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In 2021, Sanaa Shaikh was burned out. As a South Asian woman working in an overwhelmingly white and male profession, she had spent years experiencing her fair share of discrimination and microaggressionswhile at the same time being tasked with designing housing developments for underserved communities where she routinely felt like her ideas and perspective were dismissed. She was ready to move on. A friend asked whether shed consider going into public-sector work, and mentioned Public Practicea social enterprise that works to build the design skills and capacity of the public sector across the U.K. by bringing established professionals from architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, city and town planning, engineering, transportation, and ecology into local government. Sanaa Shaikh [Photo: courtesy Public Practice] After completing Public Practices program last year, Shaikh has remained in the public sector, working as placemaking lead for the London Borough of Bexley. In the role, she shapes urban design and develops planning guidance for the area, initiating efforts to reanimate its disinvested public realm to support local businesses and to ensure overlooked groups including young people and the elderly have free and accessible spaces to spend time. You have way more impact by designing for the everyday in the public sectoryoure actually contending with wider societal issues, Shaikh says. Public Practice was cofounded in 2017 by Pooja Agrawal and Finn Williams, both of whom were working for the Greater London AuthorityLondons city governmentin response to what they saw as a challenge facing local areas within the city. They found that nearly every local authority was struggling to attract qualified architecture and design professionals with the right skills to support their work. We set up Public Practice to see how we can make the public sector a player in driving development with public purpose in mind and raise the ambition and quality of what is being driven and delivered, Agrawal says. Pooja Agrawal [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] The rise and fall of public-sector designers Until the 1970s nearly half of U.K.-based architects worked in the public sector, with some of the most admired architects of their time working for local councils. But by 2020 that rate had dropped substantially. Agrawal attributes the decline to stagnant wages in the public sector, the increasingly outsize influence of the private sector in urban development, and a perception of local government as bureaucratic and ineffectual. These problems arent unique to the U.K.they are challenges for the urban planning and design professions in the U.S. and Canada as well. In their work, Agrawal and Finn could feel a marked difference in those local councils that had design skills in-house in their ability to deliver projects. And on the other side we were seeing increasing dissatisfaction with our peers and friends in the built environment sector but who hadnt seen public-sector work as a desirable option. They studied design because they had a social agenda and wanted to make a difference but ended up designing toilets instead, Agrawal says. Public Practice’s spring 2024 cohort [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] To address this, Public Practice devised its central associate program to partner up local authorities looking to build their in-house design capacity with yearlong cohorts of mid-career professionals, the majority of whom come from the private sector and are looking to transition into public-sector work. In their placements, these designers address everything from affordable housing and the climate crisis to town center redevelopment in response to changing retail patterns. Since that initial group, Public Practice has delivered more than a dozen cohorts and scaled from a focus on London to cities and towns across England and into Wales, placing more than 370 people with upward of 97 different public-sector organizations; nearly 75% of those people have remained working in the public sector. Alumni stay part of a community of practice, getting ideas and inspiration from other public-sector designers through a dedicated Slack group, learning trips, and public forum. [Photo: Dion Barrett/courtesy Public Practice] Redefining meaningful work Designer Laura Keay felt like she was hitting a wall after spending years as part of a two-person sustainable architecture studio doing low-embodied carbon, adaptive reuse, and retrofit buildings for multifamily homes, community spaces, schools, and cultural hubs in the U.K. and internationally. I felt like I was waving a green flag in a larger system that isnt always set up to support our values, Keay says. Laura Keay [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] She decided to do Public Practice to scale her impact beyond the few projects she was able to work on at any given time. Working across a diverse range of projects showed me how much design can do, but also where its influence stops without the right policies and systems behind it. Keay became a community retrofit officer with the London Borough of Merton, shaping planning policy and building retrofit strategies and sustainability frameworks to guide the area toward its transition to net zero by 2050. If we want sustainable and equitable places, change has to happen systemically from planning and policy and not just project to project, she says. In parallel to its placement program, Public Practice has been trying to instigate a wider culture and perception shift in how local government and public-sector work is thought of and talked about, even launching a magazine, Public Notice, that looks at the backstory of public space and public-sector projects. Theyve flipped that narrative and created a space where the public sector is now seen as an opportunity for real leadership and where the most meaningful work happens behind the scenes in policy writing and strategic planningthat it isn’t always about designing buildings, Keay says. I can’t believe Im saying that as an architect. [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] In the past seven years Public Practice has already had to weather and respond to ongoing internal and external crises, each of which has had implications for public planning and designfrom the pandemic, implementation of Brexit, changes in the U.K. government, and the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Public Practice is continuing to adapt to an ever-changing economic and political context with local authorities under increasing financial pressure and expectations to do more with less. The group has received inbound interest from cities in North America and Europe curious about the model and is starting to explore what it could look like to adapt its approach within different contexts. For us, international expansion isnt simply about rolling out the associate program globally, Agrawal says. Instead, its about developing new, locally embedded models that respond to different political, spatial, and institutional contexts while holding true to our core mission of building public-sector capability in place-based work.
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Every weekday morning, across the country, parents fall into the same routine. A line of SUVs and minivans snakes around the school. Engines idle as mothers and fathers inch forward, phones in one hand, coffee in the other. Kids sit in the back seat scrolling on their own phones, waiting for their turn to be unloaded by a staff member in a reflective vest. One by one, the doors open, backpacks are lifted, and the vehicle pulls away. The factory-like process is orderly, efficient, and utterly dehumanizing. The school drop-off ritual is a powerful curriculum, teaching kids that they are packages to be delivered and picked up, and that they require constant adult supervision. In 1969, about 48% of children walked or biked to school. By 2009, that number had dropped to just 13%, according to Walk, Bike & Roll to School statistics. Today, the figure hovers around 11%, largely unchanged for a decade, per Rutgers University. Even among children who live within a mile of school, walking or biking has fallen from nearly 90% in 1969 to just 35% in 2009. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}} Whats going on? The shift didnt happen because children stopped being born with legs or because they stopped wanting independence. Schools were moved to the edges of town, often on cheap land surrounded by parking lots and wide arterial roads. Roads were engineered to maximize long-distance automobile throughput and minimize short-distance walking and cycling. Parents were persuaded that it was unsafe to let kids walk or bike, even though most child fatalities happen while they are passengers in vehicles. Logistics management Line up, inch forward, unload. It looks like logistics management because it is logistics management. We have turned the beginning of a school day into a miniature supply-chain operation. This logistical worldview carries profound consequences. Physical health: Walking and biking to school once provided children with reliable daily exercise. Today, U.S. teenagers walk about 5 miles less per week than teens did in the 1990s, The Wall Street Journal reports, and rates of childhood obesity have tripled since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental health: Independent mobility builds confidence. A child who can walk to school learns to navigate space, manage risk, and take pride in independence. A child chauffeured twice a day learns dependence, passivity, and helplessness. Safety paradox: Parents believe driving is a safe way to get around, but an average of three children are killed and another 445 injured every day in traffic crashes, National Highway Transportation Administration’s traffic safety data shows. Packages dont talk back, dont take detours, dont linger to climb a tree, don’t stop to pet a dog, and don’t notice the smell of honeysuckle on the way to class. Car dependency trains kids to be passive and dependent cogs in a machine. The irony is that the very efficiency parents cravefaster lines and predictable behaviorincreases congestion, frustration, and risk to everyone on the roads. The alternatives We dont need a time machine in order to reintroduce childhood independence to our culture: Walking school buses are groups of kids who walk together, accompanied by one or two adults. This approach offers safety in numbers while teaching kids independence. Bike buses or bike trains do the same with cycling, helping to normalize two-wheeled commutes for kids. School siting reform could reanchor school construction back in neighborhoods, instead of exiling buildings to distant parcels accessible only by car. The morning line is more than a nuisance; its a ritual of indoctrination. Every inch forward in that queue trains children to see themselves as cargo, delivered by others, rather than as capable individuals navigating their world. But if we flip the script, if we give kids back some autonomy, the benefits ripple outward. Parents reclaim sanity. Communities reclaim healthier, calmer streets. And children reclaim one important thing the car line strips away: freedom. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
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Who discovered the lightbulb? If you answered “Thomas Edison,” you’re not aloneand you’re also not quite right. Despite conventional wisdom that associates great inventions with lone geniuses, breakthrough inventions are team efforts. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison was born. His patent built on prior versions of the light bulb, aiming to make it practical and affordable. Even then, it wasnt a solo achievementEdison collaborated with a team of skilled collaborators, known as the Muckers, whose contributions have largely faded from memory. Yet it was Edisons name on the patent, and thats the version of history that stuck. Were suckers for lone genius narratives like Edisonsthe brilliant scientist, the fearless military general, or the savvy CEO. The version of history we glean from popular books, movies, and the internet attributes greatness to single individuals. But individual greatness is rarely the whole story. Research shows that teams are the main creators of new knowledge across most industries. New ideas dont emerge fully formed from the mind of a single personit takes collaboration and teamwork to develop them to their full potential. In reality, the engine behind sustained successwhether in science, business, or governmentisnt a singular mind. Its a well-designed team. The illusion of individual success We tend to over-attribute both success and failure to individuals. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we explain peoples behavior by their traits, rather than their context. If a product flops, we blame the CEO. If a startup takes off, the founder is a genius. We rarely ask about the teams that surround them. It gets worse. Even inside groups, people regularly overestimate their own contributions to collective endeavors. In one study, researchers asked each team member to estimate what percent of the groups success they were responsible for. The total? A whopping 235%. Thats a lot more than 100%! Our individualistic tendencies lead us to build groups and organizations around the wrong assumptions. If you believe success comes from star individuals, you hire stars and hope for fireworks. But for complex problemsand most of our work now is complexit takes more knowledge and skill than any individual has to solve it. Thats why we need to put the conditions in place for individuals to combine and build on what each alone can bring. What good teams do differently In my research, Ive found that high-performing teams arent built through charisma, happy accidents, or trust falls. Theyre designed for success. There are four key elements of group structure that maximize your chances of creativity: Composition: Many teams are composed haphazardly, based on whos available and office politics. But the best teams are small (i.e., three to seven members) and have a task-appropriate, diverse mix of knowledge and skills. Goals: Its hard to achieve a common goal when members have different ideas about where theyre headed. Thats why clear, measurable, vivid goals are a critical antecedent for building teams that can outperform individuals. For instance, innovation at NASA spiked when John F. Kennedy swapped the vague goal of, advance science by exploring the solar system, to the vivid goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Task design: Teams can bring ideas to life when they have well-designed tasks that require a variety of skills, give members autonomy over how to conduct their work, and allow members to see progress toward their goals. For creative work, poorly designed tasks are repetitive and control the process, like a manufacturing assembly line. Well-designed tasks give teams whole pieces of work and the freedom to explore, such as the design firm IDEOs effort to redesign the shopping cart to better fit the needs of users. Norms: Too often, groups are places where members fall into bad habits. In many organizations, workers are used to sitting passively in meetings. They worry that experimentation and suggesting new ideas will be scornedor even punished. But the most innovative teams actively fight these norms. Leaders actively encourage members to share their ideas, experiment, and learn from one another. And the battle against norms toward conformity and the status quo never ends. IDEO, for instance, plasters reminders of these norms on the walls of their buildingsthings like defer judgement, encourage wild ideas, and build on the ideas of others. The real edge We live in an era that celebrates ideas: TED Talks, startup pitches, visionary founders. But ideas dont execute themselves. And many great ideas die in bad teams. The reverse is also true: A good team can turn a mediocre idea into something extraordinary. Not because theyre smarter, but because theyre structured to think together better. The great innovations and businesses of today were never built by a solitary lone genius. For all the credit Steve Jobs gets, he couldnt have built Apple and its collaborative innovation engine without the help of his cofounders and teammates. As you dig deeper into stories of great innovations, you almost always find a great team just under the surface. The next time youre tempted to credit a lone genius, remember the people behind the curtain. The collaborators, the editors, the dissenters: the ones who made the idea betteror made it real. Good ideas matter. But good teams matter more.
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