“Profit and Place”

At some point in the professional career of every designer, there comes a moment when budgetary realities of projects cause great consternation and disappointment in their changes to design intentions. Whether this moment comes as a jolt to possibilities during schematic design – or a later whittling away of design details through value engineering – design outcomes get altered and incrementally change the visual and experiential quality of cities. In this chapter from Urban Transformations: Power, People and Urban Design, Professor Ian Bentley exposes the links between developer motivations for profit and the diminishment of design quality. Bentley frames the book around public disappointment with the evolution of city form over time as changes in development financing, land acquisition, and design practices have taken root. These cumulative changes create urban places that are different in scale, detail, materiality, and design quality – often producing places that are unloved. He suggests a different set of values might be in play between designers and developer clients, some of whom see profit as the primary intent of development. Much in the same line of thought as expressed by John Logan and Harvey Molotch in Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, 2nd edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), the historic evolution of use value into exchange value creates a very different set of expectations for the design performance of cities.