BY TIM WATERMAN

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has switched off the public life support to London?s embattled Garden Bridge, a tempestuous, contested, and deeply symbolic idea that will die tightly clutching a sheaf of contemporary perversions of the civic good, a cautionary portfolio of design?s worst addictions.
Its life charts a course through the sordid world of politics and displays how the ambitions of the nation?state and the re-emerging city?state have uncoupled from democracy and attached to unplaceable global flows of power and money. The people are left helpless in a muddle of endless doubt, misinformation, threat, and the magical thrall of consumer glamour and celebrity pull. All this is held within the fading body of the Garden Bridge. City skylines have become trophy cabinets of branded building concepts (Witold Rybczynski has written compellingly of this here), increasingly greenwashed to pull the heartstrings of a populace that still largely wishes to see good done in the world. Although the Garden Bridge design lacked the space of the sky as isolating backdrop, it made up for it with the clean plane of the River Thames in a site chosen not for its dearth of transportation opportunities but for its eminently Instagrammable setting.
Its protagonist was the former mayor Boris Johnson, for whom it was another high-profile vanity project, like his cable car to nowhere (the ?Dangleway,? as it is known), and the awful red loopy thing at the London Olympics. Joh...