the cost of bad design

The cost of bad design

Everyone can think of abuilding they hate, aplace that reallydepresses them or aplace where they’d call inthe bulldozers. So why,when the problems itcreates are impossible tomiss, are we stillsurrounded by baddesign? The cost of baddesign features essayscommissioned by CABEto highlight whathappens when buildingsand spaces go wrong.This collection is the firststage in a continuingcampaign assessing thecost of bad design.

ISBN 1-84633-009-2

The

cost

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Published in 2006 by the Commission forArchitecture and the Built Environment.

Graphic design by Unit

Printed by Ernest Bond Printing Ltdon Starfine environmentally friendly paper.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copiedor transmitted without the prior written consent ofthe publisher except that the material may bephotocopied for non-commercial purposes withoutpermission from the publisher. This document isavailable in alternative formats on request from thepublisher.

ISBN 1-84633-009-2

CABE is the government’s advisor on architecture,urban design and public space. As a public body,we encourage policymakers to create places thatwork for people. We help local planners applynational design policy and offer expert advice todevelopers and architects. We show public sectorclients how to commission buildings that meet theneeds of their users. And we seek to inspire thepublic to demand more from their buildings andspaces. Advising, influencing and inspiring, we workto create well-designed, welcoming places.

CABE1 Kemble StreetLondon WC2B 4ANT 020 7070 6700 F 020 7070 6777E [email protected] www.cabe.org.uk

Contents

Introduction 3John Sorrell

The cost of bad design 7Dr Richard Simmons

The cost of bad street design 33Dr Jake Desyllas

What causes bad design? 53Robin Nicholson

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Introduction

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At CABE, we think positively. We showcase gooddesign, highlighting the best homes, public buildingsand green spaces. But unfortunately, the world in whichwe work means we can’t always accentuate the positive.We’re here to make things better. We have a job to dobecause of the poor design and bad buildings thatsurround us – houses where no-one wants to live,hospitals that make patients ill, and parks that peopleavoid at all costs.

The fact is, everyone can think of a building they hate, a street that really depresses them, or a place wherethey’d call in the bulldozers. People don’t need to betold when the built environment around them isn’tworking – they already know.

These essays highlight what really happens whenbuildings and spaces go wrong.

Too often, the people who design and constructbuildings and parks don’t worry about whether they willwork properly or what will they cost to run. Once theproject is complete, they can move on to the next job.But the public has to live with badly built, poorlydesigned buildings and spaces; and taxpayers oftenhave to foot the bill for putting them right again.

This short-term thinking is costing us millions of poundsevery year. So what can be done to change the way weinvest in our built environment, to make sure we paymore attention to the long-term value and benefits ofwell-designed buildings?

We are pressing for changes from government that willmake a real difference on the ground:

JohnSorrell

Condemned:Chingford Hall Estate,Waltham Forest

- Offer leadership. The Treasury should ensure that Thegreen book, the government’s guide to value for money,requires long-term thinking on design quality. As well asrecognising the value of good design, the economicappraisal process must take account of the whole-lifecosts of a building project. It must acknowledge thepotential risks of higher long-term costs and poorerperformance from buildings and places that are badlydesigned. As a major landowner and a client for publicbuildings, the government should take a stand byrefusing to carry on paying for other people’s mistakes.Local authorities also need to take a stand againstadopting poorly designed streets and public spaces.They can do much to reduce risk by demanding gooddesign and rejecting bad.

- Aim high. There is now a mandatory requirement forevery new public building to meet the common minimumstandards set down by the Office of GovernmentCommerce. These are the minimum procurementstandards expected from all public constructionprojects. They explicitly state that building projectsmust be selected on the basis of whole life value formoney, not just capital cost. This leaves no room forexcuses on poor design standards, and gives everyincentive for public projects to match the standards setby the best buildings in the country.

- Find out whether it works. Post-occupancy surveysare not a luxury: they are a fundamental element of anywell-run building project. The fact that they are rarelydone explains the lack of genuine user insight behind somany developments. CABE believes that every schooland healthcare building should be subject to mandatorypost-occupancy analysis, at regular intervals afterhandover. This is the best and most reliable way to find

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out whether places really work, and to learn lessons forthe future.

- Tackle the issues in PPP. A vast amount of publicinfrastructure is being built right now using publicprivate partnerships (PPP). To date, 463 PPP projectshave been signed off with a capital value of over £47 billion. On average, five schools will be refurbishedor rebuilt every week for the next 13 years. PPP hasmany advantages, but there are major issues that needto be addressed. There ought to be an incentive for PPPproviders to invest in good-quality design because theywill benefit from lower whole-life costs. The industry isonly just waking up to this, and we still see too manyprojects where quality has been sacrificed for short-termsavings. Above all, we must embed in everyprocurement process a direct link between access tofinance and satisfactory design proposals. In essence, if the design is not good enough, the project should bestopped until real improvements have been made.

The cost of bad design is a clarion call. There is noexcuse for bad design, and no reason to accept poorstandards, yet exemplary buildings remain the exception.The buildings and spaces being constructed now willshape the way our towns and cities function over thenext 50 years. We must ensure we create a legacy in the next 10 years of which we can be proud.

John Sorrell CBEChair, CABE

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The cost of bad designDr RichardSimmons

Big bang: demolition of tower blocks, Holly Street

CABE and others have worked hard to establish thatgood design adds value to public and private sectorprojects alike.

However, many decision makers still fail to get the point.Valuation and accounting methods often give low priorityto design quality as a generator of value for businessand the case for good design has to be made over andover again.

But are we forgetting the other side of the coin? Whatare the costs of bad design? What happens whenplaces and buildings ignore character, continuity,legibility and all the other principles that underpin good design?

Badly designed places impose costs on their occupiers,their neighbours and on society. A key reason why thesecosts are often not taken into account is that they arenot paid by the people that make the decisions but bythe wider community.

Two examples illustrate the potential costs. A 1970shousing estate at Holly Street in Dalston, east London,was so badly designed that it had to be demolished andrebuilt only 20 years into its intended 60-year designlife, at a cost of £92 million. Meanwhile, George’s Parkin Lozells, Birmingham was laid out in the 1970s in adesign that encouraged crime and anti-social behaviourand made it into a place actively avoided by localresidents. It was redeveloped at a cost of £1.2 million.

These examples illustrate the need for a methodology topredict and measure the costs of bad design. Thiswould alert decision makers to the real dangers and thefinancial risks that poor design poses.

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When I became CABE’s chief executive in September2004, the organisation had already done a lot ofresearch into the value of good design and we had moreon the stocks. There is now a powerful body of evidencethat good design has financial and social value. Well-designed buildings and public spaces increase the valueof physical capital and help to build social capital.

CABE is still at the forefront in gathering evidence aboutthe value of good design. I welcome that but I think welet a lot of people off the hook if we don’t talk about theother side of the argument – the cost of bad design. Asthe leader of a body with a mission to improve the

Downward spiral:graffiti and vandalismdrag an area down

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ichaelHarding

‘We let a lot of people off the hook if we don’t talk about the cost of bad design’

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quality of people’s lives by improving design quality I obviously want us to convince people about thepositive case for good design. But as a taxpayer I seethings differently.

When I think about the use of my hard-earned taxeswhat angers me is the sheer waste of public money thatresults from bad design. Bad design is the result of baddecision making. There isn’t any excuse for it. Politicians,officials, private developers and designers all haveaccess to good information about how to build well-designed places. Too often they just don’t do it. Thatusually imposes costs on all of us, whether the fault lieswith a public or a private client.

At CABE, we know it isn’t always easy. Good designdoes require creativity as well as good process. Weknow that good design is possible because we can seethe results when it works well. We know that manyorganisations can produce it. Yet we continue to seebadly laid out housing estates, hospitals that aren’t fit forpurpose, schools that aren’t inspiring and public spacesthat are green deserts.

This poor decision-making is at best ill-informed, and at worst irresponsible. It is inefficient, unnecessary and it can be stopped. That requires both political will and a well-managed approach to design, procurement anddelivery. The best design leaves a legacy that will benefit our children. The worst leaves a burden thatcosts them dear. Things are getting better butimprovement is not consistent. At the moment there isstill the risk that we will build too much that is poor, and

‘What angers me is the sheer waste of public money that results from bad design’

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not enough for which both current users and futuregenerations will be thankful.

Decision makers often start by assuming that goodarchitecture and urban design are a matter of personaltaste and style. Once we have disabused them of thatfalse notion, their next line of defence is that it adds too much to the cost of development. They assumegood design doesn’t add enough value to justify any additional costs it might bring with it.

People with many different interests seem to hold these beliefs in common: developers and valuers in the private sector who need to make a profit; publicofficials charged with keeping costs to a minimum andmaximising what public money will buy; designersanxious to please a parsimonious client; and planningcommittee members who don’t understand that theyshouldn’t settle for second best. All have different ways of looking at value and returns on investment.Many seem to think good design is an add-on they canafford to do without if doing so increases returns oroutput, or if it speeds up decision making. Then we poor taxpayers end up paying the costs that thismisguided way of looking at design impose on us down the line.

First let’s dispel the myth that we don’t know enoughabout whether or not good design adds value. CABEhas been closely involved in many studies on this.1 In2001 we published The value of urban design withUniversity College London and the then Department

‘We continue to see badly laid out housing estates,hospitals that aren’t fit for purpose, schools that aren’tinspiring and public spaces that are green deserts’

1. The value of gooddesign – how buildingsand spaces createeconomic and socialvalue, CABE 2002; Thevalue of housing designand layout,CABE/Design ForHomes 2003; The valueof public space – howhigh quality parks andpublic spaces createeconomic, social andenvironmental value,CABE 2004; The valueof urban design,Ministry for theEnvironment, NewZealand 2005; Bevaluable, ConstructingExcellence 2006

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Wall to wall: a lack ofnatural surveillancecan encourage crime

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ichaelHarding

‘Let’s dispel the myth that we don’t know enough about whether or not good design adds value’

2. S.Macmillan (ed),Designing betterbuildings, Spon PressLondon, 2004

of Environment Transport and the Regions. Since then a steady stream of research has tackled the question of value added from a variety of angles to take accountof the perspectives of different decision makers. Theseinclude, notably, Sebastian Macmillan’s Designingbetter buildings2 in 2004 and, most recently, the NewZealand Ministry for the Environment’s The value ofurban design and Be/Constructing Excellence’s Bevaluable in 2005.

These publications present an overwhelming set ofarguments to justify the hypothesis that good designsometimes (but not always) costs more initially, but thatit adds value. It can often create value in locations wherequality has not been the norm. It certainly reduceswhole-life costs.

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In spite of this literature CABE, and its partners in thepublic and private sectors, still have to justify the needfor good design as a creator and adder of value. Somedecision makers have got the point; many importantones haven’t. Why is this? One issue is that valuationand accounting methods often give low priority todesign quality as a generator of value to business3.I have already mentioned that many people also stillperceive design to be about taste rather than aboutvalue creation. However, I think one of the biggestproblems is complexity. Development is one of the mostcomplex human undertakings. There are many variablesthat affect cost and value.

Isolating the value added by good design is notnecessarily simple. Often, in the private sector, it will be someone other than the developer who benefits,especially if returns from good design are slow to come through or the added value arises after thedevelopment has been sold to an end user or investor.Developers may therefore not recognise the value ofgood design or they may discount it because it is hard to measure, or because they perceive limited benefit to themselves.

There are important factors that explain why the benefits of good design might not be perceived to be significant by developers. Much of the propertydevelopment in the UK is still carried out and funded on the assumption that the developer will not retain a long-term financial interest in the property. Muchcommercial property is built using short-term financeand sold on to investors for letting to end users. Thereare signs that this situation is beginning to change.

‘Developers do not have to carry the long-term costs of bad design’

3. J. Rouse, ‘Measuringvalue or only cost’, in S. Macmillan (ed),Designing betterbuildings, Spon PressLondon, 2004, p63 et seq

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If developers do begin to retain a longer-term interest in their buildings this may lead to a better understandingof the value created by design.

Location is often a key determinant of value when land supply is limited by the planning system and themarket. Value accruing to scarcity may tend to mask the marginal added value from good design. It ispossible, some housebuilders tell us, to sell property in a reasonably good market without the need to addvalue through good design because scarcity means that almost anything will sell.

The same is less likely to be true in high value-addedsectors such as quality retailing or premium officespace, where being developer/owner is a more common business model. Below the premium level inthe market the imperative for good design is much less clear because developers do not have to carry the long-term cost of poor design. In out-of-town retail parks, suburban housing estates and many otherforms of lower value development it is less common to find developers who retain their investment for long enough to realise the long-term benefits from good design.

A similar situation can arise in the public sector as aresult of how government funding works. In national andlocal government accounting, capital costs are usuallydealt with separately from revenue (or resourceconsumption) costs. Often different organisations ordifferent budget holders will have responsibility for each.In the case of building schools, for example, capitalbudgets are commonly held by different people fromthose who will pay the running costs. This can lead tosituations in which designing to minimise long-term

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running costs is not as high a priority as keeping downbuilding costs for the people who actually get the school built.

The second thing that may mask value added is the timetaken to see the return on any marginal investmentrequired for good design. A leading housebuilder tellsus that it took three years to reach break-even point on aproject that earned a CABE/Home Builders FederationBuilding for life gold standard. We understand that itwould have expected a much quicker return from astandardised scheme where the same level of earlyinvestment in a high-quality public realm, and indistinctive, non-standard house types, had not beenmade. The developer has since seen a higher level ofoverall profit from the scheme than it would haveexpected from a lower quality project but, as it pointsout, much of the value added by its decision to go forquality has accrued to the early purchasers of homes in the scheme.

No end in sight: adark and depressingoffice corridor

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The point is that this particular housebuilder had to beprepared both to accept a higher level of perceived riskand to wait longer before seeing a profit. A firm thatdoes not have shareholders willing to defer immediateprofit in exchange for extra value later on, or whichdoesn’t have the capital to carry higher initial costs, maynot see the benefit of investing in good design. This is,of course, an important reason why the planning systemhas to inject the requirement for quality into the systemby insisting on good design.

In the public sector there has long been a culture ofdriving down unit costs at the point of delivery tomaximise the number of units that can be produced. Thisculture is changing. The Office of GovernmentCommerce, working with CABE, has been a strongadvocate of change through its achieving excellence inconstruction programme4. The common minimumstandards5 adopted in 2005 for the whole of centralgovernment emphasise the importance of good designand the critical need to take whole-life costs intoaccount when designing projects. Ministers have madethe policy objective clear: good design is the requirednorm. Meanwhile, the National Audit Office hasreinforced the value of good design when public moneyis being spent, and has emphasised the need to considerthe improvement in whole-life costs that it delivers.’6

Many early private finance initiative (PFI) buildings havebeen criticised because they haven’t been welldesigned, either as result of failures in the procurementprocess or the subordination of good design to short-term cost savings during bidding. Yet PFI and public

‘Ministers have made the policy objective clear: good design is the required norm’

4. www.tinyurl.com/e4ueo

5.www.tinyurl.com/k7h82

6. National Audit Office,Improving publicservices through betterconstruction, HMSOLondon, 15 March2005, pp63-6

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private partnership (PPP) do create an incentive to thinkabout long-term value because the contractor has tomaintain the buildings and provide services in them forthe long term. A change in attitude is emerging slowly.The benefits of good design in making places easier andcheaper to manage and maintain are coming to the fore.

In spite of this the old culture dies hard. It seems thatthe case for good design still has to be made over andover again to people who have many conflictingobjectives and processes to manage, and who still seegood design as a ‘nice to have’ which they may not beable to afford, rather than a ‘must have’ they can’t affordto do without.

What is bad design?My frustration with waste as a taxpayer, and thepersistent requests CABE receives to restate the valueof good design, have led me to ask whether we areunderestimating the significance of the cost of baddesign, not just to government but, more broadly, tosociety, the economy and the environment. Are we sofocused on trying to prove something positive that weare in fact ignoring a negative that is both simpler tounderstand and to evaluate?

An important task for CABE has been to clarify whatmakes good design, especially for decision makers whoare not designers. Good design is not a question oftaste and style. It can happen in many styles and appealto some tastes and not others. We can judge whether ornot a design is good by testing whether it is functional,whether it is durable and whether it is visually attractiveThis doesn’t exclude innovation. The principles we applyto judge good design allow for changes in technologyand taste.

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In By design (2000), CABE and the then DETR set outto explain the characteristics that put these principlesinto effect in the built environment. Character, continuityand enclosure, quality of the public realm, ease ofmovement, legibility, adaptability and diversity arefeatures of well-designed places, all of which have beenshown to improve design quality and quality of life,whatever style is used by designers. Today we wouldundoubtedly add environmental sustainability andinclusiveness to that list. The point is that thecharacteristics of good design are well understood andcan be known and applied by good designers and well-informed decision makers.

Bad design, then, is the obverse of the design coin.Places and buildings that do not have these positivecharacteristics are not well designed. I believe we canalso say that badly designed places impose costs ontheir occupiers, their neighbours and on society.Economists describe this kind of cost as a negativeexternality, when someone does something that doesn’tcost them but creates costs for other people. I shall usethis term throughout this essay to describe theconsequences of bad design.

All developments impose some costs on society, ofcourse. They all consume resources and space thatmight be used for other things. Generally theycompensate for this by generating utility and value thataccrue to the community as well as their owners. Forexample, a beautiful, well-maintained park can be shownto increase the value of neighbouring property andquality of life.7 However, badly designed buildings and

‘The characteristics of good design are well understood and can be known and applied’

7. The value of public space, CABE 2004

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public spaces don’t provide enough of a compensatingreturn to the community and, indeed, can impose externalcosts that are grossly abnormal.

The perceived significance of a negative externality maywell change over time. For example, we have known forsome time that setting tower blocks in wastelands ofpublic space creates an environment that councilscannot afford to maintain. However, it is only morerecently that high carbon emissions have beenunderstood as an important negative impact. Both are,however, negative externalities over and above thosewhich a well-mannered, well-designed developmentought to impose on us. The principle that bad designproduces significant negative external costs seems to meto be sound.

The question of negative externalities is vitally importantin explaining why the cost of bad design isn’t alwaystaken into account when projects are planned. Bytransferring the costs to others the originators of thosecosts frequently insulate themselves from the negativeconsequences, which are instead borne by some or allmembers of the wider community.

The costs of bad design So, what have those who have written about the value ofgood design had to say about the cost of poor design?It seems they have written relatively little because theirmission has been to communicate the positive impact ofgood design.

However, the two main literature and research reviews –by CABE/UCL/DETR in 2001 and New Zealand

‘Bad design produces significant negative external costs’

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Ministry for the Environment in 2005 – did find someevidence of research into the costs of bad design.

The 2001 study identified economic costs such as:

– undermining the amenities delivered through planninggain, in the worst case turning them into liabilitiesrather than public benefits

– failure to deliver connected, well-integratedenvironments imposing costs that later have to beborne by public and private shareholders, althoughoriginal developers have often moved on

– limiting investment opportunities at the larger spatialscale (relating to connectivity and infrastructure)

– reducing the extent to which and the speed at whichthe regenerative impacts of development ripplethrough local economies.

Aerial view: HollyStreet snake blocksbefore demolition

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And it found social costs including:

– exclusionary and disconnected environments notbeing valued by any stakeholders, although locationalrather than urban design factors were considered theprimary cause of these deficiencies

– physical disconnection disproportionately impactingon the opportunities available to the less mobile

– disconnection from public transport networks andestablished urban areas causing staff recruitment and retention problems

– social value diminished by poorly designed public space

– public spaces used as short-term means to attractgrant monies.8

The 2005 study warned that: ‘Poor design…is likely tohave significant adverse environmental, social and eveneconomic effects. The perpetuation of poor design canlower quality of life and limit employment opportunities.An example…is low-density peripheral urbandevelopment with rigidly segregated land uses, andresidential areas poorly connected to commercialactivity and with poor internal connectivity. The literatureis clear that the ‘external costs’ generated by suchdevelopment are significant. Essentially, much urbandesign is unsustainable.’9

I want to discuss two cases that demonstrate what baddesign costs: the former Holly Street estate in Hackney;and George’s Park in Lozells, Birmingham. Both arepublic sector examples and both requiredcomprehensive redevelopment to correct designproblems that could not be fixed by limited tinkering. Itwould, of course, have been possible to cite similarcases from the private sector, and to look at more

8. The value of urbandesign, CABE 2001, pp. 77-9

9. The value of urbandesign, 2005

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marginal examples where the remedy was not so severe.However, I have chosen them because they are extremecases that make the point very clearly.

Holly Street Holly Street estate was built between 1971 and 1975 in Dalston, East London. Four 19-storey tower blocksand 19 five-storey buildings were constructed. Theredevelopment replaced a network of streets consistingof Victorian terraced housing, vacant sites caused byWorld War Two bombing and some two-storey housesbuilt on bomb sites in the 1940s.

What was built in their place swept away most of theVictorian street pattern. The five-storey blocks werejoined by bridges to form a ‘snake’ around twokilometres long with lock-up garages on the groundfloor, two levels of flats above with outdoor deck access,topped by two-storey scissor maisonettes linked only bylong internal corridors and enclosed bridges. ‘Almosthalf of Dalston’s grid of Victorian streets…wasremoved.’10

The design was completely alien to Hackney’s principalresidential urban form of grids of terraced streetsalongside parks and squares. The estate was built at ahigh density of 136 habitable rooms per acre. A slab andframe system of concrete beams and panels was used toconstruct the ‘snake’ blocks. Both the system ofconstruction and the height of the towers were activelyencouraged by the government funding regime, whichalso required buildings to have a 60-year design life.

As its attractiveness declined and it became hard to let,the problems of the tenants became commensuratelyworse. Just before redevelopment 31 per cent were

10. ‘Hackney: Dalston and Kingsland Road’,A history of the countyof Middlesex, Vol. 10:Hackney, 1995, pp. 28-33

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unemployed (19 per cent for the borough), 21 per centwere lone parents (9 per cent) and 63 per cent were onhousing benefit. Some 80 per cent had applied to leavethe estate. Crime and drug abuse were rife, with dealingcommonplace in the brutalist concrete lobbies of thetower blocks.

Having worked with the tenants at this time, however,when I was chief executive of Dalston City Challenge(one of the funders of the redevelopment), I know thatmost were ordinary people who wanted a decent homeand a secure job and who knew they were discriminatedagainst on account of their postcode, and written offbecause of external perceptions of their estate. Therewere clear, identifiable design failures that meant thatwhen the problems on the estate came to be resolved itwas not possible to reuse the majority of its structure.Demolition was the best option.

In 1985 Hackney’s director of housing had reportedproblems such as:

– dark, frightening staircases– badly situated lifts– long, dark corridors– smells emanating from flats– echoes/noise in corridors– weak front doors– noise from adjacent flats– infestation– large windows resulting in heat loss– poor district heating system– poor external estate lighting

‘Ordinary people were written off because of externalperceptions of their estate’

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Sink estate: groundfloor garages, HollyStreet

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Home again: residentin refurbished block,Holly Street

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– useless/undefined open space– no gardens– no play areas.11

By the early 1990s, a programme had been assembledto demolish the estate, keeping just one refurbishedtower, with a concierge, to house older people. Around1,000 homes were demolished. Almost 600 housingassociation properties replaced them, along with 40 forthe council and 250 for sale, though these wereconcentrated in one part of the new development ratherthan distributed throughout the site.

The new neighbourhood, designed by Levitt Bernstein,was made up of houses and low-rise flats with no blocksabove four storeys and a sports and community centre,nursery, surgery, elderly day care centre, shelteredhomes and local shops. It was built to emulate thetraditional street pattern. A park and play area forms thefocal point of a square. All on-street parking isoverlooked, perimeter block design means there are nounsupervised private spaces and homes have front andback gardens.

A survey of the first tenants in 1996 investigated theirperceptions of their new homes compared with theestate before it was rebuilt. It found that:

– residents perceiving Holly Street to be dangerous fellfrom 60 per cent to 5 per cent

– residents who had witnessed a crime fell from 43 percent to 1 per cent

– residents seeing graffiti or vandalism fell from 78 percent to 9 per cent

– demand for NHS services fell by 33 per cent– calls to the police fell by more than 33 per cent

11. T. Shoults, directorof housing, LondonBorough of Hackney,report to the council,1985

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– physical problems with accommodation were felt to be reduced (although the first phase included units which many regard as having rooms which are too small – another result of design driven by government funding)

– perceptions of personal safety improved dramatically– fewer tenants reported feelings of isolation– more tenants reported feeling happy after rehousing

than before.

Ten years on, the new estate has held up well physicallyin spite of problems with the quality of landscapemaintenance and the continued social problems of someof its residents. When I visited the estate in late 2005residents of the tower block told me of noise at nightand young people hanging around the streets. Someyoung people were, indeed, in evidence but they wereno more apparent than in other areas. The new estate isnot perfect but it feels like a normal part of Hackney,fitting in with the character of the area far better than its predecessor.

The second Holly Street redevelopment took placearound 20 years after the first. This was 40 years shortof the design life required by government funding. It was80-100 years less than the life of Victorian propertiesrefurbished and adapted in neighbouring streets. Poordesign played a pivotal role in the decision to demolish.

George’s ParkMy second example is simpler. George’s Park in Lozells,Birmingham was laid out in the 1970s on a site madeavailable by the demolition of a number of smallbusinesses and an independent school. It waslandscaped with mounds to provide interest. There waslittle else of interest about the park. It was grassed with

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some tree planting, a large concrete football pitch and adull play area. By 2000 it was an eyesore. The mainusers were drug dealers, fly tippers, joy riders and agroup of young men who played football there. Therewere regular muggings and a number of rapes. Becauseof the lack of clear sight lines most people felt unsafethere and would not cross the park. The mounding andclumps of vegetation were ideal for hiding illegalactivities. Mothers taking children to the neighbouringschool would walk round the park rather than cross it.

A local policeman set up a friends group with interestedbodies, including the Bangladeshi Youth Forum,Groundwork Birmingham and Kwesi Training. A grantfrom Sport England and neighbourhood renewal funding via the council enabled a start to re-planning the park. In 2003 and 2004 the central mounds werelevelled. New ball courts, a skateboard area, abandstand-style youth shelter chosen by young people,new railings and planting were installed. The communitynow takes pride in its park, and the new features havebeen a success. Women have reclaimed the park and it has become a catalyst for improvements in theneighbouring streets. It has been a focal point forsuccessful collaboration between people from differentethnic backgrounds in an area that has experiencedtension. It was untouched during the disturbances inLozells in 2005.

Refurbishment of the park cost £1.2 million. This level ofexpenditure was necessary in part because of poorinitial design. Like Holly Street the social problems ofthe neighbourhood contributed to the park’s decline.The development of community pressure was thecatalyst for change. However, the design changes havebeen critical to the park’s success.

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Direct costs, external costs and opportunity costsPoor design was undoubtedly a major contributor to thefailures of Holly Street and George’s Park. In a field ascomplex as human interaction in cities, it would be naïveto think it was the only cause. Physical determinism isnot a sufficient explanation, though I believe it is anecessary element in forming one.

Better design would have increased the resilience ofboth places to deal with the social and economicproblems of their communities. The evidence shows thatthere were negative externalities that derived from poordesign in both cases and which were higher than thecommunity has a right to expect. These included:

– higher management and maintenance costs– higher policing costs– higher healthcare costs– costs associated with failed attempts at remediation– the cost of early replacement– higher environmental costs (at Holly Street)

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roundwork

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Before work:George’s Park prior to restoration

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– costs, both financial and social, to residents as aresult of the design of the developments fostering apoor image, crime and stress.

Most of these direct costs and externalities were borneby the public sector organisations that built Holly Streetand George’s Park but, of course, not all were borne bythe generation that built them. Some were transferred tofuture taxpayers. Some were transferred to individualswho lived there. Some were transferred from the councilto other agencies such as the police and the NHS.

So, is the relationship between poor design and resultingnegative impacts strong enough in these two cases forus to be able to calculate the cost of bad design as £92million in the case of Holly Street and £1.2 million atGeorge’s Park? Unfortunately, a formula for calculatingthe cost of bad design cannot be as simple as that.

Probably the biggest single externality in both cases isthe opportunity cost of having to redevelop early. Thedesign life of a park is variable but the fundamentalstructure of its landform should be durable. We wouldnormally hope that new homes would last longer than 60 years, so an estate that survives for only a third of a60-year design life, and which is severely dysfunctionalduring that time, is costing far more than it should.Society has had to pay early to replace its assets. It haslost the opportunity to purchase other assets that willhave been badly needed by other citizens. Even so, theopportunity cost is not equivalent to the full replacement

‘An estate that survives for only a third of a 60-year designlife, and which is severely dysfunctional during that time,is costing far more than it should’

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George’s Park beforeand after: a derelict,poorly maintainedplayground hasbecome a well-usedand popular area forlocal people

©G

roundwork

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roundwork

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cost. The community has had some value out of Holly Street and George’s Park and this would need to be taken into account in assessing the true cost ofbad design.

Renewal also presents the chance to take earlyopportunities to benefit from changes in technology andimproved understanding of how to design out negativeimpacts. For example, Boardman et al12 argue that afour-fold increase is required in the rate of demolitionand rebuilding of homes to remove the most energyinefficient ones from the stock and replace them withones that will enable us to achieve a 60 per centreduction in carbon dioxide emissions from homes by2050. On this basis one could argue a case fordemolishing somewhere like Holly Street early andaccepting that the opportunity taken to reduce carbonemissions was worth the cost. This argument is, though,redundant because we know how to avoid bad design.While the perception of the importance of carbondioxide emissions as a negative factor is of relativelyrecent origin we have known for a long time how todesign relatively energy efficient homes.

A methodology to predict and measure the cost of thenegative externalities of bad design would, then, be morecomplex than one might imagine at first sight. It wouldneed to account for opportunity costs, for additionalrunning costs, for environmental and social costs.

What is the benefit of looking at design from this angle?Many of the circumstances that lead to bad design arerelatively constant in the systems that produce

‘Society and business will reap rich rewards frominvestment in good design’

12. Boardman et al,40% house,Environmental ChangeInstitute, Oxford, 2005pp. 87-8

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development. They all militate against good design: theculture of seeking least initial cost in the public andprivate sectors; misunderstandings about what gooddesign looks like; the ease with which externalities canbe discounted or ignored in a complex decision-makingenvironment; the temptation to adopt untriedtechnologies to accelerate development; the need tobuild a lot quickly; and the ways in which we calculatevalue. These pressures exist today just as they did whenGeorge’s Park and Holly Street were built.

CABE is an optimistic organisation. We believe thesepressures don’t have to lead to repeating the mistakesof the past. But we are on record as saying that theymight. In making the argument for investment in gooddesign we have shown, with others, that society andbusiness will reap rich rewards from it. We must alsoarm decision makers with the knowledge of what designmistakes can cost. In the public sector it is important tounderstand that this affects us both through the designdecisions taken about publicly funded projects andthrough the impact planning decisions about privatedevelopments have on the ability of developers totransfer negative externalities to the community. In bothcases decision makers need to be alert to the dangersthat poor design poses, to the opportunities thatcommunities and individuals lose through bad designand to the financial cost of failing to anticipate what weknow to be the case.

Bad design costs. Good design adds value.

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Every time you walk to the shops or try to cross the roadyou are encountering a classic example of bad design.Our road network has been designed with a singlepurpose: to serve the needs of through traffic.

This design failure is the result of an ideology of trafficengineering that put cars first and dictated that differentmodes of transport must be set apart and given specificrights of way.

All this was done in the name of safety and congestionrelief. In reality our streets are less safe for those of uswho cannot switch to other modes of transport: thechances of children between 10 and 14 dying on theroads doubled between 1955 and 1990.

There are alternatives to this failed system. Simplycutting the speed of vehicles in urban areas has adramatic effect on road casualties. Removing the clearrights of way currently enjoyed by car drivers couldboost safety by forcing them to take responsibility andslow down. And congestion can be managed by roadpricing rather than building more roads.

For the moment, however, the whole country remainslocked into a single design solution that segregatespeople and cars and leads to streets that all look thesame. Why not insist that designers have the freedom to create streets as mixed spaces for all?

Dr JakeDesyllas

The cost of bad street design

Behind bars:pedestrians fenced off from traffic


IntroductionThe ‘bad design’ addressed in this article is a particularapproach to traffic engineering that you can see in thestreets around you. The approach is to treat streets asplaces that serve a single purpose: as roads for throughtraffic. The design ethos is that pedestrians should bekept away from the street altogether: where possible in a pedestrian-only precinct or at least on a separate level.If the pedestrians cannot be completely removed fromthe street, the idea is that their movement has to bemicro-managed to fit around the needs of through traffic.Try walking along almost any major street in a UK cityand you will experience the heavy handedness of thiskind of design.

Your movement will probably be channelled by ‘guard-railings’, preventing you from crossing the road whereyou need to, and attempting to force you to take adifferent route. In those places where you are expectedto cross, you will have to apply for permission bypressing buttons or waiting for lights to tell you whenyour moment has come. When you get to the middle ofthe road, you might be inside a ‘pen’ that will forceanother change to your direction, creating anotherdiversion. In more heavily engineered streets,underground tunnels or walkways may be provided,although it is unlikely that you will wish to venture downthem if you can possibly avoid it.

A forest of poles for lighting, signage and often for noclear purpose at all will also probably clutter yourallocated space within the street. You will have very littlecontact with the people in the cars zooming through the

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‘Underground tunnels or walkways may be provided, although it isunlikely you will venture down them if you can avoid it’

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space and everything about the design will reinforcetheir right of way. Like the car drivers, you will alsoexperience the frustration of having to wait at empty junctions for the lights to change. An architect I knowonce referred to the experience of this kind of design as‘like living in a transport planner’s theme park’.

Modern pedestrian design can be unpleasant in themundane and annoying way described above, but thereare a series of more serious ‘costs’ or social impactsthat are created by this way of dealing with people onfoot. I work in a pedestrian movement consultancy, andmy company’s role is to analyse how people use streetsor buildings. We use this evidence to advise those whodesign streets on how to cater for what pedestriansreally need. We also use computer models to identifyhow a new design is likely to be used by pedestrians.This role requires us to study many interesting examplesof dysfunctional urban environments. The kinds ofproblems that bad pedestrian design creates include aloss of personal freedom and mobility, increased dangeron the roads, undermining of local retail anddisplacement of communities. In the end, this is all forillusory benefits in terms of safety and congestion relief.

The consequences of bad street designThe first thing that you learn from studying bad streetdesign is that it doesn’t work in the way that wasintended. The theories upon which the design is basedbear little relationship to how pedestrians actually usespace. This should not be a surprise: if streets weredesigned with a careful adjustment and response to userrequirements then there wouldn’t be so many dangerousand unpleasant places that need fixing. If you areanything like the people that we observe in ourpedestrian movement studies, you will often ignore the

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designs that attempt to control your movement ratherthan cater for it. You are probably part of a massive andongoing daily demonstration of ‘design failure’evidenced in main streets, whereby people jump overbarriers, walk outside railings, walk on the red mansignal, ignore underpasses and weave through traffic totry to get on with their lives as opposed to fulfilling aclumsy theory of what they will do.

The design failure that you can’t see is all the walkingtrips that don’t take place anymore. Important streetshave become such unpleasant environments that peopleare discouraged from using them on foot at all for manypurposes. The decline in walking over the last 70 yearsis itself a result of the influential ideology of road designthat came to prominence in this time.

Planning for trafficThe bad street design that we now live with is the legacyof an idea that gained influence all over the developedworld in the 20th century. The idea was that citiesneeded to be re-engineered to respond to the rise of theautomobile, rather than the automobile having to evolveto find its own niche within the dense urbanenvironment. In this country, the idea began with thetraffic acts of the 1930s that gave vehicles special rightsof way across the entire road network. This fixed a basicpremise that streets should not be thought of as spacesfor all people to use with due care and responsibilitytowards others: the automobile was seen to havechanged this. Streets were now to be viewed as a seriesof movement channels wherein people using different

‘Important streets have become such unpleasant environmentsthat people are discouraged from using them on foot at all formany purposes’

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modes of transport must be set apart and given specificrights of way over each other under fixed circumstances.

The main justification for changing cities in this way wasa supposed safety argument. In the 1940s, an importantproponent of this thinking in the UK was the assistantcommissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Herbert AlkerTripp, who argued that pedestrians and traffic werefundamentally incompatible and that the objective ofgovernment policy should be to re-engineer streets tophysically segregate the two. Tripp’s argument was: ‘Ifwe could segregate pedestrians completely from thewheeled traffic, we could of course abolish pedestriancasualties.’1 He went on to suggest that this should beachieved by new, vehicle-only roads where possible andby either grade separation or signalised crossings onstreets that could not be completely segregated.According to Tripp, ‘The only sure way of protecting thepedestrian is in fact to fence off the perils and to guidehim, willy-nilly, into the safe path.’2

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Sub-standard: who would want towalk through anunderpass like this?

1. H Alker Tripp Townplanning and roadtraffic, p25

2. ibid p24

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This kind of thinking led to the re-planning of urbanstreet spaces as ‘classified’ roads with a cleardesignated purpose. All streets were to be eitherarterial, sub-arterial or local roads and a strictprioritisation would be given to each. As Tripp put it:‘Every road should have its own character and ticket;there must be no nondescripts…once we have reallysorted out our roads we will have determined whatinterest is to have absolute priority on each, the rest willgradually follow.’3

Giving absolute priority to particular users can work fordedicated functional spaces (like a motorway) but theapplication of this approach to urban streets has servedto undermine one of their basic social functions. Streetsare not just for through movement, they are places forpeople to stop in, interact with others in, buy things inand so on. By treating people as categories of transportuser with fixed purposes, the design philosophy ignoredthe purpose of streets as places for life to take place in,not pass through.

The approach evolved into the post-war era and wasexpressed most clearly by the influential Buchananreport on Traffic in towns undertaken for the UKgovernment in 1963. This report was in line with Tripp’sview that traffic and pedestrians were fundamentallyincompatible and must be segregated. It also concludedthat the rise in traffic required a major infrastructurepolicy response: re-engineer the roads inside cities tocater for the new demand and to make these roads safe.The report argued: ‘The trouble is that the motor vehiclehas put our urban arrangements based on streets

‘Design philosophy has ignored the purpose of streets as placesfor life to take place in, not pass through’

3. ibid p58. Myemphasis

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completely out of date, it really demands quite differentarrangements of buildings and access ways.’4 Thesolution was clear: ‘The motor vehicle is reallydemanding a radically new urban form. We think thedesign we have described [full redevelopment as a multi-level system with motorways through central London]gives an indication of the kind of form required.’5

Reshaping our citiesOnce this approach had become a policy objective, itfiltered into the legislation and manuals that governstreet design. The main focus is the Design manual forroads and bridges, which outlines specifics such as howcrossings should be laid out and what markings shouldbe placed on the roads. There are a whole range ofbroader guidelines that mandate such things as the useof guard railings. All the engineers and designersworking in local government or advising developers inthe private sector are aware of these guidelines.Although engineers are well aware that the guidelinesoften don’t work well in practice, their existence meansthat there is a huge inertia in street design. After all,nobody will face problems in their career for advising onthose design features that are in line with currentmanuals and guidance. The onus is always on those whodeviate from current design guidance to take liability andresponsibility. There are a few experiments in alternativedesigns, such as the Royal Borough of Kensington andChelsea’s recent remake of High Street Kensington, butthis has only been possible in a location where a councilhas explicitly accepted liability on behalf of thedesigners and engineers.

The retro-fitting of cities to cope with the supposedrequirements of traffic has been one of the mostexpensive projects embarked on in history. Aside from

4. Traffic in towns, p191

5. Traffic in towns,p142. My summarycomments in squarebrackets

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the obvious economic costs associated with suchinfrastructure as ring roads and urban motorways, thereare more far-reaching social costs that are lessapparent. The big transport infrastructure developmentsinvolved the dislocation of whole communities as largeareas of cities were cleared to make way for urbanmotorways. This created a new social problem wherenone had existed: communities were split up and peoplehad to be re-housed, usually in social housing estates. Inthe dramatic example of New York, the expressways thatwere cut through the city by the famous planner RobertMoses in the post-war era involved the relocation of250,000 people6, mostly into social housing. A similarprocess was repeated throughout the world, withresidents being forcibly relocated to make way for thegrand traffic schemes. These are the social costsassociated with the transport vision of changing streets.

An obvious point to make about the costs of designingstreets to accommodate vehicles is that the problems ofsafety and congestion that the design was trying toremedy have not been resolved, despite such high coststo pedestrian amenity and environment. The level of roadcasualties has fallen since the peak in the 1960s, butthis does not mean that streets have become safer. Oneof the most important causal factors in the decline ofpedestrian deaths is the decline in walking on streets. Itis very hard to get reliable estimates on how walking hasdeclined because official statistics have ignored walkingor miscounted it in many ways. For example, itsimpossible to construct long time series data ondistances walked owing to changes in measurementsused, no pedestrian flows are collected for overallwalking volume comparisons, all trips under one milehave been traditionally ignored from the National travelsurvey and, lastly, other useful indices (such as

6. Robert Caro, Thepower broker: RobertMoses and the fall ofNew York

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insurance claims) are not used in key benchmarks7.However, as far as we can tell, in the last 25 years of the20th century alone walking fell in importance from 35per cent of all trips in England to 26 per cent. Theamount of walking undertaken by individuals in the UKmay have declined by as much as 25 per cent between1975 and 20008. In the US, the number of trips peopletake on foot has dropped by 42 per cent in the last 20years. The Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey,conducted by the U.S. Department of Transportationsuggests a drop in walking from 9.3 per cent of all tripsin 1977 to just 5.4 per cent in 19959.

Dangerous streetsPedestrians have withdrawn from the street in responseto the unpleasant environment that it has become.Under these circumstances it is hard to tell whether anyimprovement in safety has been created at all or whetherthe reduction in deaths simply reflects a loss of mobility.

Closed for business:life drains away fromonce busy streets

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7. For a detaileddiscussion of theseproblems see RobertDavis, Death on thestreets: cars and themythology of roadsafety, Leading EdgePress 1992

8. Association for TheStudy of Obesity

9. SurfaceTransportation PolicyProject

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Robert Davis has argued10 that the reduction in deathsmay also simply reflect a greater ability of healthcareservices treat casualties rather than any reflection of animprovement in safety, as the number injured did not fallsignificantly over the same key period. For certain agegroups that are unlikely to be able to switch to othermodes of transport, the risk of death got markedlyworse: the chances of children in the 10-14 age groupdying on the road doubled between1955 and 1990.

Given the problems with statistics in this field, it is veryhard to tell exactly what has happened to the real riskfaced when walking because the data are so poor.However, it can be argued that the safety gainssuggested by traditional data are illusory, and thatstreets have become more dangerous. This danger isunderstood by people who withdraw from the dangerand simply don’t walk as much. The end result is notgreater safety but less mobility.

The level of death and serious injury is still a huge andunresolved issue of the design and management ofstreets. What would you think of an industry kills andseriously injures11 over 34,000 of its customers everyyear, with a high proportion of these being children? Notonly is the safety problem still with us, it is also now wellunderstood that this traffic planning approach to roaddesign had the effect of entrenching the very congestionproblems that it was originally designed to alleviate. The‘predict and provide’ approach to catering for vehicles incities was a fallacy because it has led to urban roadwaysdedicated to vehicle use, which encourages more trafficand thereby greater congestion. There is no end to

‘The level of death and serious injury is still a huge and unresolvedissue of the design and management of streets’

10. Robert Davis (ibid)

11. Bannister D andDuxbury E: London’senvironment (2005)Chapter 14, ‘Civilisingtransport’

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predict and provide: the more investment is made infacilitating driving, the more traffic there will be and themore difficult it will become to walk.

For those who do still venture to walk, the current designfor pedestrian safety on main roads can be seen to havethe counter-productive effect of making streets moredangerous to the individual. Splitting up vehicles andpedestrians leads to unintended patterns of use whenpeople ignore designs that are too inconvenient. In ourobservation studies of how pedestrians actually usestreets, we often find the majority of people crossing theroad ‘informally’, that is to say away from the designatedlocations or during the ‘red man’ phase of the lights. Thisis especially the case in areas of high pedestrian activity.So, regardless of the design idea that pedestriansshould be channelled into safe areas, the reality on theground is that the engineering often simply doesn’t workas intended. This increases the danger of conflict inplaces where pedestrians and vehicles meet.

An interesting example of this design failure is thejunction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road incentral London. Post-war plans for London envisagedthis as the intersection between two new urbanmotorways: an example of how the original plans for re-engineering streets in the 20th century were even moreextreme than the changes that actually got built. Whenthese motorways failed to be implemented, the CentrePoint office tower was developed on the site. If you haveevery visited the area you may have found yourselffacing an odd assortment of barriers, underpasses and atotal lack of pavement next to Centre Point. If you havebeen there often, you have probably at least onceignored the barriers and walked in the road where thereis no pavement provided for you (next to the fountain).

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This stretch of street has been designed with a specificidea about where the pedestrians should walk, but theydon’t follow the rules. Pedestrians vote with their feet,walking through barriers and in the road along a heavilyused bus lane. This is a dangerous kind of design failure: the risk of accident on this section of road istwice as high for the number of users as it is on thesurrounding streets12.

The death of walkingAnother significant cost of segregated transportplanning has been the detrimental effect on local shopsof the major new traffic arteries that divided up cities.When the idea that cities need to be reengineered toaccommodate higher levels of traffic was put intopractice, what this meant was that vehicles ought to beprovided with bigger, wider and more segregated routesto travel along. The guiding design idea was to treateach street as part of a fixed network hierarchy andengineer it for its purpose within that hierarchy. Onexisting streets, roads were widened, railings were put

Voting with their feet:walking in the middleof the road, ratherthan using anawkward crossing

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12. For moreinformation, see the St Giles Circuspedestrian movementand safety report byIntelligent SpacePartnership, available by request atwww.intelligentspace.com

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in, underpasses and flyovers were built. Where existingroads could not be retrofitted, new arteries were builtthrough urban areas by demolishing the buildings andstreets in their path. All over the country, huge ring roadswere built around city centres, cutting off pedestrianroutes between residential areas and the town centreand creating a barrier to change.

These changes had serious effects on local shops, asthe roads designated as main roads in the hierarchywere often the main shopping high streets. As citiesgrow and develop, shops locate on those streets wherethere is passing trade and this itself encourages morepeople to use these streets. This is why many of theradial streets that connect city centres to the edge oftown developed as trade routes and have local shops on them.

Carving up the street network of a town like this hashuge effects on pedestrian movement patterns. Walkingtrips are short trips. Pedestrians are very sensitive todistances and conditions. If pedestrians are tooinconvenienced, they will not walk. If pedestrians are notwalking past shops, the shops themselves cannotsurvive. Walking itself has been in serious anduninterrupted decline with the rise of the car. The endeffect is the well-known decline in local shops.

Many of the areas that we are asked to look at are highstreets that used to have successful local economiesbut are now struggling. Streatham High Road in southLondon is a good example. After it was voted Britain’sworst street in a 2002 CABE poll, we were asked to

‘Carving up the street network of a town has huge effects onpedestrian movement’

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identify the problems faced by pedestrians. Over the lastcentury, this street was redesigned to accommodatetraffic with the usual treatment: road widening, centralreservations and guard-rails. Increasing the trafficcapacity of the street has undermined the viability oflocal shops by progressively reducing the amount ofpedestrian movement. The streetscape designundermined the use of the space as a high street andtransformed it into something more like a single purposethrough-route for traffic.

Given the decline in urban walking and the fact thatsuch substantial infrastructure for cars has beencreated, is it really surprising that retailers want to locatein large shopping centres situated near ring roads?Once such huge infrastructure has been put in place,car-based shopping becomes effectively subsidised andhas many advantages when compared to the experienceyou face shopping on foot locally. None of the shoppingcentres force their customers to walk inside guard-railsor wait at a light every time they want to go from oneside of the mall to the other. The decline of the UK highstreet is one of the unintended results of transportplanning attempts to re-engineer streets as roads. It hasalso encouraged the development of more car-basedurban design related to the big road networks,especially the out-of-town shopping centres and low-density residential commuting areas that would not bepossible without such infrastructure.

A final cost of the bad pedestrian design of modernstreets is the health effects. The lower level of walking isa key contributor to the obesity epidemic that has hitwestern societies in the last 40 years. If people are notable to walk as an integral part of their regular life, theylose out on one of the most important basic elements of

physical health. Behind the rise in obesity is thereduction in average energy expenditure over the last 50 years estimated at between 300 and 600 kcals/day,which is enough to create a significant rise in obesityunless there is a significant reduction in energy intake. In the USA the trend has been even more marked than inthis country: the number of Americans defined as obesegrew from 12 per cent in 1991 to almost 18 per cent in 199813.

Alternative solutionsFrom the beginning, the transport planning approach tocoping with the problems associated with the automobilewas to attempt a physical redesign of streets towardssegregation - in fact a sort of elimination of streets. Butthis design strategy isn’t the only way to handle suchproblems as road safety and traffic congestion. Thereare many approaches to managing the potential conflictbetween people on foot and people in vehicles who areall using the same urban street.

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Desire lines:pedestrians maketheir own crossing,where their needshave been ignored

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13. SurfaceTransportation PolicyProject, Caught in thecrosswalk, SanFrancisco, California,September 1999

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Simply controlling the speed of vehicles in urban areascan have a huge effect on both the risk of accidents and the damage caused when the accidents happen.Once traffic is slowed to less than 20 miles per hour, the number of people killed or seriously injured falls by 57 per cent and child pedestrian casualties fall by 74 per cent14.

Ben Hamilton-Baillie has suggested that removing theclear delineation of rights of way that drivers currentlyhave will actually improve safety by making drivers slowdown, take responsibility and negotiate for spacethrough eye contact15. There are interesting examples ofthis approach from the Netherlands, many of which havebeen undertaken by the engineer Hans Mondeman. Thecity of Draachten is one case16 where studies haveshown that road safety appears to have improved.

There are also many ways to manage traffic congestionon urban streets at a very local level, without buildinginfrastructure to pump vehicles through at the expenseof other uses of the street. Most obviously, road userscan be charged for the benefit of using a specific streetat a specific time with a specific vehicle type. With theright pricing mechanism, the level of use on a road canbe minutely adjusted.

There are only limited examples worldwide that can beseen in practice, the main ones being Singapore’s roadpricing and the London congestion charging scheme.Both of these are relatively crude, London with a singletoll for peak-use times and Singapore with one variation

‘You can actually improve safety by making drivers slow down, takeresponsibility and negotiate for space through eye contact’

14. Department ForTransport: Newdirections in speedmanagement, 1998.Slower speeds: briefingdocument, 2000.

15. Hamilton-Baillie, Band Jones, P: ‘Improvingtraffic behaviour andsafety through urbandesign.’ Proceedings ofICE Civil Engineering158 May 2005 Pages39–47 Paper 14014

16. www.tinyurl.com/jkhka

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for the peak within the peak. However, the basic lessonfrom such schemes is that you don’t have to destroy thestreets of a city to control traffic jams. It could even beargued that such pricing mechanisms should bedetermined at a much more local level in order to givecontrol of streets back to the local communities that liveor work on them. At the moment, you don’t really haveany choice about how much through traffic there is onyour road and you don’t get any benefit from living on aheavily trafficked route. If people could decide forthemselves how much traffic they want on their streetthey could either benefit from the road-user chargingrevenue that it brings or from their enjoyment of the lackof traffic if they choose to discourage it. In this way, thelevel of traffic would be a matter of choice and streets

Pedestrian by-pass:anything rather thanuse the underpass

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could be designed with all kinds of concepts forencouraging or discouraging different modes.

ConclusionThe purpose of this article isn’t to advocate a grand newsolution to the problems of road safety and congestionthat should be rolled out to all urban streets, replacingthe vision epitomised by the Buchanan report. On thecontrary, it is arguable that street design needs a lot lessgrand vision and a lot more sensitive, localised designresponses to the needs of the people actually using thestreets. Transport planners have tried for so long toimplement a vision of segregation between pedestriansand vehicles that they have ignored what pedestriansare actually doing on the ground. Just take a moment togo and watch people using a bit of typical main roaddesign and you will see how far detached the ‘concept’of the design is from how pedestrians really use it.

What I have tried to do here is to review the unforeseencosts that this approach to pedestrian design has had.The conclusion is that that we should at least questionthe basic assumptions that give certain users overridingrights of way and priority in street design. At a simplelevel, people must share space in cities because societycan’t function if everything is segregated. If people areto share space, they need to know that they must do sowith proper regard to each other. This means that thedesign and management of roads should stop trying togive special, overriding rights to particular usersdepending on factors such as whether they are movinginside metal boxes. In a dense urban environment,streets have to be for everyone and people will use themnot just for through movement but as the stage wherethe events of everyday life get done.

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The main problem that engineers and architects facewhen trying to design streets to cater for normal urbanlife is the fact that designing for segregation and single-use prioritisation is mandated by the legislativeframework that they work within. To a large degree, thewhole country is locked in to a single design solution formanaging main roads by the extensive legislation thatgoverns the design of highways. This is why all streetslook and feel the same and there is a lack of alternativedesign precedents, especially for the more importanturban streets. We have created such uniform streetsthat there is a pretty poor sample of design case studiesto observe and learn from.

All we can be sure of at this point is that the embeddeddesign approach to handling pedestrians and cars onimportant streets is not the only way and it does havesignificant social costs, particularly in terms ofundermining pedestrian movement. Why not allow formore freedom to design streets as mixed spaces forliving, working and driving in, rather than trying to makesegregated conduits for people and cars?

‘The whole country is locked in to a single designsolution for managing main roads’

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What causes bad design?

What is bad design? And why are we surrounded by so much of it?

In spite of government backing for design quality inpublic projects, the international reputation of Britisharchitects and the establishment of CABE to promotehigh standards across all buildings and spaces, we arestill wasting resources on bad design.

A badly designed building is one that does not fulfil theaspirations of its clients, meet the needs of its users orinspire the general public. It could lack the adaptabilitythat all buildings need over time, or fail to be designedwith climate change in mind.

Nobody wants bad design. But if we are to improve thequality of the buildings and spaces around us we needto understand the social, economic, cultural and politicalreasons why it happens.

Projects can be derailed by factors such as concentratingon the lowest cost rather than the best value, thedifficulties inherent in measuring quality, the fickle natureof fashion or the rigidity of the planning system.

The tools already exist to help. Value can be createdthrough discussing shared aspirations. Theenvironmental impact of buildings can be reduced. Andpost-occupancy evaluations can help uncover what thepeople who use buildings really think of them.

With huge public investment going into homes, schools,and healthcare facilities it is vital that we understandwhat causes bad design.

RobinNicholson

Last legs: Heygate Estate,London

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I am constantly surprised by the number of badlydesigned buildings and public spaces that surround us.Brilliant design is rare and even good design is theexception. There are now many studies showing how thedesign of a building affects the performance and thewelfare of its users. This weight of evidence should bedriving us to demand high-quality design as a matter ofcourse. Yet we are still not aspiring to the best. Short-term funding concerns are no excuse for poor design.Given our limited resources, surely we need to be muchmore imaginative. We must adopt a whole-life view ofour built environment.

I believe that bad design is pure waste. At a time whenleading UK architects and engineers are in demandaround the world, why are we designing places forourselves that are just not good enough? The size of thecurrent construction programme means that thepotential for waste is vast. We need to understand whybad design comes about. And we need to realize whatbad design is costing us.

What is bad design?In some ways, design is an integral part of our popularculture. The performance of our cars, our mobile phonesand our sound systems are all common subjects fordiscussion. But the design of buildings is not debated in the same way. Part of the reason is that consumergoods are much simpler to assess than buildings. For example, the public could easily see why the 1957Ford Edsel, described as ‘the Titanic of automobiles, a marketing disaster whose magnitude made it ahousehold name’, was badly designed, and they didn’tbuy it. However, a building scheme such as the Holly

‘We need to realise what bad design decisions are costing us’

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Street estate, discussed in Richard Simmons’s essay,may initially be very popular and successful. But onlyafter several years, when long-term design flaws start toshow, does its failure become obvious.

Our perception of design quality also depends to someextent on who we are. An architect, a bricklayer and afacilities manager are all likely to disagree with eachother over what is good design in a building. A teenager,a street sweeper and a landscape architect will probablyhave different opinions about what makes a good urbanspace. Design quality is subject to professional, social,and cultural perspectives. We all want different thingsfrom our built environment.

Why is there so much bad design?In my experience, good design is always a balancing actbetween conflicting needs. This delicate balance can beupset for many different reasons.

A genuine lack of understandingA celebrated 1998 study1 suggested that staff salariesover the lifetime of a 1,000m2 office building were 200times higher than the original cost of design andconstruction. Lifetime maintenance and operation costswere five times higher than construction costs. Whenyou realised that design fees make up less than 20 percent of the construction costs, it became obvious thatsavings on design quality are a false economy. Since theoriginal research was published, further studies havereduced the ratio to 1:1.5:10 or 15, without underminingthe main point. The marginal costs of good design arealmost irrelevant when you really understand whole-life

1. Raymond Evans,Richard Haryott,Norman Haste, andAlan Jones, (1998) Thelong term cost ofowning and engineeringbuildings. London, Royal Academy ofEngineering

‘Why are we designing places for ourselves that are justnot good enough?’

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What causes bad design? ©

MichaelH

arding

Identikit housing: too many new homesmimic the past andlook the same

costs of operating a building. I believe that there are stilltoo many people running major building projects whojust do not have this fundamental insight.

Choosing the lowest priceCompetition for the lowest cost is engrained in ourculture. We all want to pay as little as possible, as lateas possible, whatever we buy. But this culture is highlydamaging when applied to public sector buildings.Since 1997, successive Chief Secretaries to the Treasury

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have tried to tackle this problem by stating that thecheapest option does not automatically provide the bestvalue. However, I am not convinced that this message isgetting across to the level at which design is procured.

The problem of measuring quality Most project managers are hired to achieve a balancebetween time, cost and quality. Unfortunately, I haveoften seen how easy it is to measure the time and thecost and to forget about the quality. But quality isessential if the client is to achieve good value. It’s mucheasier to measure quality with the tools that are nowavailable. These tools need to become accepted as anintegral part of the project manager’s trade.

Traditional opposition to art and beautyI am constantly frustrated by our national tendency torubbish anything new or different, especially where art ordesign is involved. To some extent, attitudes to beauty inbuildings are changing, as building makeovers anddesign debates become part of mainstream television.However, it is still difficult to win the argument in favourof buildings that are beautifully designed if they are inany way different or unusual.

The development control planning systemBritain’s development control planning was an inspiredinvention, but it has its downsides. One of the problemsis that it can be highly politicised. Planning committeemembers are keen to be re-elected. They will not usuallystand up for an unpopular project, even when it is ahigh-quality design. They can put huge pressure onarchitects to design down to the planning committee’s

‘We all want to pay as little as possible, as late as possible,whatever we buy’

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taste. I recently suffered an elderly planning committeemember opining triumphantly in committee, ‘But it’s noteven trying to be Georgian!’ during the discussion on a significant proposal that was largely invisible to thepublic, and was adjacent to buildings of the late 19thand 20th centuries. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example.

The fickle nature of fashion Architectural fashions come and go, a recent examplebeing the fall from favour of post-modernism. Wechange our minds very rapidly about how our buildingsshould look. Today in the UK there is a presumption that contemporary architecture should exhibit some‘wow’ factor. The consequence is that many buildingsare unnecessarily extrovert. Meanwhile, goodbackground buildings will struggle to be appreciated for their quiet quality.

Anything new is betterThe drive for good design has to come from the clientsand come from the top. But the conditions in manybuildings are so bad that anything new is better. On aCABE fact-finding mission to two early private financeinitiative schools in 2002, I was shocked to hear from ahead teacher who was completely happy with her newnursery school. She was delighted because she nolonger had to worry about the needles on the front path,the poor heating, the broken windows and the lack ofsecurity. Yet I was shocked by the likely long-termeffects on pupils of the lack of daylight in the deep-plan,low-cost building.

‘I am constantly frustrated by our national tendency to rubbish anything new or different’

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The lack of a briefA building project should start with the basics: abusiness plan and an evaluation of the existingpremises. This is the essential platform for writing agood brief. However, I am alarmed by how often thisresearch is simply not done. At a recent Department forEducation and Skills conference, a head teacher, whohad successfully rebuilt his secondary school, explainedthat most heads want ‘what they already have, butwithout the leaks.’ This near-sightedness is verydamaging, yet the problem can be easily solved. Toolssuch as the Construction Industry Council’s designquality indicator (DQI) are available to get projects off to the right start.

Unsustainable buildingsUntil recently it was still just about possible to bury our heads in the sand on climate change. However,those days are truly over. Research now suggests thatthe existing building stock is responsible for 40 per cent of CO2 emissions in the UK. Disturbing figuressuch as these show us that we have to face up to thecarbon challenge. We must bring all new buildingstowards zero carbon emissions; we must generaterenewable electricity on site; we must tackle theproblem of existing buildings. Massive investment isrequired in our housing stock. We need to understandhow our buildings work in terms of energy consumptionand make improvements very quickly.

‘The conditions in many buildings are so bad that anything new is better’

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The need for evidenceEvidence is crucial to make the case, both for public and private investment. We have made great progress in tackling the evidence gap on design quality, with awide-ranging portfolio of research appearing over thelast 10 years. A growing range of tools is on offer todemonstrate the value of investment in good design.High-profile awards schemes recognise the quality of successful buildings. Support is available, from CABE and others, to get projects on track and toachieve the highest quality. Above all, there are still gaps in the evidence base, for example the chronic lack of post-occupancy evaluation. Housebuilders have access to a wealth of market data, which theyshould use to shape what they build. Post-occupancyevaluation should be a basic requirement of thegovernment’s public-private partnerships programme.We must make good use of the evidence we have, but we still need to produce more.

Huge challengeWe are facing a huge design challenge right now. Thescale of public building in the UK cannot be overstated.Take the education sector. We will rebuild or refurbishevery secondary school in the country by 2010, andinvest huge sums in primary, nursery and sure startbuildings. Education is where we can engagetomorrow’s citizens, by creating high quality teachingspaces that promote learning. But if we build schoolsthat do not learn from the past we can easily fail the next generation. The education building programmecould show us what we can achieve if we raise ouraspirations. It will also shows us what could happen

‘If we build schools that do not learn from the past we can easily fail the next generation’

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if we fail to challenge buildings that are below standard.If we continue to accept buildings that are poorlydesigned, the costs will be enormous. We just cannotafford bad design.

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Biographies

Dr Jake DesyllasJake is a founding director of the pedestrian movementconsultancy Intelligent Space Partnership. He has ledconsulting and research projects on pedestrianmovement and space use all over Europe, the USA,Australia and South America. These include high-profiledevelopments such as the redesign of ParliamentSquare in London, the Leeds Eastgate urban masterplanand analysing crowd movement at Notting Hill Carnival.Prior to founding Intelligent Space, Jake had worked asa property market analyst in Berlin and as a director ofSpace Syntax in London. He studied propertydevelopment and planning at the Bartlett, UniversityCollege London. His PhD was about using computermodels to identify the influence that the spatial structureof a city has on the pattern of rental values. He haspublished widely on the subject of pedestrian movementmodelling and spatial analysis.

Robin Nicholson CBERobin is a senior director of Edward Cullinan Architects.He has worked on a range of health, education andregeneration projects in the UK and abroad since joiningthe practice in 1979. Previously he taught at the Bartlettand PNL and worked for James Stirling in London andCristian Boza in Chile. Robin was a vice-president of theRIBA (1992-1994), chairman of the ConstructionIndustry Council (1998-2000), a member of the UrbanSounding Board, the M4i board (1998-2002) and theEgan skills task force. He is a founder member of theEdge, the DQI development group and chair of CABE’senabling panel.

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Dr Richard SimmonsRichard is a town planner and chief executive of CABE.He has a doctorate in urban history and urbaneconomics. He worked as a planner in a number of localauthorities before joining the inner cities directorate ofthe Department of the Environment in the early 1980s.After a period advising on regeneration policy he movedto the London Docklands Development Corporation. Heled teams developing masterplans for the developmentof the Royal Docks and Canary Wharf, buildinginfrastructure and selling land for development. In theearly 1990s he became chief executive of the DalstonCity Challenge regeneration company in Hackney. Therehe led a five-year programme of economic, social andphysical renewal before becoming director ofdevelopment and environment for the new UnitaryCouncil of Medway.


Everyone can think of abuilding they hate, aplace that reallydepresses them or aplace where they’d call inthe bulldozers. So why,when the problems itcreates are impossible tomiss, are we stillsurrounded by baddesign? The cost of baddesign features essayscommissioned by CABEto highlight whathappens when buildingsand spaces go wrong.This collection is the firststage in a continuingcampaign assessing thecost of bad design.

ISBN 1-84633-009-2

The

cost

of

bad

desig

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the cost of bad design

Documents