Architectural agency and public value
by Tom Fox | @tomfredfox
If the concept of public value is absent from contemporary economic theory, the same cannot be said for architecture.
The discipline has a long history of using space to create common good — forming equitable cities that encourage interaction between strangers, bind communities together and creating opportunities to people to participate in the social, political and economic life of their surroundings. Architecture and urbanism create public value through the coordination of a critical mass of private interests that are together more than the sum of their parts.
Despite the important role of urban space in creating public value, the architectural profession is increasingly put to work in extracting and shifting value. The transfer of value through real estate has been gradually growing over the final decades of the 20th century, but since the financial crisis of 2008 this has become particularly acute. In a single year between mid-2014 and mid-2015, $55bn was invested in London property, a growth of 13.4% on the previous year.
“Architecture has expelled the messy and the idiosyncratic in order to become a reliable means of revenue.”
In order for architecture to be a reliable investment its brief has changed. Instead of architectural value being created through meeting the needs of those that live in it or around it, its value is derived from its ease of commodification. The result on the city is clear. Architecture has expelled the messy and the idiosyncratic in order to become a reliable means of revenue.
Richard Rogers has forged his career in parallel to this shift in the priorities of the architectural profession. Speaking at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) lecture series on public value, Rogers reflected on how his own career has had to confront these challenges, and the multiple ways he has been able to influence public policy and urban planning.
Rogers’ ability to create public buildings consistent with his civic spirit and to boost the public value of intrinsically private briefs has given him the credibility to take on roles explicitly in the name of the public good, from advising London mayors, chairing the UK Government’s Urban Task Force of the 1990s and becoming a Labour peer in the House of Lords.
In these public roles Rogers has led initiatives that have had substantial impact in guiding urban policies that orchestrate the many private interests that make up the city into public value.
The generosity and civic sprit of Rogers is an example to follow — but his career cannot be a blueprint for achieving this agency. The Pompidou Centre, a tipping point in Rogers’ career, is almost unthinkable for a young architect today — both in the scale of project he was able to take on at such a young age, which current public procurement processes would make almost impossible, and in the audacity to only build on half of the central Paris site in order to create public space on the other half.
This period of Roger’s career corresponds to a sharp fall in architects working in the public sector — from 49% in the 1970s to less than 1% today — alarming when considering the impact of Rogers’ public positions on town and city planning.
The huge reduction in public sector architects has not been mirrored by an increase in the agency of private sector architecture — in fact, quite the opposite. The agency of public sector architects 50 years ago was drawn from their integration of doing research and collecting evidence, creating masterplans, designing buildings and deciding how they will be looked after. Today, these tasks have been fragmented into a number of specialisms represented by a spectrum of consultancies.
This shift in agency in part accounts for the difficultly the profession has in countering the triumph of exchange-value over the use-value of architecture. Without this broad spectrum of services, architecture is constrained by the narrow (and often commercial) interests of their client.
“More architects need to defend the use-value of architecture over its value as a commodity.”
This kind of generalist thinking is critical in creating just, open and sustainable cities, however taking this position in the private sector is a risk, making potential commissioners uncertain of the service you are able to provide. More architects need to work at the point where multiple private interests are coordinated to form the public interest, and to defend the use-value of architecture over its value as a commodity.
The impact Rogers has had on urban policy in the UK demonstrates the urgent need to expand public sector architecture and urban design, where being able to work across departmental silos — for instance, explaining how better designed public spaces could create public health benefits, or how higher sustainability credentials of social housing can minimise future operating costs — serves to strengthen your agency.
But a public sector with more architects is not enough in itself. Major voices in the UK construction industry are calling for better resourced planning departments as a means to accelerate the building of homes. While greater design scrutiny of planning applications would be an improvement, this idea of public planning — there to grease the wheels of the construction industry — fails to account for the transformative impact architects could have in strategic positions.
Explaining how he came to chair the Urban Task Force, Rogers hints at the scope of this role in his response to the then UK prime minister Gordon Brown’s call originally asking him to look at housing: “I’d be willing to do it if we look at towns and cities, and housing, in other words the environment in general”.
Tom Fox is an Associate at Public Practice (@PRACTICEPUBLIC), a social enterprise focused on bringing a new generation of planners to city governments to shape places for the public good. Public Practice is also a founding member of IIPP’s Mission-Oriented Innovation Network.
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