As LSE launches a new enquiry into social value, LIZ WILLIAMS reflects on Future of London’s good ancestor project. Find out why she believes the built environment sector urgently needs to provide “value pluralism”.
Planning is integral to realising the Government’s growth ambition if we want to create economic, social and environmental value. The multisectoral nature of planning presents a real opportunity to tackle the complex problems our society is currently facing, including climate change and housing affordability and inequality.
However, the current planning system does not deliver the quality and scale of outputs necessary to meet society’s needs. Our project on Pluralism in Place is addressing this challenge. To create better social, environmental and economic outcomes, we need to take stock of the processes behind decision-making — examining how built environment professionals navigate the tools used to define, measure and balance these priorities.
Click here to complete the survey and contribute to this research!
Future of London is helping to lead this conversation with its report, Social Value: How to be a good ancestor, which puts long-term thinking at the heart of urban development. The legacy approach considers the needs of future generations, maps and safeguards existing community assets, and promotes designing and building for the long term.
Why we need a social value legacy mindset
This legacy mindset ties directly into the UN Sustainable Development Goals, recognising that the needs of future generations extend beyond short-term economic benefits to include social wellbeing and environmental resilience. Yet, while social value is increasingly part of policy and practice, a shared and consistent understanding of what that means in the built environment is still missing.
A clear, collective definition of social value is essential for forging a shared mission In 2019, Grosvenor found that just 2% of the public trust developers and only 7% trust local authorities to carry out large-scale development.
Adopting a legacy mindset in areas that have historically felt disempowered by development can play a key role in rebuilding this lost trust. However, trust requires the co-creation of social value by communities most directly impacted by change.
Future of London says impacted communities should be put at the heart of social value creation. Its community-led research echoes the arguments made in our earlier LSE report, Planning with Purpose: A Values-Based Approach to Planning Reform. We highlighted the importance of surfacing competing trade-offs and ensuring inclusive processes of value creation.
This report examined both ‘value’ and ‘values’. Value, the often economically understood worth of something is informed by our values, the principles and standards that are important to us. These rationales are key to how we perceive problems and their respective solutions, legitimising certain decisions over others. Creating a long-term social value legacy requires us to question how value is measured to shape outcomes.
Pluralism in place – navigating value(s) based tools
Meg Hennessy and I explore how we might better manage ‘pluralism in place’ – the differing and often competing priorities that form the places we live and work. A special aspect of the built environment is the “spatialisation” of our political-economic ideals (values). It is where decisions about people, place and planet are made. We seek to get to the heart of “what we value” and generate a more empathic understanding of the trade-offs inherent to successful place-making.
Balancing trade-offs is at the heart of planning — between housing provision and environmental protection, speed and democratic engagement, or short-term gains and long-term resilience. These trade-offs are mediated through value-based tools, which play a central role in aiding evidence-based decision-making and built environment outcomes.
Our research distinguishes between two types of value-based tools: value frameworks and value measurement tools.
- Value frameworks outline a set of principles used to understand what is important to an organisation and to guide decisions to achieve those outcomes. For example the Social Value Legacy Framework helps embed long-term community-led priorities in regeneration projects.
- Value measurement tools provide metrics, indicators, or scoring systems to measure both the financial and non-financial value generated – or compromised – by a project. Examples include the Toms Social Value System, Design Quality Indicator (DQI) or Biodiversity Metrics.
However, given the number of disparate tools and mechanisms available, there’s no common language or shared framework for articulating what matters to people and planet. This fragmentation limits coordination, weakens accountability, and risks diluting the very outcomes these tools were designed to achieve.
Help shape the future of planning
To build places that genuinely serve people, planet, and prosperity, we need to better understand how values are defined, measured, and prioritised in the decision-making process.
That’s where your voice matters.
We’re inviting built environment professionals, policymakers, community leaders, and anyone with a stake in how places are made to take part in our survey. Your insights will help us take stock of existing tools: investigate how they are constructed, what value concepts they promote, the extent to which they shape development decisions, and how effectively they work together.
Click here to complete the survey and contribute to this research!
Liz Williams and Meg Hennessy are LSE researcher.