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Designing Upstream: Rebuilding Agency Through New Forms of Public Practice
Author(s) -
Williams Finn
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
architectural design
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.128
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1554-2769
pISSN - 0003-8504
DOI - 10.1002/ad.2350
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , agency (philosophy) , architecture , upstream (networking) , politics , public administration , period (music) , public sector , public relations , sociology , law , political science , engineering , social science , history , telecommunications , physics , archaeology , acoustics
What went wrong with public‐sector architecture? In the immediate postwar period, the UK's municipal architects' departments were a hotbed of innovation, while today's planning authorities tend to be regarded as bureaucratic and stale. The social enterprise Public Practice was set up to counter this trend by recruiting talented professionals in architecture and related fields to fixed‐term contracts in public authorities, while reserving a tenth of their time for collective research. Finn Williams , one of its co‐founders, sets out the background, political and economic, and describes how it works.