Abstract
It is not difficult to conjure up images of Sydney, Australia, when thinking about design excellence. The city has had its identity intimately associated with its most distinctive building, the iconic Sydney Opera House, designed by Jørn Utzon in the late 1950s and prominently sited on Sydney Harbor. Similar to Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, global cities privileged by their physical setting, Sydney benefits from its geographic location and its topography, offering stunning views from land and water. Its natural features in and of themselves offer an unparalleled visual experience designed by nature. This exceptional landscape creates a context that demands “nuanced design solutions” (p. 48) for any planning intervention, particularly large-scale developments in such high demand in global cities today.
A unique book about a unique policy in a unique city, Designing the Global City: Design Excellence, Competitions and the Remaking of Central Sydney considers how mandatory design competitions can contribute to design excellence and improve the competitiveness of cities on the global stage. Sydney is the only global city that requires all commissions to design commercial buildings be awarded through a competition; the city’s Competitive Design Policy (CDP), established in 2000, has indelibly embedded design governance into large-scale private property development. The authors build a compelling argument for the benefits of statutory competitive design and the design excellence that results from the process. Sydney’s approach to design excellence is made quite unique because it recognizes the need to have design for individual sites be part of an urban context that gives the city its flair and preserves its distinct character.
Designing the Global City is written in a clear, direct, and accessible style, not only plentiful in detail, but also a pleasure to read. It displays the research rigor expected of an academic publication while being readable and useful to practitioners, developers, and other professionals who may benefit from its rich content. The book draws some of its material from previously published journal articles and conference presentations by the three authors, in addition to a 2016 symposium. The authors conducted more than sixty interviews, in addition to performing quantitative and qualitative data analysis and fieldwork.
The book is organized into ten chapters, each uniformly comprising an introduction, several sections, and a conclusion. Both chapters 3 and 6 include methodological notes. The Introduction to the book, chapter 1, sets the context. It describes how design excellence, achieved through design competitions for private property development, contributed to putting Sydney on the map of global cities. The Introduction also includes descriptions of the research approach and book’s organization. Chapter 2 explains how design competitions have created Sydney’s unique design governance and how property development has been shaped by the intervention of the public sector in the design of large commercial properties to achieve design excellence. Carmona (2016, 705) defines design governance as “the process of state-sanctioned intervention in the means and processes of designing the built environment in order to shape both processes and outcomes in a defined public interest.”
As interesting as the story of Sydney’s CDP is, the story of Barangaroo, the mega-development happening outside of this policy, is also compelling. Sydney’s symbiotic relationship with Barangaroo is discussed in chapter 3, which also presents the context within which Sydney fits as a global city. A brownfield redevelopment being implemented by the state, Barangaroo allows for developments of a scale that is not afforded by Sydney’s CBD, given its physical constraints. Thus, although the area abuts the CBD, developments in Barangaroo are not subjected to the CDP; its master plan is directed by the Barangaroo Development Authority and the New South Wales Department of Planning. The Barangaroo development has undoubtedly contributed to Sydney’s status of a global city, particularly because Sydney’s CBD could not offer sites to accommodate the construction of buildings of the scale desired by global businesses today. Although some of the professionals interviewed for this book prefer the approach adopted by the state in the redevelopment of Barangaroo—direct hiring of star architects rather than competitive selection—some believe that Sydney’s competitive process has raised the bar and allowed the city to achieve new levels of design excellence. Could master plans be decided through competitions? This is a legitimate question regarding developments of the scale and breadth of Barangaroo.
Chapter 4 gives the historical context within which Sydney’s CDP developed, explaining how the concept of design dividend evolved since the 1970s and how the value of design became recognized. Design dividend is defined as the benefits stemming from good design that are obtained by private parties beyond those realized by the city. This chapter also covers the evolution of planning and design standards and the establishment and growth of design competitions. Sydney’s CDP offers a viable alternative to unguided (or misguided) development given that real estate interests more often than not dictate what our cities look like and the results of unbridled private development are not always compatible with the best interests of a city (Barnett 1974). Chapter 5 describes Sydney’s CDP, its creation and how it is operated, including the institutionalization of the policy and the review and revision processes. The chapter focuses on design excellence in Central Sydney after 2000 and how the competition process actually works, including the inclusion of a Design Review Panel into the process since 2007.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 give a comprehensive understanding of the CDP in practice. Chapter 6 rates competitive projects and analyzes their impact on the city since the inception of the CDP. The three case studies that exemplify the positive influence of design competitions on design excellence are presented next. Although only one of the three projects has actually been completed to date, all three had physical constraints imposed by the urban context and adopted a holistic approach that benefited private and public interests alike. In addition, none of them may have been possible were it not for the preference of global corporations to occupy quarters like those on offer in Barangaroo. Chapter 8 discusses the benefits and drawbacks of mandatory design competitions. The authors argue that competitions actually elevate design quality and produce varied and innovative solutions. In addition, competitions open up opportunities for a wider range of firms to participate, although the authors recognize that large, international firms stand a much better chance of being awarded design commissions than smaller, local firms.
Chapter 9 assesses the Sydney Model and discusses the use of design competitions as public policy. The authors suggest ways to refine the CDP and assess the efficacy of mandatory design competitions as a tool for design governance; they also discuss the positive influence that this policy has had in the metropolitan context. The concluding chapter considers competitions through four lenses: Exceptionalism, Competitiveness, Design Excellence, and the Public Interest. The authors ask whether other global cities could adopt similar policies, recognizing the challenges presented by different contexts and legal frameworks. They also consider how competition among global cities can be directly linked to the design quality of their built environments and how much of this design quality (and excellence) is achieved because of design competitions, statutory or not. Finally, a question related to a core value of planning, the authors contemplate whether the public interest can be well served by design competitions and if design governance can, at least, succeed in prioritizing it.
Other Australian cities, such as Melbourne and Perth, have been inspired by Sydney’s CDP and have taken steps to emulate its design excellence philosophy. This book clearly demonstrates that “public sector intervention in private design and procurement processes is possible, and that it can greatly improve the quality of property development outcomes” (p. 303). Beyond design excellence, it would behoove our global cities to adopt statutory sustainable development processes given that stewardship may need to be mandated by sustainability reviews and competitions. Since developers not always have incentives to reduce the impact of their developments on the environment, conditioning the approval of projects to their ecological footprint and incorporating sustainability requirements into statutory planning processes and the city’s governance framework may be the only way to achieve planetary excellence.