Task
Place making is the design of cities and economies in support of a country’s development plans. EY needed something that did not exist: centuries of urban development knowledge, codified into a framework a client could build against.
Then the harder version. A new district was being planned from an empty site in Riyadh. A city with no design industry, an arid identity, and a young population whose creative ambitions had nowhere to go.
What actually makes a city iconic, and can it be designed on purpose?
Pilot
We had two weeks from first hearing about the engagement to presenting a concept.
So we did not write a strategy. We designed a session that let the client experience place making live. World-renowned authorities on cities, design, governance and public space in a room with prospective residents, co-creating while our analysts designed and optimised blueprints in parallel for the experts to react to.
Design thinking and Flow running at the same time. The thinking was made and stress-tested inside the same fortnight.
For the Riyadh work we ran the same move differently. Rather than theorise about what makes a city iconic, we used London as the working case. A city that had already run the experiment over four decades, in public, at scale.
Transformation
The session produced a transferable model.
Every city that works is a blend of systems and empathy. The recipe is constant. The ingredients, and the way they are blended, differ every time.
Systems are designable. Infrastructure, governance, transport, the architecture that determines what is possible.
Empathy has two layers. Surface empathy, meaning retail, food and drink and the design of space between buildings, can be designed. Deep empathy, the self-sustaining culture of a place, can only be enabled.
Four principles came out of it, and they hold well beyond cities:
- Guardrails, not dictate. Governance should let top-down planning and bottom-up creativity share vulnerability and evolve together.
- Do not try to complete the design. A finished city cannot adapt to the people who arrive in it. This was the central recommendation.
- Build for how young people imagine using a city in future, not for how today’s residents cope with today’s constraints.
- The freedom test. A city has the balance right when women, girls and children feel free simply to be.
And the finding that has shaped our practice since:
London is, in some quarter or another, always in a pilot phase. That is what unlocks and maintains its creativity.
Delivered with a full mood film, so an abstract civic philosophy became something a client could feel rather than read.
Result
The strategy became a template for city design.
Beyond the original brief, the framework was applied across distinct city typologies: an education city, a creative city, and an ultra-high-net-worth city. Two smart destinations, targeting ultra-high-net-worth individuals and international creative professionals, were taken into development in the region.
One engagement produced reusable intellectual property the client could apply across a portfolio, rather than a single answer to a single question.
Why it worked
A two-week deadline is usually a reason to produce something shallow. Here it forced the right method.
There was no time to research a city into existence, so we ran the question as a live pilot instead. We convened the people who already knew, put them in a room with a real problem, and designed while they argued. The output was tested before it was written down.
Systems and Empathy came out of this engagement and became the foundation of how we work. So did the belief underneath it, that the things which stay alive are the ones permanently, partially, in beta.
We are named for a bird that carries seeds into broken canopy. We found the same idea in a city.