What's The Value Of Social Value?

Beth Bourrelly, architect associate, shares her thoughts on the impact of design on communities and explains how a new toolkit is enabling more analytical insight into the social value provided by architects

As architects we spend a great deal of time aspiring to deliver design quality. A shift in accountability within the industry places a stronger focus on the added value of the work we do with and for local communities. Social value has moved up the agenda for the entire built environment, with an increased call to quantify and report the impact of social and environmental parameters which support conscientious design.

The government’s Social Value Act 2012 sets a baseline for implementation but economic viability continues to dominate planning negotiations, often resulting in a lack of quantifiable societal outcomes. It has become critical for the designer to make a quantitative and qualitative assessment of how the design of a building or place affects social cohesion, wellbeing or happiness. It’s a balancing act. The traditional cost metrics will always be important but developers, contractors and investors are now placing greater importance on social value in terms of design, local engagement, sustainability, skills and employment in order to create more resilient communities.

We now have access to a pragmatic tool which demonstrates and calculates social value in architecture. In 2018 I joined a RIBA working group of industry professionals brought together to evaluate the impact of design on communities. The result of months of collaboration is the ‘Social Value Toolkit for Architects.’

The ethos of BDP lies in a collaborative, people-focused culture and user-inspired design with a shared aim to value each other and the communities where we work; enabling economic growth, enhancing education, building robust supply chains and increasing employment. We aspire to design healthy, sustainable environments and enable resilient buildings and communities. Now we can use external benchmarking to track and record the impact of any activity we undertake in the community. The idea that project metrics could be analysed through a standardised approach to identify and ‘monetise’ added social value is of enormous benefit when making design decisions. A recent report conducted by Hatch interrogated our Teaching and Learning Building at the University of Birmingham to measure outputs. The findings set out the variety of meaurable impacts across the whole project process. As well as being able to report on all social engagement, the data will be embedded in a continual process of improvement to ensure we learn lessons from completed projects and adopt them to inform future design decision making.

Understanding and calculating the long term ‘social value added’ of our built projects is very important to help us continue to improve upon our wider contribution to society. In London, plans to improve Beckenham Place Park meant a complete overhaul of 96 hectares of parkland and the addition of a wide range of facilities. We engaged with the council and residents on proposals to attract a larger and more diverse audience to the park. The local community was involved in the design process from the outset, and since the restoration the park has reconnected surrounding communities and provided much needed, high-quality open green space in the borough during the Covid-19 pandemic.

University of Birmingham, Teaching and Learning Building

For both large and small projects, the Social Value Toolkit for Architects helps us to recognise and, crucially, to evaluate the vital impact that user-inspired design has on social measures like cohesion, connectivity, interactivity, freedom, flexibility and ability to participate. It has enabled us to robustly define design value. The toolkit gives us the ability to look at how places really perform over time and then to attribute a meaningful figure to our work as designers, based on the outcomes.

By using the toolkit designers can evaluate how successfully they deliver more sociallyconscious places, taking a people-first approach and contributing to the creation of happier communities more engaged in the areas they live, work and play. Surely that is a step in the right direction.