What is driven by Why? As city planners, urban designers, architects and built environment professionals, we all ask this question at some point: what are we actually designing – buildings, spaces or experiences?
Buildings and the built environment are designed and constructed according to measurable, quantifiable and gradable standards, yet a community’s interaction with their environment is not measured, or indeed measurable in this way.
Our built environment – and increasingly, what is left unbuilt – affects us in subtle and unconscious ways. Beyond providing physical shelter, buildings affect us psychologically and emotionally. Take a moment to recall a happy memory, and the space it happened will inevitably feature. Therefore, one conclusion for practitioners is that we design all of the above. To make an impact, design has to encapsulate the delivery of the tangible as well as the intangible.
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This correlation between the quantitative nature of the physical material we work with and the qualitative effects the spaces we design brings about, has long occupied architects and theorists. Le Corbusier called space that evokes feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment “ineffable”, while Louis Kahn referred to these qualities as “unmeasurable”. Norberg-Schulz called this spirit of the place “Genius Loci”. As professionals, our aspirations for architecture have always encompassed the qualities of the material object itself, as well as the effect it has in mediating its context and how this shapes the human experience.
As a result, our designs should address some of the most urgent issues in our everyday lives. Inclusion, agency, connection and attachment affect all of us, especially when finding new and better ways to live sustainably and are inevitably at the top of the agenda for governments, societies and even businesses. Could architects and designers intervene proactively in the practice of everyday life to create spaces that embody these values?
Lovable or Liveable?
Given that there are already many liveability indicators, the Design Singapore Council commissioned the Loveable Singapore Report in 2020-2022. The outcome was a distillation of six intangible attributes that mattered most to Singapore’s residents – agency, attachment, attraction, connection, freedom and inclusion.
There is a universality to these attributes, but they are best understood as reflections of the values and aspirations of the city’s people and we can expect these to evolve and require constant engagement. Our task as designers – even before crafting our own brief – is to establish the highly context-dependent intangible outcomes that would drive the endeavour. To do this we should not rely solely on our own training and bias, but to find ways in which residents can find their voice on these issues.
Each city should really ask its people these questions about the intangible values they aspire to. The process of inquiry should become the universal constant, rather than the values professed at any given time. We need to be guided by them from inception, to formulating a brief, to working out the un-measurable outcomes that each project needs to achieve, to be able to form a collective city for the people. Whether we design spaces that become generic or distinctly worth visiting depends on the extent we can reflect the qualities that people love about their city.
The value of a good question
Questions reveal the values of the questioner. Finding the right questions to go beyond the superficial could uplift participatory design outcomes. Questions that find that balance between a self-centred introspection and communal considerations are key for making collective decisions reflecting personal values.
At the Singapore pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, we invited the audience to reflect on their values but also on those which might benefit the common good.
What is beneficial to society might not coincide exactly with individual aspirations. Indeed, this will open up a spectrum of answers. If we can recreate this exercise with a large sample size and a representative cross-section of a city’s demographic, the guesswork that seems to underpin too many building development projects would be replaced with a set of actual aspirations.
Measurements for new measures
Measurement of such un-measurable concepts like connection to our community, attachment to places or the lived experience of agency, to effect change in our surroundings could bring new frameworks and measures of success in projects. How can we embed these values within our work, as well as safeguard the common good in the future?
As KoozArch asked in a recent edition of the publication, architecture company OMA director Reinier de Graaf dedicates an entire chapter to the phenomenon of liveability indexes, tracing the emergence of the word liveable from the 1608 origin in England, when towns suffered severe outbreak of the bubonic plague, to the entry of the term within urban discourse with Lewis Mumford’s essay, Restored Circulation, Renewed Life, (1956) and ultimately the establishment of this as an objective within reports as The Livable Region 1976/1986: Proposals to Manage the Growth of Greater Vancouver.
Thirty years after the report’s implementation, in 2005, the publication continues, Vancouver earned the top position on The Economist’s Global Liveability Index. In this time, the city almost doubled its population, becoming a poster child for North American urbanism. But it also led to an increase in house prices of more than 300 per cent, reflecting the shift in the meaning of the word ”liveability” from the protection of local communities, to a mainstream factor of the built environment and real estate market.
The annual report evaluates the best and worst living conditions based on five major categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.
Melbourne’s near perfect score
Melbourne held the prestigious title of the world’s most liveable city for seven years from 2011-2018 achieving nearly perfect scores.
The city has seen an increase in house prices of more than 414.6 per cent and the largest population growth of any of the Australian cities over the past two decades but the people who live there love it for more than its quality of life but embrace its quirks and charms as well.
“I love that it thinks it invented laneways. I love that it retains its old architecture by building new architecture directly on top of it.
I love that it thinks it’s the only place with baristas and sourdough, and that there’s a running joke about everyone wearing black but, actually, everyone does wear black.”
Author Anna Spargo-Ryan said in The Guardian when Melbourne was recently again crowned the most liveable city in Australia, “I love that it thinks it invented laneways. I love that it retains its old architecture by building new architecture directly on top of it. I love that it thinks it’s the only place with baristas and sourdough, and that there’s a running joke about everyone wearing black but, actually, everyone does wear black.”
This is a pivotal case in point to align our work between the tangible and intangible, to more closely reflect, embody and foster society’s values. As designers, we need to steward the interest of the city’s population in addition to reflecting their contemporary aspirations in our designs.
By focusing on the emerging frontier of these lovable intangibles – agency, attachment, attraction, connection, freedom and inclusion, in the case of Singapore – built environment professionals can help create more sustainable and truly liveable cities that balance participation, affordability, economy and belonging.