London is entering a confident new era of public housing, says Paul Karakusevic, thanks to housing projects with pioneering new financial models.

The great cause of the early 21st century global city is public housing. While new museums, galleries and beautiful one-off houses grab attention the world over, it is affordable housing that is the fundamental enabler to the future health and vitality of the city.
After nearly four decades of neoliberal housing policy, London is waking up to the fact that its future prosperity depends on tackling a severe housing crisis and worsening inequality. To do that, it is reinventing public housing and embracing new architectural approaches, and its local democracy is again playing a central role in delivery. London gave the world public housing in the form of the council estate
At the end of the 19th century, London gave birth to big-city municipalism. It gave the world public housing in the form of the council estate, and with it some of the finest, most innovative dwellings the world had seen.
But in the 1970s, as the British economy faltered, the great urban project of housing the people started to crumble, inflation soared and funding became unworkable. Then, in the 1980s, a UK led by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government followed the example of the USA and shifted housing supply firmly to the right of politics. In doing so, the UK walked away from public housing, indeed the whole idea of the public city, and it turned almost...