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FACING THE CONSEQUENCES: WOMEN AND URBAN GOVERNANCE
REFORM IN LONDON AND TORONTO
County Hall, with its curved central arm embracing the Thames and long, well-
proportioned wings on either side, stands as one of the most imposing buildings
on London’s south bank. Completed after World War I to house the London
County Council, this block-long stone edifice still stares down, across
Westminster Bridge, at the hardly insignificant houses of Parliament and offices
of Whitehall. In 1965, County Hall became the home of an expanded and
renamed London regional government, the Greater London Council (GLC).
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In
2003, however, County Hall houses two hotels, an aquarium, a luggage shop,
two art galleries and an array of private condominiums. It is no longer the seat of
London government, having been stripped of that occupant in 1986 when
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative central government shut down the GLC.
As part of a larger effort to decentralize and modernize the British unitary
state, Tony Blair’s New Labour regime created a strategic governing authority for
London with a directly elected executive mayor and 25-member scrutiny
assembly. Operational since 2000, the new Greater London Authority (GLA) has
its city hall in an egg-shaped, Norman Foster-designed glass structure, also on
the south bank, just west of Tower Bridge. The GLA’s jurisdiction includes
transport, spatial planning and public safety across inner and outer London; the
unit co-exists with 32 local boroughs and the square-mile City of London.
Some 3500 miles across the Atlantic, Toronto City Hall looms above a
large public square as a high-rise pair of glass and concrete crescent moons
Convention