financial terms, as we have argued, this is toonarrow a measure of success, since it excludes the overrall effectiveness of a housebuilder in producing desirable housing outcomes for the end users and for society as whole. In the context of a scarce land market, large housebuilders’ ability to build a greater number of properties for less translates simply into increased profit margins. It has little or no impact on the market price of the product for the end user.
competition, preference larger or smaller companies, support different kinds of behaviour and produce or exploit different kinds of value over different periods of time. Just because a particular kind of market works for one thing (providing sandwiches for example), that does not mean the same model will be an effective solution to a fundamentally different problem (such as providing care for the elderly). Our responsibility is to decide what our priorities are and choreograph those markets accordingly.
2. The ends are shaped by the means ‘Value architectures’
The second misconception, which ran at the heart of the ‘third way’, is that a house is a house, regardless of who built it. The belief has been that complex innovations in the process through which a dwelling is procured have no intrinsic effect on the dwelling itself .2
The theme which underlies these three realisations is that while architects and governing agencies such as CABE3 have hitherto been largely focused on protecting public value by changing the architecture of the product (the design of buildings), in fact in doing so they have been marginalised to the end of the process: to a point of very poor leverage. In order to shape housing outcomes, and find a better model of mass-housing provision, we need to extend our focus from the architecture of the product to the architecture of the process: redesigning the systems of procurement and delivery which shape
It should by now be clear to us that the opposite is the case; changing the nature of the process through which a product is conceived, designed and procured has far more impact on the outcomes than regulations applied directly to the end-product. Debate on housing policy has arguably been much too focused on housing product and tenure (owner-occupied vs private rented vs social rented vs cooperative etc.) and not focused enough on the actual production process and what values drive it.
our environment. In their 2008 book, Nudge, behavioural economists Thaler and Sunstein coined the phrase ‘choice architecture’.4 What they mean by it is that any choice we make, from shopping to recycling, always has an underlying structure to it, often biasing one kind of choice over another. Sometimes that structure is accidental, sometimes it has been carefully planned. For example, when you go to the supermarket, the products which are on the shelf at
3. We need a new approach to markets The third misconception is that all markets are somehow the same, and as such are universally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (depending on your political viewpoint). It is now widely recognised that markets vary in the way that they encourage or discourage
2. This attitude was very nicely summarised by the Calcutt Review’s assertion: “Government can specify outcomes, such as good quality or environmental performance, but should allow the industry to determine the best means”.
3. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment was created in 1999 to advise on and review new architecture and urban design. Public funding was withdrawn in 2010. 4. Thaler & Sunstein Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness (Yale University Press, 2008) 22