Farrell Review Workshop - Implementing the Recommendations

The Value of Good Design

Urban Rooms

See p139 of main report

A laissez-faire attitude to the concepts of value and quality permeates the built environment industry and the professions around it. This has resulted in a short-sighted, box-ticking approach to quality and value for money by developers and commissioning bodies. This approach is clearly not delivering the high-quality buildings and environments that will enable Britains communities to prosper into the future.

There is no accepted means of evaluating the particular qualities or performance of a building in its particular context. A new set of quantitative criteria could produce metrics accepted by all bodies in the property and construction industry

Questions

· How can we get an agreed system for valuing new development?

· Is there a consensus among PLACE institutions, developers, public and politicians as to what good design is? Is it a robust consensus?

· Is there a robust relationship between good design and value? What research is needed to prove or disprove it.

· Who do we need to convince and how?

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· What research do we need to undertake and who could fund it?

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· What should be the brief for the research - eg a properly designed case-control study?

1B.1

Every town and city without an architecture and built environment centre should have an urban room where the past, present and future of that place can be inspected

Recommendation #11

PLACE institutions and built environment agencies, the Design Network and the LGA could research the feasibility and viability of urban rooms (or Place Spaces) and establish pilots in different-sized towns and cities where there are no architecture and built environment centres.

• How can we create an urban room in a town or city
• What should it do?
• Where should it be located?
• What should be in it?
• Who should run it?
• How can it be funded?
• Should it be permanent, or temporary?

· How could virtual urban rooms best make a contribution?

Design Literacy

Proactive Positive Planning -

1B.3 - page 163

Places would be greatly improved if the people who make decisions about our built environment, such as planning committee members and highway engineers, were empowered by training in design literacy.

Recommendation #12

All individuals involved in making decisions about the built environment should receive basic training in placemaking and design literacy and it should be given the same status as legal and financial training for elected Councillors.

Recommendation #01

PLACE institutions and agencies should develop online resources for teachers and professionals to teach architecture and the built environment across a whole range of subjects

Design literacy for councillors

· What do councillors need to know about design

· What is the best way of doing it?

· How can it be funded?

Design literacy for engineers and other professionals

· What do highway engineers and other built environment professionals need to know about design

· What is the best way of doing it?

· How can it be funded?

Big-picture thinking and proactive planning are not done in the same way as they were in the immediate post-war period, yet property and construction are much more complex and need joining up now more than ever.

Recommendation #19

The PLACE Leadership Council (PLC) outlined in the Built Environment Policy section of this document (chapter 5) should work with government and representatives across the industry to bring about a revolution in support of proactive planning in this country. For the sustainability of our villages, towns and cities we have to reduce our reliance on reactive planning which is characterised by the current system of development control (or development management as it is now called).

Recommendation #56

The PLACE Leadership Council should produce a strategy and action plan for improving design quality within the everyday built environment in the first six months. This should include proposals to create a more proactive planning system and new place-based policies.

· Can we do proactive planning under the NPPF?

· Do we need further changes in policy - if so what are they, and how would we get the political support?

· Is proactive planning urban design?

· Is one of the keys to proactive planning funding?

· Is public funding of new highways (and practically nothing else) distorting development?

· How can proactive planning be made to work on:

- national scale

- city region scale.

- city wide

- town/neighbourhood

- streets and single sites?

Highways

A subject of your choice?

P 173

There should be reviews of highway regulations and specifications and more focus on design literacy for highway professionals. Some of the worst design impacts over the past fifty years have been from road schemes, with over-engineered junctions and intrusive signage ignoring the context of streets where public life is played out.

Recommendation #27

There should be major reviews of highway regulations and specifications and the design education of highway professionals. All highway schemes could be subject to a credible system of PLACE Review and local authorities should take a lead on implementing these

· Are existing highways regulations and practice science and evidence based?

· Who should undertake the review?

· How should it be resourced?

· What should the brief be?