The London 2012 Athletes’ Village displays signs of poor planning from the start

Housing nearly 3,000 units, the Olympic Village is the most substantial piece of city making undertaken in Britain for decades. It offers welcome evidence that the UK still has the capacity to undertake major urban transformation projects when it puts its mind to it, but speaks too of the poverty of the prevalent thinking about city planning in this country.

Seventeen different practices were employed, but their efforts at variety can’t disguise the fact that the masterplan was predicated on the use of blocks that are overbearingly large, set too far apart and unmodulated.

There is a comparison to be made with London’s Barbican where a single architect was tasked with the design of thousands of units of housing with far happier results.

There, the variety derives from the adoption of an extensive range of housing typologies, not a pick-and-mix selection of cladding treatments. The same could surely be said about any of the great urban set pieces of the past — Georgian Bath, for example, or Edinburgh New Town. We need our cities to be complex, but real complexity derives from intelligent urban planning. If the plan is bad, no amount of stylistic variation is going to save it.