Prioritise and tell it how it is

London’s popular mayor, Boris Johnson, has been taking advice from many quarters on his policies in respect of design quality. The elephant in the room when design is discussed by politicians is the cost, or additional cost, of commissioning excellent design as opposed to whatever the construction sector chooses to give you. Since politicians are responsible to the public for what they do with the money we have provided them with (on a compulsory basis), this is good and proper. The danger, however, is that by treating ‘design’ as a discrete subject, it implies that it is an optional extra — or at least that ‘good’ design is.

What, therefore, should the mayor, bear in mind when it comes to determining the level of seriousness with which they will treat the quality of architecture, planning and urban design they want for their city or country?

The first and admittedly banal point is that whenever you adapt, improve or create buildings, spaces and places, you will be paying for design. It may be good, bad or indifferent, but you will be paying for it. The idea that any mayor would say ‘I know, let’s commission some really third rate designs for that new transport interchange/school/hospital’ is of course ludicrous, but from observation it cannot be said — to put it mildly — that all our new public buildings are exemplary. The reasons why we often end up with less that high-quality design are comples, but they stem from the attitude of the client towards the desired quality of outcome. Unless there is an expressed desire, backed up by procurement safeguards to ensure high standards, then what you get is what you get.

Politicians nevertheless need to be convinced that the cost of good design can be explained in simple terms to the media and to the electorate, which is where the trouble starts. Too often, the cynical prediction of time and cost overruns in relation to major public projects turn out to be true. Even worse is when they are half-truths resulting from a failure to be frank in the first place.

The London 2012 Games are a good example of this. The reality is that the cost of the games is about one-third of the total money being expended on the Olympic park site and associated infrastructure. The other two-thirds covers environmental improvement and long-term buildings and facilities which would have been necessary anyway in some form; the Olympics acted as the trigger to get the work done in a short time-frame now, rather than in piecemeal fashion over the nest 30 years. If this had been explained clearly from the beginning, then the wave of media hostility towards the project, largely unfounded, would have been much reduced. But rising costs looked like a very good story at the time; now the sums involved seem rather trifling given the bank bail-out over the last two years. The Games have moved from being a financial pariah to a much-needed neo-Keynsian construction stability programme.

Any politician should remember that really big spending on major projects is often about engineering rather than architecture. The Jubilee Line extension programme was a good example of this: the minor cost increases on the stations were as nothing compared with the cost of the tunnelling, which went sadly awry. The public’s experience of the line, however, is all about the stations, and they ended up being the greatest civil architecture project of the 20th century in the capital.

The justification for spending more money on those stations than was spent on their Victoria Line equivalents is simple: safer, more efficient, but above all a magnificent demonstration of the aspirations of London government and the London Underground for its citizens and users. The psychological effect of high-quality design on the paying customer is underestimated, possibly because it is difficult to measure it in money terms. Which brings us to two categories of people whose reaction to a well-designed city spells financial reward.

Tourists are one obvious group who will be impressed by the quality of the built environment, parks, public places and public transport of any city destination. And tourism brings huge money, which is why the slum of East Oxford Street needs to be addressed with all due speed, ditto far too many of our Underground stations, ditto the dreadful paving which disfigures too much of central London.

An even more important group are the companies that choose to locate here, not least because of London’s reputation as a great place to be. This becomes less convincing if you have to put up with the transport nightmare conditions pertaining at Victoria Station for example, or the unpleasant one-way motorways masquerading as rational street planning in much of the West End. Of course many other factors influence corporate location decisions, but it is nevertheless true that cities which are liked and admired stand a better chance of making and attracting money than the other sort.

So for financial, social and psychological reasons, the case for aspiring to high-quality design can be strongly made. But aspiration is never enough: it needs to be accompanied by a strategy and a budget to deliver what is desired. In the case of London and other world cities, the politicians need to be clear about whether the level of design excellence needs to be world-class, international class, high-quality or good ordinary (in my view this should be the minimum standard for any public project, e.g. paving on suburban streets).

Having established criteria for determining which quality category should apply to any given project, the budget should be set appropriately, bearing in mind precedent, and perhaps giving international comparisons. That way, the public will not be misled into thinking you can get a parliamentary building for the same price as a B&Q warehouse. Budget increases should be explained and justified if and when they occur, by an appropriate official who should give all details to the public and media.

Boris could make a start by deciding, with Westminster, whether we should turning those urban motorways into traffic-calmed two-way streets, and if so, whether the accompanying paving improvements should involve York stone or something cheaper. Either way we should be told why the decision has been made and what the cost is, including professional fees, VAT and any other associated cost. If we start telling the truth about costs, there will be fewer nasty surprises along the way and we will begin to think more about the real benefit of good design, which is long-term value in every sense.