London’s creative classes are caught up in an urban renewal hamster wheel that’s escalating property prices across the capital – and there’s no way off without leaving the city entirely. The result might well be a British capital that’s rich, quiet, and semi-deserted thanks to the investment properties of the global elite — a larger, chillier Monaco. (via placeswire.org)

London is in danger of losing its creative class, warn Barber & Osgerby. Another expired canary to fling onto the cheerful yellow heap outside the coalmine that is the London property market – alongside Rohan Silva's urgent plea earlier this year that the capital's technology sector was threatened by the housing shortage, and a slew of Why I'm leaving London essays by journalists, artists and novelists.

The creative class is in an uncomfortable position in the broader, nationally important, story of London's property bubble and the housing crisis. For a start, it's difficult to work with an unwieldy concept like "the creative class".

At one end there are deeply indebted architecture graduates struggling through internships and sleeping on friends' floors. At the other, there's Norman Foster, who shrugged off the whole problem with the splendid "circle of life, sunrise, sunset" philosophical equilibrium that must come a little easier when you're on the Sunday Times Rich List.

And there are those who would find it hard to summon up any sympathy for the "creative class" in general given that it's mostly not at the truly sharp end of the housing crisis – for instance, struggling with the implications of the Bedroom Tax, or 15 to a room in an illegal "bed in a shed", or being evicted from a housing estate to make way for its demolition.

But "creatives" (I know, I know, that's even worse) have a unique and problematic status because of the governing urbanist ideology. They are mythologised as the tooth fairies of urban renewal, or perhaps its compost heap. Post-industrial leftovers are transmuted (indirectly) into gold. Leave a heap of dilapidated warehouses in a post-industrial corner of the city, inscrutable biological processes take over, and from the creative compost luxury flats and boutiques bloom.1

• 1. http://www.dezeen.com/2015/09/25/will-wiles-opinion-london-creative-classes-urban-regeneration-housing-crisis-collapse/