The impacts of mandatory design competitions on urban design quality in Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT

The pursuit of high-quality urban design through the planning process is made challenging by two key problematics. First, control over the decisions that produce or alter the built environment is differentially distributed across numerous public and private agents. Second, there is little agreement about what ‘good’ urban design is and how it is best pursued. Recognizing this, the focus in this paper is on how these two problematics are being tackled through a unique design control initiative in Sydney, Australia. This initiative requires that all major property developments are subject to a design competition before they can be approved. The paper reports the findings of 41 stakeholder interviews and appraisals of 25 projects completed under these provisions. These findings indicate that mandated design competitions have helped force a general raising of urban design quality by re-distributing decision-making control and enabling a broad but non-prescriptive approach to the regulation of design excellence.

Notes

1. The data collection formed part of a multi-year research project concerned with design governance in Sydney (Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP150104054, entitled ‘Designing Global Sydney: The negotiation of public and private interests’).

2. Awards surveyed: Australian Institute of Architects, Property Council of Australia, Urban Development Institute of Australia, Urban Taskforce, Housing Industry Association, Master Builders Association.

3. Sixty-three different firms participated in design competitions for the case-set projects, including numerous collaborative entries. Of the participating firms, 37 competed once, 16 competed two or three times, eight competed four to six times and two competed seven times. There were 24 one-time winners and three two-time winners. There were also three collaborative winning schemes, and one project where two winners were each awarded a portion of the project. Of the 27 firms that won, five were headquartered outside Australia.

4. There is public participation for the City of Sydney’s own projects.

5. It should be noted that competition type could not be confirmed for some of the earlier case-set projects due to the unavailability of data. In these cases, an assumption was made about competition type, based on the number of architects competing.