reasonable to ask whether London’s low-density outer suburbs could not soak up more of the pressure currently being felt by the inner boroughs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Fiddling with vanity projects while the city burns with clumsy overdevelopment’: Boris Johnson at the Shard, London, 2014. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

It also has to be asked how far the logic of stacking up units can be pushed. Why not maximise everything everywhere? Why worry about daylight or open space at all? Why bother with keeping historic buildings, old churches, and anything else that gets in the way of optimising the figures? At some point even the most dedicated numbers fanatic would accept that quality has to be asserted against quantity. The Whitechapel Sainsbury’s plan, for example, has the makings of a half-decent piece of urbanism if it were maybe 15% or 20% less greedy. As it stands it should be dispatched by planners back to its developers and architects as a crude imposition on a rich and historic part of London.

Even so, the main point is not that density is necessarily in itself bad, but that it requires a degree of skill in planning and design that is not on offer. If South Quay is to be a place of unequalled urban intensity, rather than an accidental heap of investment units, perhaps those who would have it so could show us what this wondrous place will be like? Richard Rogers argued long ago that cities such as Barcelona and Paris, and indeed some historic parts of British cities, show that high densities help cities thrive if well planned and designed. His theory was built into both national and London policies, but while the part that was about increasing numbers is ever more enthusiastically adopted, the parts about planning and design have been progressively watered down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The new view in Elder Street, Shoreditch, if the Bishopsgate Goodsyard development is approved.

This is not all the London mayor’s responsibility. As Tony Travers of the LSE likes to point out, the enthusiasm for ever greater housing numbers is partly the result of government policy that pushes local authorities into raising more and more of their revenue from granting planning permission for housing, while reducing it from other sources. Both South Quay and current proposals for Whitechapel, which as well as the Sainsbury’s site include other clutches of towers, reflect the enthusiasm of the former mayor of the borough of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, for pushing development numbers as hard as he could. He commissioned a masterplan, “Whitechapel vision” from the architects BDP, which, rather than set out standards that developers might be expected to meet, seemed to beg them to do their trashiest work. It proposed random and clashing skyscrapers squeezed wherever they might go, plus nugatory and ill-considered attempts to improve the “public realm” between them.

But the London mayor has the power to overrule boroughs’ decisions to approve or refuse planning permission. He and his office are also directly involved in what are called opportunity areas, and write planning policy. These powers can be used to set standards, to lead by example, to show what a stupendously beautiful place, as Johnson might put it, the new “densified” London could be. Instead he has approved all of the projects he has chosen to determine, often overruling boroughs’ opposition. In opportunity areas such as Vauxhall and Nine Elms, attempts to insist on quality in planning and design have been sketchy and flimsy. The widely praised redevelopment of King’s Cross gives some clues how it might be done, but they are not followed.

There are hints that Bishopsgate Goodsyard might be one project where the mayor asserts that developers are going too far, in which case there should be some joy that a sinner repenteth. But such a decision would not fundamentally alter the fact that current patterns of growth in London are signs of weakness in government, not strength, bulging up opportunistically wherever it can, rather than in the places where it would best serve the city. At the same time, of course, Johnson has backed a series of gestures that don’t deliver what they promised: the Olympic Park’s Orbit tower, which now requires the addition of a £3.5m slide to boost its flagging popularity, the barely used cable car called the Emirates Airline, the Garden Bridge.

Goodbye Boris. You have not left your city, as the Ephebic oath required of Athenians, more beautiful than you found it. You have been more like Nero, fiddling with vanity projects while it burns with clumsy overdevelopment. Ultimately this is bad for business and bad for the London brand, promoting as it does both a speculative bubble and shoddy products. To this extent those much-courted overseas investors, as they will come to realise, are being conned. It is, to switch from ancient Rome, like making over a house with gym, Jacuzzi and conservatory, while leaving the plumbing rickety and dry rot untouched.

Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century by Rowan Moore is published by Picador (£20). Click here to buy it for £16





Five Johnson projects

Mount Pleasant

The redevelopment of the Royal Mail’s sorting office in Islington, north London, was vehemently opposed by local residents for its fortress-like qualities and limited contribution to local housing needs. Objectors commissioned an alternative scheme, which showed how more homes could be fitted on to the site with a less insensitive design. None of this was good enough for Johnson, who used his powers to approve the developers’ plans. The developers took the opportunity to reduce their provision of affordable housing still further.

Convoys Wharf

A billion-pound project for 3,500 homes with three new towers in Deptford, south-east London. The developers Hutchison Whampoa complained that the local council was holding things up by making too many demands. The council, Lewisham, said that the problems were caused by the developers’ failure to cooperate. Johnson chose to believe Hutchison Whampoa, and approved their proposals in 2014, in the name of speeding up development. Two years later, not much is happening there.

Cycle superhighways

Clumsy in design and execution, and criticised for the disruption caused by building several at once, the intention is entirely reasonable – that London improves its traffic movement by encouraging bicycles, which are healthier and take up less space than cars. Critics say they will simply cause traffic jams. Their merit will depend entirely on whether they do their job.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Arcelormittal Orbit sculpture in the Olympic Park. Photograph: Alamy

ArcelorMittal Orbit

Johnson promised that this would be a free gift, paid for by the sponsorship of the ArcelorMittal steel company; it actually needed several million pounds of top-up in public money. He said it would be a “corporate money-making venture” and “rouse the curiosity and wonder of Londoners and visitors”, but it lost more than £500,000 a year in running costs, and will now have a £3.5m helter-skelter slide added, by the artist Carsten Höller, in order to boost its dismal visitor numbers.

Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea

A planning framework was established for this “opportunity area”, the most significant zone of redevelopment in central London, whose rules developers were then allowed to break. The result will be mediocre architecture and planning, some canyon-like streets, and new tall building that will make the existing St George Wharf tower – condemned by a planning inspector as unsuitable for this sensitive site – look almost modest.