Designing the Global City: design excellence, competitions and the remaking of central Sydney by Robert Freestone, Gethin Davison and Richard Hu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-2056-9
Designing the Global City is an invaluable history and analysis of the City of Sydney’s Competitive Design Policy (CDP) as applied within the central business district (CBD) between 2001 and 2017. A full one-third of the book is given to placing the policy in a broad series of contexts: design excellence as the driver, design governance as the conceptual framework, Sydney’s evolution into a global city, its governments, its planning system and the precursors to the CDP that emerged throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
These include Quay Visions, the Institute’s 1983 effort to provoke serious debate on the design of the harbour city, the East Circular Quay competition of 1993, and the architectural successes of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
Going into a satisfying level of detail, the book steps through the assembly of the policy from beginnings such as these, highlighting the seminal role of key figures such as Frank Sartor and Graham Jahn, and the ongoing stewardship of the program under a much wider cohort including the likes of Peter Mould, Bob Nation, Peter John Cantrill and Olivia Hyde. The book traces the shift in the policy’s focus from a traditional planner’s concerns for issues such as massing and overshadowing to a larger remit encompassing sustainability, placemaking, engagement with research and innovation, and integration with transport and mobility. It identifies the success of the program hinging greatly on the 10% floor space uplift offered to developers to participate fully in the competitive process.
The research underpinning this book relies on two main methods: an eclectic study of the 46 competitions completed during the study period including the use of an appraisal tool to assess as objectively as possible the available completed buildings from an urban design perspective, and a series of in-depth interviews with 60 leading figures including architects, planners, developers, elected politicians and government officials. With such a cross section, the study was able to capture many of the gripes architects have with the CDP, including the cost of participation, the lack of sufficiently deep engagement with the client and its requirements, the possibility for lack of transparency and theft of intellectual property. But the study was also able to weigh these against the apparent benefits of the policy: in overall increase in design quality, in awareness about design, and in the value of architects and their services.
The study also rated the CDP a success against the objectives of its original creator, Frank Sartor as lord mayor in 2001: ‘One, to allow variation to controls – a proper process that allowed you to say, yes, there is a better solution to this than the planning control, or DCP control. Secondly, to break the cartel of the three or four architecture firms doing all the CBD building design, boring mirror-glass rubbish. Thirdly, probably most importantly, was to make the property industry realise that design paid a dividend, that design was important’ (Sartor 2015, quoted on p. 129).
Cause and effect
One must ask whether these objectives were achieved as a result of the CDP, or if the CDP was simply another conduit for industry trends that were already heading that way. Sidestepping planning controls rather than fixing them has become so much a part of doing business in NSW that successive state governments have legislated a growing number of pathways for doing so. In this sense the spot-planning components of the CDP seems more like a symptom of the same disease than a solution for a problem specific to the CBD.
Likewise, the value of architecture and design has been increasing globally throughout the years that the CDP has been in place. Arguably the CDP was created at a time when there was already broad appreciation of the need for instruments that could mandate improved architectural outcomes, and has succeeded for so long because wider faith in its objectives has not waned since.
By relying so much on a methodology based on industry insiders, some of the book’s ability to tease apart causation versus correlation for issues such as these has been lost. Which makes Sartor’s second objective so interesting: ‘to break the cartel of the three or four […] firms’. This is perhaps the most specifically Sydney of the three objectives. Why was Sydney’s CBD designed by such an oligopoly? I surmise that it was because Sydney of the 1980s and 1990s was a small, isolated market for architectural design, especially in contrast to similar cities in North America and Europe where there were greater capacity and tradition of hiring architects from other cities. The book argues that the perception that the CDP has opened the door to international architects is unfair since only 21% of winning firms have been international. Arguably that is a comfortable ratio for a balance between importing new ideas and employing a greater diversity of local architects.
Design review panels
The book points out that much of the success of the CDP has been the fact that the City of Sydney has been led by various independents throughout its history, and is vulnerable to a major shift in power. What then will prevent architects from falling back in line with the development industry at the expense of the public interest if that happens? The book notes that the main mechanism in the current form of the CDP is architects’ ability to refer back to council when the developer attempts to jettison any element the architect believes to be in the public interest.
These design integrity provisions allow council to reconvene the jury or establish an independent panel to weigh the impacts of design amendments and make recommendations. Such panels are examples of a Design Review Panel (DRP), a policy tool also having its genesis in precursors such as the Sydney 2000 Olympics and growing in favour with initiatives such as the Government Architect NSW State Design Review Panel pilot program. It is easy enough to say, as the Government Architect does, that different policy tools are relevant at different stages of a project. But it is the task of architectural scholarship to determine to what extent that has been true in practice.
Designing the Global City is an excellent and thorough example of scholarly investigation applied to a major policy paradigm, coming to a very fair-minded judgement about the net-positive benefits of the Competitive Design Policy for the governance and quality of architectural design in Sydney. The questions it does not answer, however, point very clearly in the direction of a follow-up study on the comparative merits of other policies in the government’s toolbox, in particular the current generation of Design Review Panel initiatives.
This book review was originally published in Diversity (2019), Architecture Bulletin 76(2).