Are East London Planners aware of the Government's plan for a high-tech East End?

No? Well read this article (link).

David Cameron wants to create a Silicon Valley-type business district from Old Street to the Olympic Park. In his address to the CBI (the voice of business) on Nov 4th, he outlined plans to get companies like Google, Facebook, Cisco, Vodafone, Imperial Innovations, Silicon Valley Bank and Barclays to set up hubs and invest in East London. I've shortlisted some quotes so you get a flavour:

"There are now over one hundred high-tech companies in the area. There’s the potential for nearly one million square feet of flexible office and research space which our technology companies could expand in to...

We understand where previous governments have gone wrong. They believed that they could design and create a technology cluster from on-high. But the lessons from Silicon Valley are instructive. There was no grand centralised plan...

We will help to create the right framework, so it’s easier for new companies to start up, for venture capital firms to invest, for innovations to flourish, for businesses to grow...

With our new Entrepreneur Visa we want the whole world to know that Britain wants to become the home of enterprise and the land of opportunity. I want to encourage the sort of creative innovation that exists in America."

This is typical of the Tories. They don't like Planning and criticise the Central and Regional Governments for carefully planning cities. They'd prefer the growth was 'organic', ie: market-led, which we all know results in poor quality of space, uneven development and isolated pockets of negelect, often inhabited by the poor and dispossessed.

The irony is that Cameron is planning. But he's not using the usual tools or methods. He's supplementing the usual bedrock of planning - physical, environmental and social considerations - for business deals, new Visa schemes, migration caps, and changes to IP law. He is bypassing all the usual steps and marginalising millions of people, to create a loose, untested, top-down plan, direct from Central Government that ignores the context in pursuit of global investment.

Any ideas of how to intervene?