The requirement to submit a 1000-word ‘research proposal’ to accompany my resubmitted application form takes a little longer – one of my difficulties being the need to reduce the length of the text in order to comply with the word-limit, a task I always find difficult. I am also conscious that an exercise similar to this does in fact represent DArch ‘Document 1’ – so I feel obliged to take special care with its wording, imagining that this is what I will need to build upon over the next four months. In the version set out below, I have indicated in brown the parts of the text that were omitted in the finally submitted text (which also takes up Tom Hughes’ suggestion that I begin with a large generalised issue rather than one narrowly related to our particular architectural practice):
Practice and Community: how can involvement in community development enable architectural practices to grow their business?
01
The UK government’s current ‘Localism’ agenda, coupled with the slimming down of the planning system through the National Planning Policy Framework, seeks to encourage local communities to lead the development of their built environment. In support of such policies, the RIBA is keen to help architects recognise this as a potential business opportunity. Engagement with the public over the development of a brief would be a new role for many practices however, demanding knowledge of unfamiliar techniques and tactics (the subject not even now featuring in the prescribed curriculum for schools of architecture).
I would start from the assumption (which would need to be tested) that smaller practices tend to develop closer ties to the community in which they are located, and are therefore enabled to become more deeply and successfully involved in such development projects than larger practices, but that they are often required to operate pro bono, at cost or at risk (in the hope of the work turning into a ‘real job’) – resulting in perpetuation of poor resourcing, and a consequent inability to increase the size of projects they undertake. My proposed research would therefore aim to help professional colleagues feel more confident about the business sense of engaging in community development projects.
02
My professional context is the architectural practice that I help run, and its strategy for growth in terms of the size of projects we undertake. We share a commitment to community engagement alongside our design processes, but this ethos is seen by my colleagues to be constraining our ability to expand beyond domestic-scale work – usually because of clients’ unwillingness to fund (even partially) what they regard as non-essential activity. I wish to challenge this orthodoxy and to explore ways of winning the larger-scale projects we seek, not in spite of involvement with the communities in which they are located but as a positive outcome of such involvement. My aim would be to identify the potential for attracting corporate rather than private clients (offering work associated with larger budgets and therefore demanding a greater amount of design-time), not merely without prejudicing the values we hold in respect of social sustainability, but actually because of the way we put them into practice.
03
Having framed my main research question, accordingly, as ‘how can involvement in community development enable architectural practices to grow their business?’ I would need to address two issues. Firstly, why do there seem to be so few instances of engagement in community activity leading to the commercial expansion of a practice? And secondly, in the few instances where such effects on a practice are reported, can that success be attributed to any particular features of the way in which the associated community projects were managed, or is it due to other features such as marketing or the architects’ relationship with their clients? I am conscious of the risk built into these questions – such as initial failure to identify specific community projects which have resulted in the practice securing larger design commissions, and then the difficulty of distinguishing (in retrospect) between contingent ‘luck’ factors and a firm’s carefully targeted intentions.
Such risks might be more than offset, however, by the potential benefit of deriving a set of recommendations on how to manage community development exercises in ways that could work to a practice’s strategic advantage. Of course, findings to the reverse could be equally useful to practitioners – confirming what kinds of community engagement may need to be terminated if a practice wishes to start winning larger commissions.
04
I would need to begin with some case studies of architectural practices which, having established an initial reputation for small-scale urban interventions in conjunction with community engagement, have subsequently begun to undertake larger projects. Firms such as Studio Weave, for example, are just beginning to move from the counter-cultural fringe to the ‘professional’ mainstream – I would need to identify two or three others of a similar nature in order to review the techniques they developed for running community projects (aiming to discover any common features).
I suspect that, as we emerge from a recession in the construction industry, now should be a good time to observe this phenomenon: the architectural press carries such stories on a weekly basis. For a longer retrospective however, I would also rely, however, upon my own substantial library of back-copies of architectural journals (covering the aftermath of the last major recession in the construction industry).
05
I would need to speak both to architectural project managers (one-to-one interview followed by invitation to comment on selected transcription) and to members of the community they worked with (focus groups followed by invitation to comment on a written summary – a copy of which would be offered to the architects as ‘feedback’). Having used this kind of exercise to identify distinctive features about the way these particular firms ran (and continue to run) their community projects, I would then seek to test the application of these techniques in a community project run by the architectural practice with which I am now associated.
06
This would involve me in observing the experiment (and perhaps occasionally intervening in order to ensure the appropriate techniques are being applied) and monitoring the business outcomes for the practice – through quantitative analysis of the firm’s financial results and prospects. I am familiar with Action Research as a data-gathering method, having applied it effectively in a significant research project in the health sector (‘A Case with Ten Handles’– SCOPME, 1996) – which coincidentally also centered around testing the implementation of unfamiliar principles within a professional context.
I am less familiar, however, with the kind of sensitivity analysis I anticipate would be required in order to identify which variables are the most significant in producing the desired effect (and which might be dismissed as merely contingent factors). Experimenting in the context of a small, young practice with the ‘live’ application of techniques found useful by larger, more experienced practices should nevertheless enable me to formulate conclusions and recommendations for other practices seeking to expand their portfolio.
07
In a rather broader sense (but therefore with impact upon the curriculum I now promote through my teaching), I see my research as a contribution to the development of architectural culture away from emphasis upon its utopian modern movement origins as a form of art practice (championed by Le Corbusier, for example), and towards a stronger sense of responsibility for its social impact. As Peter Plagens (US painter and art critic) has recently observed, “by its very nature, architecture tends toward the dictatorial, in the sense that, once built, we can’t not see it, or even, when an offending or inconvenient building arises in our own neighbourhood, avoid interacting with it.” Arguably, it was in reaction to the impact of modernist architecture upon neighbourhoods that the ‘community architecture’ movement developed in the 1970s.
08
I would therefore propose first to seek the origins of this ethos in the seminal works of Paolo Freire (‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ – first published in English in 1970) and Ivan Illich (‘Tools for Conviviality’ – 1973), and then to explore the variety of ways in which ‘human geography’ may be theorised – adopting as my guide ‘Key Thinkers on Space and Place’ (2004, edited by Hubbard, P. et al). For up-to-date thinking on developing and working with community organisations, the website Locality Brokers looks promising.
And the RIBA’s 2011 pamphlet “Guide to Localism Opportunities for Architects (part 2: getting community engagement right)” contains not only some key case studies but also a valuable list of websites related to the topic, which – as the publication demonstrates throughout – is currently of great interest to the profession.