We need a multi-dimensional approach to social value

日本vs塞内加尔比分建筑设计的意图是在一个非常重要的时刻实现社会价值。社会价值(换句话说，幸福)的出现是一个真正重要的机会，让以人为本的设计(和建筑师)回到建设议程的核心。

Since the advent of the Social Value Act 2012 in England and the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, social value has been gaining traction as a requirement of procurement, contracts and planning in the public sector (UKGBC, 2019).

然而，对于如何衡量经济增长，各方迄今几乎没有达成共识。英国政府最近就采购中应归因于社会价值的比例进行了一次咨询，建议为10%。然而，像大曼彻斯特这样的机构似乎已经在他们的投标决策中赋予了30%的权重。在评估项目、有关土地价值的决定和履行第106节协议方面，社会价值的上升似乎是不可避免的。

At the same time there is growing consensus on the wellbeing impact of design and placemaking (Design Council, 2018), particularly now that social prescribing is becoming such an integral part of NHS activity (NHS England, 2018). Organisations such as HACT have been developing social value proxies for use by housing associations and local authorities to collect information on their portfolios but until now no toolkits have been developed specifically to capture the social value of design.

Taking its cue from local authority procurement, the construction industry tends to focus on the creation of jobs and apprenticeships when trying to prove social value. Anecdotally loopholes in the process are being exploited as this process is poorly monitored and can lead to an ex-offender being offered a job for a day in a part of the country entirely unrelated to the original project.

These are just some of the reasons why architects need to get behind social value. If they don’t do it others will

Instead a multi-dimensional approach to social value is needed which also recognises the impact of the design of buildings and places in terms of wellbeing (for example, active lifestyles and connection to nature) and the learning achieved by involving communities in the building of their own projects.

The social value of material specification – using local products and services – urgently needs attention from architects and can be fed into discussions about embodied carbon and lifecycle costs.

Design value is widely accepted to be the sum of environmental value and economic value and social value (Serin et al., 2018). In other words, the commonly used triple bottom line of sustainability.

These are the measures currently used in HM Treasury’sGreen Book英国政府进行成本效益分析的手段。虽然环境价值通常用碳来衡量(有时还会加上生物多样性和空气质量)，对经济价值也有普遍一致的看法(尽管存在缺陷——请参阅经济学家玛丽安娜·马祖卡托的研究)，但对于如何衡量社会价值，人们几乎没有达成一致。

There are a variety of existing systems for capturing social value – the National TOMS Social Value Portal is sometimes used by local authorities for procurement and now includes a Real Estate Plug-in. (TOMS, 2019)

HACT’s Social Value Bank is another example that we draw on extensively (HACT, 2015). One of the key aims of the highly pragmaticSocial Value Toolkit for Architectureto be published by the RIBA in the new year is to help architects to navigate the social value terrain, making the best of existing systems to demonstrate value in monetisable terms. While many architects may rail against the “dragon of measurement culture”, social value will not be taken on board unless it is presented in terms easily digestible by government and client bodies.

In an increasingly data-driven environment we have to find ways to capture intangible impacts or they will not figure in future city models such as Digital Twins on in the next generation of BIM. Nor will they be included as targets within outcome-based procurement or insurance-backed alliancing (see for example the work of IPInitiatives with Cullinan Studio at Dudley College).

These are just some of the reasons why architects need to get behind social value. If they don’t do it others will.