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  I was asked to give a 'provocation' last week to a workshop led by the Glass-House Community Led Design and Urban Design London on co-designing design codes. My thoughts below are not exclusively about design codes, but could apply to any co-design process in the built environment. I wrote this thinking about my own two Gen-Z kids and I was rather aware - when giving this provocation - that most of the audience were in their later years in life. What if the only people we should be co-designing with are Gen-Zs? The new National Planning Policy Framework asks Local Plans to look forward a minimum of 20 years, and that this should be at least 30 years if you are planning for strategic scale new developments – the kind of things for which design codes are intended – new communities, new villages, urban extensions, major regeneration sites, which take decades to build out. Someone who is 65 now – possibly the typical person who has the time and energy to...

Over the last couple of years I've become slightly obsessed with thinking about how things end. How organisations, businesses, masterplans, policies and, of course, buildings come to the point where they are redundant: superseded by the change that happens around them.  Cassie Robinson's brilliant blog How do we help things to die?  crystallised a lot of those thoughts for me and I've been considering how this applies across a whole field of things ever since. I admired how FAT announced their disbanding rather than fizzling out through mediocrity like so many architecture practices. I've been involved with some charities and one came perilously close to shutting down, prompting a lot of thought about when a charity's mission is complete, or when it no longer becomes relevant.  I've watched buildings be built for all the right reasons, but with little thought to the sustainability of the organisation that they were built for, resulting in disillusionment in the...

Recently we developed a scheme where we didn't show the clients or the planners any design options, and they approved it. In detailed design, we showed the client a couple of design options for a particular tiny detail, thinking they would see so clearly why the one we preferred would be better than the other, only for them to all like the option we thought was worse, and with no logical explanation as to why. Recently we presented a scheme that, we thought, had a strong logical response to brief and difficult site conditions, and an attractive design presence, only for the planners to ask us for lots of other design options because they didn't 'get' why it was designed as it was. We duly prepared a lot of other design approaches, but because the underlying premise, brief and site constraints, and the designers working on it were, of course, the same, they all had a similarity. The planners still didn't like them. In fact, they liked the version that we thought was ...