There’s an economic explanation for why London has so many skyscrapers that get up on their toes and say, “Look at me”: Developers hire star architects because doing so gives them a better chance of winning approval for taller, more profitable buildings, according to research by Paul Cheshire, an emeritus professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and others.1

Land-use decisions in Britain are mainly discretionary rather than rules-based, as in, for example, Chicago, Cheshire noted in his article last year. The elected committees that decide on applications in London are unpredictable and can be swayed by lobbying, he wrote.

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• 1. Cheshire and Christian Hilber, also of the London School of Economics, advanced the starchitect argument in an article way back in 2008. Cheshire and Gerard Dericks of the University of Oxford offered supporting evidence in a 2014 article and updated their argument with fresher data in 2020. Last year, Cheshire included the starchitect idea in an article for a policy journal of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He expanded his thinking in an interview with me last week.