Small strategy: Good design is everyone’s business
Small projects (and practices) have much to offer government, writes Olivia Hyde at the office of the Government Architect NSW. They can test ideas for use on a larger scale, reveal valuable community qualities and bring diversity to the urban landscape.
“Architecture and architectural freedom are above all a social issue that must be seen from inside a political structure, not from outside it.” – Lina Bo Bardi
In my mind, the terms “small” and “state government” don’t immediately sit together. In 2019, the state of New South Wales employed more than 400,000 people, making it the largest employer in the country. In the 2019–20 financial year, it will oversee a budget of more than $90 billion and implement more than 200 public infrastructure projects.
The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, within which the Government Architect (GANSW) is located, employs 14,000 of those 400,000, with the GANSW accounting for around 20. We are not the only employees with a design background in state government, but we are the only team with a dedicated design focus. We account for less than 0.2 percent of our department and 0.005 percent of the overall. Small is our reality, but as with any good small project, we try to do a lot with a little.
In the context of such a large machine, how and where do we position small? Small projects, small practice, small strategies? Eliel Saarinen famously proclaimed, “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” Working at state level, the challenge is that things usually flow in the other direction – there are many city plans but not much thinking about chairs. This is where an ability to work at many scales simultaneously – a core skill of the architect, landscape architect and urban designer – has great value. Much of our role at GANSW is to encourage and support consideration of the small in the definition of the big. This means bringing multiscalar thinking to bear early in projects so that it can inform the big moves. Design, in the form of spatial and qualitative approaches, allows project teams, communities and governments to understand the physical implications and opportunities of largescale thinking on the smaller human scale throughout the process of defining and developing a project, and then to use that knowledge to inform decision-making.
Small is still relative in this context. During the past five years, the New South Wales Department of Planning has been implementing changes to the planning system intended to move it to a more strategic model. This process began with the creation of District and Regional Plans to provide high-level strategic guidance for development across broad areas in response to state, national and international forces and policies, such as those on population growth, changing work patterns or climate change. Now local areas are creating Local Strategic Planning Statements to bring the next level of detail to these plans, responding directly but still strategically to local conditions. These statements will directly inform changes to Local Environmental Plans and, from there, inform Development Control Plans and then individual projects. At each sequential step down in scale – or up in granularity – the project, plan or scheme must indicate how it meets the strategic intentions of the step above. In this way, strategic responses at a state scale should inform detailed implementation of projects large and small on the ground. In the same way, global, national and state priorities on climate change, construction quality or public space will help guide the orientation and materiality of a new apartment building, the scale of a new public park or the location of a street tree and bench.
Running parallel to this is a move toward a performance- rather than a rulesbased approach. If a project aligns with the agreed strategic direction and can demonstrate that it will meet performance guidelines to encourage that direction, then it should be supported. Design has a crucial role to play here, too, in helping define what these more detailed, often qualitative criteria might be, in responding to them through design proposals and in establishing the mechanisms whereby they are evaluated.
GANSW’s Better Placed, an integrated design policy for the built environment launched in 2017, seeks to take this design-led, performance-based approach, outlining expectations for the quality of a project. The advantage of performance approaches is that they can open up a much broader field of operation. The challenge is how to evaluate them. In our draft “Evaluating Good Design,” GANSW created a checklist of characteristics of good design and listed them against the objectives of Better Placed. Approaches like this are intended to make it easier to include design quality (in its broadest sense) in the systems of project evaluation by creating a shared language and set of expectations across all members of the community. Good design becomes everyone’s business.
The big machine of government can also learn from the strategies of small projects. Small projects may not always have limited means, but most do. Small projects tend to be efficient, economical and often innovative in their responses to project conditions – all qualities one would
surely wish for in our public works. They may also pilot new ideas or approaches physically, in construction, materials or environmental systems; programmatically, in the use or interrelationship of spaces; or procedurally, for example through new ideas about the role of the architect. In this way, small projects can demonstrate or prove big ideas, providing a means to argue for larger, more structural change.
Small projects are often very closely connected to their place or community. Whether a building or an urban or landscape intervention they are often infill, addition or refurbishment. This closeness demands a detailed attention and responsiveness to context that is both physical and social. Thoughtful small projects can enable neighbourhoods to grow incrementally in ways that enhance the qualities valued by their communities, or make evident those qualities where they may previously have been ignored or undervalued, bringing new life, respect and activity.
And if diversity is part of what makes a city or a neighbourhood vibrant, then it is the combined effects of many parts, large and small, that create that mix. So small is also valuable as a collective: great cities need many authors.
For government, this means that small must also extend to the scale of the practice. It is New South Wales government policy to harness the know-how, skills and experience of small and medium-sized enterprises to grow industry capacity across businesses generally. As the government’s expert advisers on the built environment, we advocate for the creation of better opportunities for smaller practices on their own, through the assembly of diverse multidisciplinary teams, and via partnering of smaller practices with larger ones. One of our tools is the GANSW prequalification scheme, which has a category dedicated to emerging practices, with reduced red tape in terms of insurance and vetting to make it more accessible to this group. It is the only scheme in NSW that actively seeks to increase the access of smaller, younger design practices to government work.
And while it is no silver bullet to the many hurdles facing small practices that seek to shift into public work, it plays a small and, we hope, expanding role: the emerging category now has 24 percent of all listings in the scheme. Of those, 37 percent received government work in the past three years, totalling $3 million in consultancy fees.
But let’s get back to those small numbers. In 2017, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan launched a call to action to the built environment professionals of London under the banner “Good Growth by Design.” The Good Growth program has six “pillars” that include introducing a design review panel, supporting diversity, building design capacity within government, commissioning excellence, advocating best practice and introducing “design inquiries” to shape policy. There is much for us to learn from here.
As part of the intent to build capacity, the Greater London Authority committed to supporting a new social enterprise called Public Practice. Public Practice was established by two architects-turned-planners in response to the lack of design expertise in local government in the UK, something that has been in decline for 50 years following its high point in the 1960s and ’70s. The enterprise brokers placements for highly skilled built environment design professionals – architects, urban designers, landscape architects and others – within local authorities, giving the public sector cost-effective access to expert design know-how, and building a network and a shared culture of commitment to good design across the authorities and the participants. Public Practice also commissions guidance and advisory notes from their placement associates, building a library that is available for all councils, practitioners and the public to access online.
Three years on, there is a renaissance in public housing underway in London, commissioned and directed by local councils. The work is being designed by a broad range of London’s best architects – the new generation – and demonstrates the highest design quality in urban, landscape and building terms, along with innovation in sustainability, procurement and affordability. The increase in public housing construction in the London boroughs was spurred along by the removal of a longstanding cap to borrowing for new housing construction, but I sense the hand of the Public Practice placements in the quality of the new projects. Just as in London, Australian cities need good designers in government roles, championing quality and diversity, in both the large and the small, in its many manifestations.
— Olivia Hyde leads the Design Excellence team at Government Architect NSW and is a part-time professor of practice in architecture at the University of Sydney.
She is a registered architect with diverse private sector experience on projects locally and internationally.