Architect for Common Good: a non-profit model for public place-making
We believe that architects should work for the common good in public place-making, and should have the agency in bridging the gap between public and local authorities in public space making process with our professional knowledge. By establishing long-term collaborations with specific government planning bodies, we can achieve holistic design neighbourhood as a whole, at the same time ensuring a more secured business model founded on deeper trust through constant collaborations and communications.
Architect for the common good
The status quo of a privatised architectural industry is apparent — by 1976, 49% of all UK architects worked for the public sector, but the percentage has then decreased significantly to the current 0.7% since 1979. When compared to the private sector, the public sector has also seen a great loss of agency in shaping the city as the local budgets for planning and development have significantly dwindled since the financial crash in 2008. Taking London as an example, nearly half of the borough councils have no in-house design capacity.
How could we tilt the balance of the industry from creating private value for people who are already very rich, towards creating public value for the people who need it most? (Finn Williams, 2017)
To create public spaces and places that are truly what the public users desire, we see an urge for more architects to work for the common good rather than a small group of wealthy landlords. Reviewing the current RIBA Code of Professional Conduct which was drafted back in 2005, among the three principles there is only one clause touching slightly on the architects’ responsibility in delivering projects for local communities:
Clause 3.1 — Members should respect the beliefs and opinions of other people, recognise social diversity and treat everyone fairly. They should also have a proper concern and due regard for the effect that their work may have on its users and the local community.
While this vague clause is certainly not enough in addressing the responsibility of architects in the delivery of public projects, we aim to recognise the importance of integrating users’ needs and interests into our design, and advocate for a more proactive role of architects in achieving this objective.
We also see the limitation for more extensive public involvement in conventional project commissions in which competitions are most commonly used as allocation methods for public projects. In the case of London, land and financial support are allocated to local authorities (London Boroughs) by the Greater London Authority (Mayor of London). Project briefs would then be set corresponding to the local planning strategies and released as competition briefs via four types of competitions, namely open design contests, sortation selection, frameworks, invited design contests.
When public projects are commissioned through competitions or frameworks, we see very little consideration of common good and public’s opinions. In London Construction Plan Framework, for instance, the projects would be commissioned 40% based on price and 60% based on quality, reflecting that the project is usually commissioned highly dependent on monetary value of proposals.
Whereas sortation selection, frameworks and invited design contests certainly confine applicants to trained architectural talents, open contests also hold high threshold for submission. In many contests for public spaces or furniture design, printed drawings and computer renderings are required as deliverables, making public participation in the design process much less accessible.
Therefore, we endeavour to propose a model of intimate collaborations between the local authorities, residents and our practice using video game as a medium that can lower the threshold of participation and increase transparency in design submission processes in order to open up design possibilities for real users of public places.
Partnership with Local Authorities
To establish a parallel relationship with government and public that allows us to introduce public involvement as early as in the brief-drafting process and question the conventional client-consultant relationship, we will establish ourselves as a Community Interest Company (CIC) collaborating with local planning authority on a partnership agreement. We will take local planning authorities as strategic and delivery partners rather than clients; at the same time, we will take local residents as design collaborators as they play our game, so as to work together on the planning over large areas of neighbourhoods on a prolonged timeframe.
Our partnering local authority will be our important support in providing data of local demographics, public project planning objectives and site surveying information. Our partnership agreement with the local authority will set the legal foundation on which both parties agree on the objectives of work and principles of collaborations, while each maintaining the authority in making our own decisions on the use of funds. It will moreover ensure that shared database and accessibility to the design tools in our developed warehouse will be exclusive to the period of partnership, and our intellectual property to be vested to our own employees. This model of partnership with local authorities has already been proven successful in the cases of The Arts Council England, Sport England, and many more.
As a pilot scheme of this practice model, we will seek partnership with potential local councils that are looking to develop an extensive area of public projects within their local planning strategy. For instance, City of London Corporation has collaborated with the London Festival of Architecture to launch a series of competitions calling for designs for city parklets and green spaces within the borough. London Borough of Hackney is also delivering the Hackney Development Framework, which will be live May 2019, for a series of mixed programmes in Dalston, Hackney Central, Hackney Wick, Manor House, Shoreditch and Stamford Hill. In both examples we see the opportunity to intervene with our new model in public place-making which are more likely to guarantee a contented proposal for the whole neighbourhood.
Good cause explained in our non-profit CIC model
Though the CIC model does not strictly limit us to non-profit, we are dedicated to show our advocacy for the common good through a non-profit and transparent operation model. By doing so, we will be able to make sure any profits will be cycled back into our organisation to further our purposes, and the operation to be made visible to the public through the legally required submission of yearly reports detailing the activities undertaken and how these have benefited the community.
The model of Community Interest Company was introduced in 2005 as a legal form of social enterprises which operate to provide a benefit to the community they serve, which in our practice defined as the local residents in need for public spaces and projects. It grants us a clear purpose to deliver benefits to a community, at the same time a certain flexibility as the practice will be exempted from the regulatory regime of charity law. Working under the nonprofit model will allow us develop deeper trust through long-term collaboration with all stakeholders while maintaining our non-governmental independent position in making decisions and testing innovations. Our small scale office will also perform more thorough and prolonged engagement with local residents initiated by our ‘highly motivated employees’ who share the same vision and sense of satisfaction from work.
To keep our model on track we are also determined to confront the potential financial difficulty in obtaining funding. Apart from the funds offered by our partnering local authority, we seek to apply for funds available to small- to medium-sized enterprises offered by the government, such as Funding London set up by the Mayor of London in 2004, the Good Growth Fund, or the London SME Fund, etc. In boroughs where funds for frameworks are available, we will seek to divert the fund partially into our partnership project as a test-bed for new practice in public place-making.
As we welcome donations from public, private, group or individual financial supporters that share our proposition in augmenting accessibility to public involvement and the value of collective intelligence in public project design processes, we will remain cautious to any conflicts of interest between the common good we work for and the donations we receive. Our team of operation will hold conversations with interested supporters to carefully evaluate our collaboration possibilities. Supporters will be acknowledged publicly and revealed to the residents in the project neighbourhood.
In the long run, the initial work we do will be a pilot scheme and research work that contributes to the collective research archive of public project typologies that can potentially be used for partnerships with other local authorities in the future. The Creative Commons License of our game will ensure that the data collected and work generated will not be manipulated for commercial uses.
Allies on the path
Challenges do exist on the path of setting up our practice, but we realise that we are not alone. We see our allies working towards the same vision for delivering architecture for the public good — Public Practice, a not-for-profit social enterprise acting as broker between built environment experts and local authorities, is augmenting local authorities’ design capacities in public space design; Article 25, a registered architecture charity based in London, is working on worldwide design projects to improve health, livelihood and resilience to disasters. These allies have infused us with their success the confidence in working out our non-profit model with support from a network of partners and supporters.
