ESRC Collaborative Studentship: Creating well-designed spaces in Scotland: What does it take?

The aim of this collaborative studentship is to identify the barriers to good urban design and assess the effectiveness of the local planning system to enhance development quality. Research indicates that well-designed places support economic development, foster social interaction, and improve people’s health and wellbeing. Yet, the quality of many new places is poor and uninspiring buildings and public spaces that ‘could be anywhere’ prevail. Working in collaboration with West Dunbartonshire Council, a local authority that has recently made a strategic investment in urban design review and established a Place and Design Panel, the studentship will examine what it takes to deliver well-designed places in Scotland.

West Dunbartonshire’s Place and Design Panel will be the empirical focus of the studentship. It will be used as a vehicle to understand the barriers to delivering well-designed places, and as a basis for assessing the effectiveness of the planning system to control design outcomes and achieve local and national design objectives. The successful candidate will be use a range of qualitative data collection tools to analyse the urban design decision-making process, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, document collection and structured ethnographic observations, and will also undertake a part-time internship at West Dunbartonshire Council as part of their PhD research process.

The studentship will be based in Urban Studies within the School of Social & Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Urban Studies is a leading centre of urban planning, design, housing and public policy research (ranked joint first in the UK in REF 2014). The successful candidate will work closely with a supervision team led by Dr James White (Lecturer in Urban Design) and supported by Dr Rebecca Madgin (Senior Lecturer in Urban Development and Management) and Dr Sharon Wright (Senior Lecturer in Public Policy). The successful candidate will also have opportunities throughout the PhD to work alongside professional planning and design staff at West Dunbartonshire Council where they will be mentored by Pamela Clifford (Planning Services Manager).

The originality of this studentship lies in its simultaneous engagement with national planning objectives for design and the delivery of those objectives at the local level. It is anticipated that the successful candidate will develop an empirically-driven understanding of the process of governing urban design through the planning system, and the factors that influence how design priorities are weighed against other concerns.