Design for Growth: Built environment from Design Council on Vimeo.
Deborah Meaden
Design has a huge impact on our public spaces - and on people’s perception and experiences of them. But good design goes beyond the aesthetic. Well-planned, inspiring places make a positive difference to people’s lives and help build a sense of identity and civic pride. But they also encourage inward investment, and lead to export success.
So, how can we use more good design to create great places for renewal and growth?
Design for growth: Design and the built environment
Design has got to be holistic - design should be about creating somewhere that people want to move about in to do things that are useful to the economy and useful to society, so you create a place.
And it’s how it all works together and frankly as important if not more important are all the spaces between, um, the buildings and the way the public realm you know looks and feels.
87% of people agree that better quality buildings and public spaces can improve quality of life.
Kevin McCloud, Author, broadcaster and designer
Beautiful places of course have that elevating impact that you feel slightly better, they make you feel good about where you live and where you are.
Well designed housing brings public health benefits which saves over £1.5billion a year
I would also expect good design to be robust to be enduring you know good, good lifecycle costing and all those all those sorts of assets and to be sustainable.
Communities
Tony Burton
You need to make the community the client, put the community centre stage and up front in the decisions you’re making, the plans you’re drawing up and the proposals, from the very beginning.
Paul Morrell, Government Chief Construction Advisor
You have to create more of an obligation to to involve the local community in what you’re doing to show them you know the joy of that take them to places that work and so on and make people want things as opposed to remove their objections to things.
There’s a more positive way of approaching the question of community consultation which is to talk to them about their, quite often what their fears are, they might not know what they want, but their kind of, they know what they probably don’t want.
Kevin McCloud
There is a role, I think a very important role, for design professionals for architects to lead, to say to communities look we can take that as a brief we can come back and we can give you this we can do something more magical. And I think that is the great magical thing that the design process can bring to places or communities is taking that vision that people might have and actually amplifying it into something really powerful.
Success story: Gateshead Millennium Bridge
Deborah Meaden
The Gateshead Millennium Bridge is the world’s first, and only, tilting bridge - winning major international awards for its designers, Wilkinson Eyre. The bridge is one of the North East’s most popular attractions, a landmark for the region, and a catalyst for local regeneration.
Jim Eyre
Design was absolutely paramount you know they knew that if they get something really good it will help regenerate Gateshead. So all the benefits of cultural creditability, identity, creating a destination you know these are the things that that bridge really helped to seal for them.
It’s a collection of things together, you know by some people with some vision, you know a client with vision and a real determination and commitment that creates something special and and I think it has raised the cultural credibility of Gateshead because people go there from all over the place.
Business
Tony Burton
Business and the community have actually very similar interests, they all want to have high quality design, they all want to be living or working in places which they feel proud about - and there are opportunities there for business communities to work together, particularly in the development of design frameworks of neighbourhood plans.
Liz Peace
A well-designed environment is going to be more attractive to people who will pay more money to be there. The commercial property industry by and large is interested in long-term investment in places and that is actually about creating value.
Success story: Better Bankside
Deborah Meaden
Better Bankside is a Business Improvement District in London. Its members are the 460 companies who benefit from its services - everything from street cleaning and security, to marketing and business networking.
Liz Peace
Better Bankside is actually a business improvement district that had had the forethought to involve its residents as well as its businesses to produce a plan for a genuine mixed use neighbourhood.
Tony Burton
The economic benefits of um businesses, locating in well-designed spaces, can be really very significant and can be part of the wider way in which we re-generate and improve our urban areas.
Well designed streets can residential property prices and retail rents by 5-15%
Planning
Liz Peace
The planning system is key to creating the right sort of place but that means the planning system has got to have the facility to understand and appreciate good design, so building some local local design capability is I think hugely important.
Paul Morrell
I think the combination of a well-run planning process and the right degree of local engagement, trying to move away from the restrictive attitude towards planning to a more permissive attitude is part of it.
Tony Burton
Critically, design needs to be sort of front and centre of those planning decisions to really think about um the urban design of the place, um respecting where its coming from but thinking about how that can be changed and improved for the future.
Deborah Meaden
So, well-designed places and spaces are good for business, and good for the people who live and work in them. But what can government do to encourage good design in local planning?
Tony Burton
They’ve got an important role to play in encouraging people to want better. Government is itself is a major developer and it should be setting the highest standards um for its own developments and um for the way in which it manages and looks after um the public estate.
Kevin McCloud
You can absolutely legislate for good design and you can also legislate in terms of the planning process in terms of empowering communities and helping residents in places understand that they too can take part in it.
Paul F: 10.14 ++ There is plenty of room for improvement. I mean the good news is that we’ve certainly got the talent to do it.
Liz Peace
Central government should establish that design is important, local government should work out how you set the structure for actually making it happen, communities should be able to look at it and deal with it at their level. So there’s a role for everybody.
Thanks to
Deborah Meaden, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and all who appeared in this film