The cities we build today will still be standing for generations to come, so we need to anticipate how these will form the physical and social infrastructures people need in the future. Siobhan Burger explains how to achieve that with social design – and how she infiltrated decision-making circles to put it into practice.
Siobhan Burger was fed up.
For eight years, together with Faye Ellen, she ran Arttenders, a social design agency, and for those eight years she had tried to get influential actors in the Netherlands, to listen.
It’s a classic story: decision-makers and construction companies build cities to meet immediate demand, always on the back foot as growing urban populations add pressure and new challenges. With next to no wiggle room, they give scant regard to the bigger picture: a city’s future needs or how physical infrastructure influences the city’s social makeup.
“These organisations plan for a very long time, but during their planning process, they do not really connect or relate to the people that will actually be living in these areas,” Siobhan explains.
Occasionally they did respond to her calls, but it was often too late: the remaining time and budget was usually too limited to action anything meaningful. They expected Siobhan and her team to provide a quick, cheap solution, but a compromise was not on the cards.
This happened time and again, and Siobhan got incredibly frustrated.
So, our CityChanger did something drastic: she quit the company she co-founded.
New Beginnings
“At some point I got so fed up with not being in the design processes that I reached out to one of the biggest real estate developers in the Netherlands,” Siobhan explains.
A family-run property firm, Dura Vermeer, was recruiting an urban developer. “I emailed them, and I said, ‘I think you have probably 3,000 people matching this profile working for your company already. Maybe it’s time to invite a different perspective.’”
The incoming managing director was open to fresh ideas and offered Siobhan a job – a turn of events that still surprises her, two years on.
Yes, the company took a gamble, but that decision represents the organisation’s responsibility for developing “good neighbourhoods”. These, Siobhan tells us, are projects that address the “undeniable” complexities of challenges in spatial planning.
Since 2022, she has been running a social impact programme for internal teams of architects and engineers to imprint social design in every project the company handles. The overarching objective is to help Dura Vermeer create the types of places people need and want to live in.
Making a Splash
Siobhan has plenty of experience of this.
Before leaving Arttenders, she worked on The Splash, a temporary installation near a recently renovated shopping mall.
Interviews with locals identified a “huge demand” for a place to hang out outdoors, while observing social distancing rules during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Also functioning “as an informal playground” for children, The Splash gave people what they wanted. We know this because the final design was put to a public vote.
It proved so popular that a six-month installation became a year.
But when the municipality “had to make a qualitative decision on whether or not” to make it a permanent fixture, they found The Splash didn’t fit the aesthetic that regulation dictated was suitable for this area – odd, considering the design itself was a colourful imitation of a pool which had once stood on the same spot.
It’s a pity, Siobhan says, that such a popular feature was lost due to rules created by people that may never even access the spaces they’re governing.
“This for me was such a big symbol of where the decision-making power in the system is and how it does not necessarily match the needs of the end user.”
Acknowledging a Social Agenda
Siobhan is determined to correct this injustice.
“So many times people ask me, ‘What is your role at Dura Vermeer?’ and I say, it’s to challenge our ways of thinking in every part of the process.”
She’s right to bug them. Our CityChanger says that the social agenda is still underdeveloped, amounting to little more than “vague aspirations”. That’s like Kryptonite to professionals who feel safe using empirical measurements and who prefer the neat, measurable quality standards available in other areas of sustainability: technical and financial frameworks, for example, and carbon emissions data.
As messy as it may be, social infrastructure needs to be on the same priority level. The decisions we make are practically “irreversible”, Siobhan claims, because we what we construct today is built to last – at least for a century or more. So the social infrastructure that it develops must be fit for the future too.
So, what can be done about it?
Building Social Infrastructure
Tens of thousands more inhabitants will move to cities like Rotterdam in the next few decades; a considerable proportion will be low-income and arrive starting afresh, with no local network to rely on. The built environment needs to offer conditions that create a supportive social infrastructure for them.
If we do not address the fact that you need some social infrastructure to make sure that different types of people can engage in society, we can design all the houses that we want, but we already know that these plans are going to fail.
For example, planners may happily put greenery somewhere in a neighbourhood, which looks good and has clear health benefits, “but how it’s placed in space actually matters”. A grassy area for children to play directly outside an apartment block, or trees to climb, can be important for youth development and socialisation too.
“Having this space to learn and make mistakes – we oftentimes forget to design that,” our CityChanger points out. “It’s part of developing. It’s part of the growing up process, that you have space to climb; you fall down, and you learn how to get up again. It’s how we build resilience: by going out there and doing stuff that we’re not supposed to do.”
Like The Splash, these communal spaces can also act as an important meeting place for families, an incentive for interaction and development of support networks, friendships, and non-commercial sharing: all building blocks to cohesive, happier communities.
Cultural Hypocrisy
This is not some unobtainable utopia. Parcels of it exist already, from which we can learn – if we’re willing.
Siobhan recently visited a neighbourhood in Netherlands demonstrating a “very solid community”. She observed interactions between multiple generations, a thriving school system, people taking care of each other, etc. In many ways, it’s the archetype neighbourhood that a social designer would aspire to create.
However, it also exposes prejudices. This is “a very dense Islamic community” meaning “it was marked as a neighbourhood that required attention” by the authorities “because it was becoming a monoculture”. These are concerns that our CityChanger believes would not have been imposed upon it were a social-economic or Christian monoculture.
“My point is there is no one-size-fits-all approach. There’s always a cultural context. There’s always a local context. There’s always a political context.” All too well, this highlights how planners’ decisions may support one group but disadvantage another.
Designing Opportunities
Siobhan’s job is to encourage designers “to think about how urban development shapes societal systems” such as this.
That means understanding how people live – and live together – and how the built environment provides or restricts opportunities: “Who gets access to education, who gets access to work, who gets access to different types of mobility.”
Which requires a change in perspective – Siobhan’s biggest challenge.
She discovered that professionals like her colleagues design, plan, and construct for the issues and wants that they are familiar with, instead of trying to understand and meet the requirements of the communities they’re building for. They were simply unaware.
We tend to design structures based on a perspective of privilege. And by doing that, we exclude the people that need to be included the most.
To get them thinking about the broader intricate tapestry of social experiences, Siobhan keeps asking the niggling questions: “How do these children walk to school safely? If there are elderly people living there, how do they meet each other? How do they interact? Can I call my neighbour to ask for a cup of sugar if I run out? Where do I park my car? Does that affect the safety of the children that are playing there? If I am 16, where can I secretly kiss my girlfriend out of view of my parents?”
Each answer gets them closer to designs for more inclusive neighbourhoods.
From Care Homes to Daycare: Considerations for the Future
Although that’s just half the task.
Maybe the biggest headache is how to align developments that meet the pressing needs of today and prepare for the unknown needs of tomorrow. The future is notoriously hard to predict, but we do know that demand is likely to change.
Ageing societies being a case in point.
Siobhan explains that the average age of residents in some renovation projects is around 70 years old. “We can optimise the houses for their needs, but let’s be honest, in 20 years, that house will still be there, but those people will not.”
Without too much expense or restructuring, the very same houses suited to seniors should be ready for communal living, singles, nuclear families, or any number of alternatives – most likely a mix.
One way is to design provision that overlaps for diverse lifestyles. Knowing what they want can be obtained via consultation with user groups.
Sporty Spice-ifications
That’s why Rotterdam has also taken this approach, in one of their urban densification projects, to fulfilling its ambition to become “the most inclusive environment for sports”, Siobhan tells us.
It’s a wholesome goal, but inclusion is about more than just a matter of access to venues.
The built environment must make allowances for different groups: equipment at various heights that can be used by adults and children, or shared between people using wheelchairs and those who do not, etc.
To do this, a social designer will need to learn what citizens are thinking.
“We need to identify the challenges. And the only way to do that is to actually listen to the people that in the end probably need the biggest adjustment in the things that we’re designing.”
So, it’s not that we’re designing the minimum requirements, but that we’re actually trying to think of smart ways to optimise for different types of use.
Active mobility is a classic bottleneck, where plenty of groups experience similar barriers, especially as pedestrians.
Siobhan realised this from interviewing people living with “a variety of physical disabilities in different age groups” and by drawing a correlation with pregnant woman and parents of young children.
“If you’re walking around with a wheelchair and there is this jerk that parked his shared scooter or bike in front of the door and you can’t pass it, it’s the same type of disturbance.” Disturbance being a polite word for microaggression.
By opening people’s eyes to the variables, social designers give developers a fuller understanding of the scope of issues that can lead us “to make the right choices” – or, at least, to approach the relevant problems with the intention to devise solutions.
The Social Design Process
Most municipal department and construction companies won’t have the inclination or funds to hire a Siobhan equivalent for their own teams. So what does she suggest they do?
Social design follows a process, of course. It starts with asking the right questions: Who is the development intended for? What scope does the department or company have? What certainties do we know for the decades ahead? If one group of people leave, who is likely to move in to replace them?
Enquiries like these give Siobhan’s colleagues a better “understanding of how their choices might impact the daily lives of people that will actually live there”, leading to better output.
However, she adds, it’s not a scientific process. Even after all this, they could get it wrong. Acknowledging our limitations is an unavoidable part of it all.
“I think that it takes a lot of courage to recognise that, but also admit that as a company operating in this field, we can’t do everything right. But at least I can look myself into the mirror and say we’ve tried to look further.”
What is an Inclusive City, Really?
Just maybe we also have to acknowledge that a city is never going to be truly equal – and that it’s okay.
Once a wheelchair user with a car who Siobhan interviewed explained that she drives to spots tailored for her “specific needs”, and that is enough. She didn’t expect every space to be optimised for her, as long as she has options.
Not every place has to be for everyone, as long as everyone has a place.
That’s just as well, our CityChanger admits. Space, time, resources, and money all impose limits in what we can realistically change. “We always need to choose. But as long as you have a bigger vision and make sure that there’s a place for everyone to be, to grow, to participate in society, then I think that we’re on the right track.”