Co-founder of DSDHA, Deborah Saunt, explains how social value optimises the investment in public spaces, and why redevelopment projects are improved by random conversations.
When Deborah Saunt was asked to design a landmark building for South Molton Street in London, UK, she could not have envisaged the technological behemoth that was looming on the horizon.
As co-founder of the architecture, urban design, and spatial research studio DSDHA, Deborah was tasked with redeveloping the former site of a pub between Oxford Street and Bond Street, a well-known part of the city populated by up-market shops. “It’s a very important retail street,” Deborah says, but it offered very little else.
The client had asked for a building that makes a statement. DSDHA delivered a flat iron building with a façade representing the flow of the nearby River Tyburn, now buried beneath the urban world; terracotta tiles give a natural, earthy feel and mask the mix of retail, office, and residential units inside. But, as in her other projects, Deborah was interested in the surrounding space too, and how it could be improved for public good.
“We decided to make it convivial and lovely,” she says. And so, they interred “little blocks that you could sit on”, inviting people to slow down, relax, and be sociable.
The project began in 2008, the same year 3G-enabled smartphones launched; by the time the South Molton Street Building was completed four years later, connectivity capabilities had exploded. Deborah recalls how people exiting the nearby underground station, now distracted by screens, “were bashing into them and falling over”. Eventually the blocks were removed.
Innovation Invites Experimentation
Today Deborah has a sense of humour about how things turned out. “I put my hands up, we did not anticipate the digital revolution.”
It’s a reminder that human behaviour is unpredictable, a variable designers have to work with.
“We also did the UK’s first green wall on the outside of a public building,” our CityChanger informs us. “And, after two years, we had the first failing green wall.”
All the vegetation died off. Not because the tech they devised didn’t work, but because somebody turned off the water pump by mistake.
Risk is inherent in innovation, and these cases are not failures but trials the DSDHA team learnt from.
As designers, because we’ve innovated from the beginning, we know that failure is part of innovation; we very much see those going hand in hand.
Subsequent iterations of the green wall, for example, contain a simple failsafe: two pumps on different circuits.
Perspectives of Transdisciplinary Practices
As may already be clear, DSDHA is less a “traditional drawing office” and, as Deborah prefers to describe it, more of “an enabling organisation”. Her 60-strong staff is multidisciplinary, offering clients a convenient all-in-one service under one name, from research and architecture to urban and landscape design. This allows them to follow through on their commitment to certain values:
- Integrating projects into existing urban fabric, connecting the interior and exterior, and public and private realms
- Leading open-ended co-design processes in every project
- Championing diversity and inclusion in their designs
- Improving conditions for ecology with regenerative design – that which meets societal needs in harmony with the natural world, and helps to restore it
- Fostering long-term stewardship of urban environments via upskilling of and knowledge exchange with diverse stakeholders
It all adds up to a catalogue of projects offering social value.
Understanding Social Value
“Social value for us is about doing the most with the least in any project, so that you get as much for people as possible,” Deborah explains.
Specifically, our CityChanger uses her position as one of London’s most celebrated architects to reclaim urban spaces, much of which have been lost to “the diminution of public offices making public projects and the rise of private partnerships and neoliberal models” – i.e. land falling into private ownership.
The developments she designs can therefore be thought to exist in an emerging “third space”, where land is privately owned but shared with the public and which can, Deborah believes, restore “the humanity of cities”.
Finding The Hidden Brief
This is rarely the intention of clients who approach DSDHA, and its Deborah’s role to convince them to incorporate – and pay for – public access space.
“I’m always looking for the hidden brief on a site,” she says. This begins with dismissing the assumption that either she or the client really understands the space earmarked for development.
“How do we find out what the needs are? Well, we go out and talk to people.”
Every time, DSDHA heads out to the site and conducts conversations with 100 random passersby.
Spontaneous conversations make room for the voices that tend to be missing from public meetings, especially minority groups or women and girls. “You should always engage them in context.” It is what our CityChanger hails as “the democratisation of the [architectural] process”.
These conversations can be with locals, commuters, or even transient types. Tourists, shoppers, rough sleepers, and recreational visitors can also contribute a snapshot of the diverse experiences occurring within a space and inform suitable designs that respond to the needs that this identifies.
We need to have processes that share knowledge and distribute power more equitably.
It is an unconventional step, and one which can prolong a project. But it means “that we don’t build in inequalities” in the way that city planning has in the past.
Examples of DSDHA’s co-design activities with young people from White Horse Square, Wembley. Image credits: ©Julia King
Equitable Engagement
This process spreads the net wider, but it does not replace formal engagement activities, like townhall setups and focus group-type consultations sessions, which are planned and advertised in advance. Even these can be more inclusive.
Wherever necessary, DSDHA collaborates with grassroots organisations that have the trust of diverse communities and specific stakeholder groups.
On one occasion, they teamed up with Edit. This feminist architecture collective gathered a group of about 20 young people in workshops to shape designs for Purchese Street Open Space at Central Somers Town, and it was important to offer targeted incentives to reward them for their interest.
“We paid the group of young people for their time and arranged food for them. They came together regularly to develop a relationship with the design team, and to learn about how public spaces work”
Their input resulted in a “wonderful curved, sociable, conversational landscape” which impressed the developer so much that they stumped up £5,000 so that Edit could continue working with the same group until the development was finished. In a show of genuine co-construction, a group from Young People for Inclusion eventually crafted some hand-made, individually decorated bricks that were incorporated into the final build, and were later displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
It’s a simple engagement device but a free meal can be “an amazing leveller,” Deborah says. Incentives like food, money, childcare, and meetings held at diverse times make it easy and attractive for busy people to get involved.
While working on the public realm of the reinvention of Euston Tower, a family of six travelled two miles to a session tempted by the food. “You might say, ‘What are they doing here? Two miles? That’s not local.’ Well, it must be if they think it’s worth coming.”
That’s how they saw it. Finally, someone was willing to listen to why they stay away at other times: as a “horrible” office environment, it had nothing to offer them – no social value at all.
Social Value as an Incentive
Feedback like this is important for clients to hear. Creating more inviting public spaces may be in their financial interests.
It’s true that meeting the hidden brief can “cost a lot of money to be up to the job” that wasn’t in the client’s original plan, Deborah admits. Although we should avoid assigning monetary value in attempts to justify the expense, as there is yet to be a consensus for an “agreed metric for actually describing it in financial terms”.
Even so, if the result of a social value design is “robust and generous and bringing delight and wellbeing”, there’s a chance for competitive return on investment.
The more diverse those public spaces are, the more young people are coming, who are the employees of tomorrow.
Young professionals have different expectations to their predecessors: city living but without the corporate flimflam. “They want to feel that they’re part of something relevant,” Deborah explains.
A residential block in Broadgate seems to have nailed it “There are social value programmes run by the owners into which occupiers can participate.” But cleverly, the contractor spreads the costs of the activities among residents in a fee added to rents. Management even drew up a charter enshrining the activities into day-to-day operations, making their commitment clear and offers an attractive prospect for social-conscious would-be residents.
There’s a legacy to it, too. “You can get meaningful amounts of work done when you have a whole building full of volunteers,” Deborah explains. In examples like this, residents “carry on being custodians of the spaces or the buildings” long after the design team and contractors have left. “Those empowered citizens then become the people who lead the next project,” she explains. “It’s really a virtuous circle. It’s good city-making.”
The Expense That Pays Off
The decision to embrace social value in the Broadgate residential block was well worth it: every flat was pre-let. “That building paid for itself.”
It was similar story in Exchange Square where, after completing “a series of quick meanwhile projects”, the client asked DSDHA back to redesign an entire park above the tracks of London Liverpool Street station.
The park offers gently sloping, meandering pathways which replicate a fluid, natural landscape – complete with waterfall – and allows for wheelchair and pushchair access. Seating enables open-air working and invites people to linger, relax, and socialise. One quarter of the 1.5 acre site is green, boosting biodiversity by 600%. Office workers in neighbouring blocks flock here for some respite and emotional repair away from their pressured corporate bubbles.
As the park became a popular place of gathering and enjoyment for locals, commuters, and visitors alike, rents increased, allowing the developers – and local landlords – to recuperate the expense.
Exchange Square. Image credits: © Daniel Fisher
Challenging Authorities and Assumptions
For all the effort put in to discovering the hidden brief, sometimes social value emerges quite by chance.
Local planning and regeneration authorities were happy because the “massive” King’s Cross development ended up being “very rich, glossy, fabulously successful” in their eyes, Deborah says.
It was not one of DSDHA’s projects, but the site neighbours Somers Town, so they happened to capture insights about the way people use the railway building in some of the conversations there.
Many folks said that they preferred “using the British Library as a waiting room” than Kings Cross “or the horror that is Euston Station”, especially people with hypersensitivity or neurodiverse needs.
But unexpectedly, the train terminal served many local low-income families as a place for recreation as well: parents take kids there to run around the ceilinged expanse when rain makes outside play inconceivable.
This “changed the perception of very well-meaning authorities,” Deborah explains, which previously carried the preconceptions “that nobody from Central Somers Town gets out, that it’s a ghetto”. Suddenly it was clear that their behaviour is a reflection of how poorly the neighbourhood’s infrastructure meets their needs, whereas King’s Cross “actually dignified the local people” by giving them a convivial space to share.
In more clement weather, the same children love to run through the 1,000 water jets of Granary Square, outside arts university campus Central Saint Martins. Also completely unplanned for this purpose, it nonetheless gives local families – including “women from some minority groups, for whom getting out and exercising is really difficult” – a safe outside place to gather and move around in.
The Legacy of Social Value
However well designers consult and plan, they need to be ready to respond to the unpredictability of human nature – for better or worse.
The experiences like those in South Molton Street and King’s Cross reveal extra depths to a hidden brief that consultation didn’t capture. These lessons give designers a chance to iterate and possibly hand developers new avenues for making investments pay off.
However we approach it, there’s no escaping the fact that protecting urban spaces for – or returning them to – public interests is a complex and involved business. It takes time, money, and effort to engage essential stakeholders properly.
Thankfully DSDHA has consolidated its engagement process into a framework made available on a “really user-friendly” partnership-led co-design website, complete “with a toolkit and checklist”.
Maybe what anyone involved in the process needs to remember most of all, though, is to remain genuine. People are more honest in their feedback when they trust us, and that can reveal a whole new urban world for the public good.