CLG COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO PLANNING SKILLS

 

Evidence submitted by UDAL (the Urban Design Alliance)

 

 

UDAL

 

UDAL is a network of professional and campaigning organisations that was formed in 1997 to promote the value of good urban design. UDAL's organisations bring together over half a million people who design, plan, manage and campaign for better places. Their day-to-day decisions shape the urban environment. UDAL is working to help them become more effective.

 

Members of UDAL

Institution of Civil Engineers

Institute of Historic Building Conservation

Institute of Highway Incorporated Engineers

Institution of Highways and Transportation

Royal Institute of British Architects

Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors

Royal Town Planning Institute

Urban Design Group

 

Affiliate members of UDAL

Academy for Sustainable Communities

CABE Space

Civic Trust

 

 

 

 

Capacitycheck

The urban design capacity framework

 

A new method of building skills in planning and urban design

 

 

UDAL believes that higher standards of urban design depend on everyone who makes or influences decisions about development (including councillors, design champions, clients and a wide range of professionals) having better understanding, knowledge and abilities.

 

To raise standards through training and education, and through learning on the job, we need to be able to assess what capacity individuals and organisations have, and to plan how to develop it. Capacitycheck is an aid to doing this.

 

UDAL is publishing the first user's guide to Capacitycheck this spring. It believes that the method has enormous potential in developing skills in planning and urban design. As PPS1 says, planning and urban design are 'indivisible'.

 

 

Some uses of Capacitycheck

 

Capacitycheck can be used either to assess the present skills, awareness and understanding of an individual or organisation, or to determine what capacity a person or organisation requires. The following are some of the ways in which Capacitycheck can help.

 

 

Uses of Capacitycheck	What Capacitycheck can help to create
1. Training and education
· Individuals planning their own continuous professional development (CPD).	A personal development plan
· Devising training programmes (for councillors, design champions, clients and various types of built environment professional, for example).	A training programme
· Devising education courses in urban design.	The curriculum for an urban design course
· Devising education courses for other built environment specialisms where it is important to increase the urban design and placemaking content.	The urban design content of a course
· Devising training materials.	Training materials
· Drawing up charters for local authorities, developers and development agencies in particular regions to aspire to, and to base training programmes on.	An urban design charter

 

· Built environment professional institutes planning how to enhance the urban design content of their accreditation standards, their accredited courses, and their CPD events and requirements.	Improved accreditation and CPD standards, and a programme for CPD events and courses
2. Employers
· An employer deciding what sort of person to hire, and drawing up a job description and person specification.	A job description and person specification
· Carrying out an annual review of an employee and discussing with them how to improve their urban design capacity.	An annual review and personal development programme
3. Local authorities
· Setting out a minimum urban design capacity that every local authority should have. (The raw Capacitycheck framework does not constitute such a minimum capacity, but it provides a method for deciding what that capacity should be). Local authorities could be persuaded to achieve this capacity, and the government to support them in this.	A regional or national standard for urban design capacity
· Local authorities assessing their own urban design capacities (based on a scoring system to be devised), creating a benchmark to check against annually.	A benchmark of the local authority's urban design capacity
4. Design champions
· Setting out recommended standards of awareness and understanding for design champions.	A regional or national standard for design champions, and training programmes to achieve it
5. Policy and guidance
· Deciding the coverage of a local authority's planning policy and guidance.	A programme for formulating policy and publishing guidance

 

6. Accreditation
· Assessing urban design practitioners for purposes of accreditation.	Accreditation standards
· Drawing up lists of practices that will be invited to tender for urban design projects.	A list of approved practices
· Assessing potential project teams as part of a tender process, to ensure that they have the capacity to deliver an urban design project.	An assessment of the urban design capacity of a potential project team.

 

 

 

The skills gap

 

Eighty-four per cent of planning applications are prepared by someone with no design training: plan drawers, surveyors, planners, builders, computer-aided-design technicians and many more. That figure began as a guess. But it can be verified by asking local authority planners: 'Is 84 per cent about right?' Usually they reckon it is, within a few percentage points. Often they add: 'And even some of the people who have had some design training have no idea about how to design in an urban context.'

 

What skills are needed to make successful places? Sir John Egan's review considered the skills and knowledge required to implement the government's Sustainable Communities Plan. Its brief had focused on specialist, professional skills, but Egan's report (Skills for Sustainable Communities, 2004) highlighted a wide range of generic skills that are required by regeneration, built environment and economic development professionals.

 

Egan identified these generic skills as project management, partnership working, making things happen, leadership, community engagement, negotiation and conflict resolution. One of the review's major recommendations was the creation of a national centre for sustainable community skills, which now exists as the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC). Among its other tasks, the ASC is focusing on how to promote those generic skills.

 

The ASC has also raised the alarm about what it predicts will be significant labour shortages among professions in the sustainable communities sector (Mind the Skills Gap: a review of the skills we need for sustainable communities, 2007) within the next five years. There is an urgent need for recruitment and training programmes to provide enough people with the right skills, the ASC says. 

 

 

Four essentials

 

In no sector is the projected skills shortage more severe than in design, particularly urban design and landscape design. It is not just a question of skills. Making successful design achievable is likely to depend on four factors:

 

1. Leadership (organisations that shape places need commitment from the top to high standards of design).

 

2. Policy (local authorities need policy, guidance and procedures that will support high standards of design).

 

3. Organisation (organisations need to be structured in ways that support design).

 

4. Skills (local authorities, other organisations, and people who play a part in shaping places need to have, or have access to, generic management and communication skills, and specific skills relating to urban design).

 

Capacitycheck focuses on the last of those factors: the specific skills (or understanding or awareness) relating to urban design. It makes acquiring skills - whether by individuals or organisations - less of a hit-and-miss affair.

 

 

Building capacity

 

Any strategy for making successful places (or sustainable communities or eco-towns, or whatever is the buzzword of the moment) needs to take all of those four factors into account. It must also recognise that higher standards of urban design depend not just on professionals, and not just on specialist skills. Places are improved by everyone who makes or influences decisions about development (including councillors, design champions, clients and a wide range of professionals) having better understanding, knowledge and abilities.

 

To raise standards through training and education, and through learning on the job, we need to be able to assess what capacity individuals and organisations have, and to plan how to develop it. Capacitycheck has been devised as an aid to doing this. Capacitycheck is currently being trialled by two London boroughs; Urban Design London is using it as the basis for planning its training programmes; and the Urban Design Group hopes to use it as the basis for its new Recognised Practitioners initiative.

 

Organisations committed to improving urban design skills include the ASC, CABE, English Partnerships, architecture and built environment centres, regional centres of excellence and, in Scotland, Improvement Service. They face an almost unlimited need for training for the whole range of people whose decisions have an impact on the quality of places. Making their efforts effective depends of focusing their resources where they are most needed.

 

 

Urban design is a way of working

 

Where does urban design begin? Where do architecture, planning and other related disciplines end? They don't. Urban design is not another profession occupying a niche between the others. It is a way of working.

 

Yes, there are professional urban designers, specialists in the art of placemaking who choose 'urban designer' as their professional label. But many of them are also architects, building conservationists, engineers, landscape architects, planners or surveyors. One of the defining characteristics of urban design is that it is a process involving a range of disciplines.

 

And there are other professionals who may not call themselves urban designers and are happy to fly under the flag of one or more of the established professions, but whose way of working nevertheless puts them in the mainstream of urban design. Many of the new generation of professionals expect to develop new skills and areas of expertise throughout their career, and some have more than one professional affiliation.

 

The key for people working in urban design, whether they are professionals, design champions, councillors, community activists or anything else, is to understand that successful placemaking depends on different professional disciplines working together and on effective collaboration among a wide range of people whose decisions matter. That is where we must start building skills.

 

 

Changing places

 

Urban design is a way of managing the complexity of places, and of creating frameworks for change. Its focus is usually on how places change through time. It is a way of approaching architecture, though not the type of architecture whose job is done once the project has been photographed for the professional journals. It involves planning, but not the sort that considers the process complete when the plan has been approved. It is concerned with highway engineering, but the type that responds to the particular possibilities of the place, rather than being enslaved to regulations and conventional practice.

 

Specialised urban design skills may not fit into neat professional categories. The range of skills is wider than any single individual is likely to possess, and a different combination of skills will be required for different projects. The most creative people involved in urban design expect to learn through being involved in the process, rather than to have their prejudices confirmed.

 

UDAL believes that Capacitycheck will be an important means of helping to fulfil the potential of urban design in the planning process.

 

 

Further information

 

UDAL would be pleased to provide further information about Capacitycheck or to present evidence in person.