Designing the Multilingual City: Architecture for London’s Diverse Communities

Before you get to the tube station on a Saturday afternoon, you will hear at least a dozen different languages as you stroll down Whitechapel Road. Somali greetings reverberate by the bus stop, a Polish couple quarrels quietly over a stroller, and Bengali drifts out of the confectionery stores. However, the street itself doesn’t respond. The majority of the signage is in English. The wayfinding relies on a level of literacy that the street has long since outgrown. It has a subtle irony to it.

Although London has always been a city of immigrants, there has never been a greater disparity between the people who live here and the people for whom the buildings were intended. Approximately 40% of Londoners were foreign-born. Every day, more than 300 languages are spoken. However, a large portion of the city’s infrastructure—from glass towers completed last year to housing estates constructed in the 1960s—remains based on an outdated notion of what it means to be a Londoner.

This might be slowly changing. The authors of a recent report by Mott MacDonald, which was created in collaboration with Transport for London and Places for London, advocate for what they refer to as a “mindset shift,” which involves integrating social inclusion from the outset of a project rather than retrofitting it later. The language is cautious, bordering on diplomatic. However, the implication is more pointed than it first appears. The argument being made is that good intentions haven’t worked out on their own.

Architects in Tower Hamlets and Barking & Dagenham, for example, have begun to think differently about little things. where a balcony is located. How a shared courtyard is accessible through a kitchen window. Whether a community center offers a women-only swim hour, a prayer room, or a notice board that doesn’t presume fluency in English. These seem like insignificant details. They’re not. The small details determine whether neighbors nod or never speak, as one designer stated at a recent panel.

There is a persistent belief that inclusive design is more expensive, slows down processes, and complicates spreadsheets. The evidence seems to indicate otherwise. According to research from Bristol University, which was referenced in the Mott MacDonald report, well-designed community interventions can have social returns of up to one to six in terms of reduced crime, healthcare costs, and improved school results. Though unevenly, investors appear to be catching on. The projects that the people writing the checks are most familiar with continue to receive the fastest funding.

Walking around the city, I’m struck by how frequently the best examples of multilingual design are unintentional. The staff at a Newham library speaks six different languages. There is a community garden in Hackney where no one could agree on which scripts to use, so the signs are in pictograms. People who had to make things work came up with these solutions from below. The question is whether London’s planning system can scale that intelligence without becoming flat.

It’s difficult to ignore the stakes. People tend to stay, raise their children, and create enduring things in cities that are designed with everyone in mind. London has the resources, the talent, and the information. It lacks a consensus that this is important enough to be done consistently. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next ten years. There’s a feeling that the next great building in London won’t be the shiniest or tallest. It may be the one that just gives more people a sense of community.