Putting a value on better streets: from research to real-world impact, a decade of evidence

Ten years on from his research project, urban designer Stuart Houghton looks back at testing international urban realm evaluation tools in Auckland and helping build the evidence base for the value of public realm quality and good design in transport investment decisions.

Q1: What was the outline of your 2016 research project and how it has since informed NZTA’s Economic Evaluation Manual?

Stuart Houghton: My research project was called “Place Economics – Growing the local evidence base and tools for measuring the value of place and place-making in Auckland New Zealand”.

Essentially, the project helped identify and test a way to measure the benefits of better streets and public spaces in a New Zealand transport business case context. That work then helped point NZTA towards filling a gap in the way its Economic Evaluation Manual dealt with urban realm benefits.

That later work in the Economic Evaluation Manual was led by economists Peter Nunns and Nadine Dodge, who authored the 2020 paper "Impact on Urban Amenity in Pedestrian Environments". Their paper acknowledged the foundation of the Transport for London tools that we had applied in my research project; and gave a basis for using those sorts of tools to evaluate urban realm benefits in New Zealand business cases.

Q2: Why did you propose that particular research project?

Stuart: In 2016, Boffa Miskell was becoming increasingly involved in transport business cases, particularly public transport and bus projects in Auckland’s city centre with objectives around improving walkability and public realm quality. At the same time, streetscape and public realm investment was increasing across the country.

In Auckland, the Downtown Programme was taking shape, including Quay Street and the waterfront. We were also working on Wellesley Street business cases for the midtown bus route, while Te Hā Noa, the Victoria Street Linear Park, was on the drawing board. Those projects reflected a wider shift in the Government Policy Statement on transport, where walkability and urban realm outcomes were getting more emphasis. In business cases, they were becoming things we needed to account for properly.

The problem was that the existing tools for economic evaluation had not caught up. There were tools for measuring walking as a transport mode, but not a sophisticated way to assess the value of improving urban realm quality: the place amenity, and the things people enjoy when they spend time in streets as public spaces.

That was the gap. Through Auckland Transport and Auckland Council, we became aware of Transport for London’s VURT and PERS tools. My research proposition was practical: apply them to real Auckland projects, test whether they were fit for purpose, and understand what might need to change for New Zealand.

Q3: Were there adjustments that needed to be made to make these London-based tool appropriate and fit-for-purpose in a New Zealand context?

Stuart: Yes, but mostly on the economic side. That became clearer through conversations with, and support from, economist Peter Nunns, who was at MR Cagney at the time.

From an urban design perspective, we found the tools could be applied pretty directly. We were able to assess the change in quality for walking and the uplift in urban realm quality between an existing situation and a proposed design. We could also compare multiple design options against the same baseline; to understand which ones were likely to achieve greater benefits.

The quantitative inputs were manageable. We had reasonable information around pedestrian volumes, and in some places commissioned pedestrian counts, which is a normal thing to do. The harder question was how to monetise those benefits in a way that was consistent with the New Zealand business case model. That is where the later NZTA work became important.

The research itself was a fairly simple, contained piece of applied research: take the tools, test them on real projects, and draw conclusions about their relevance here. But the findings pointed to a bigger issue — the need to address the gap in the Economic Evaluation Manual. The next step was engaging with NZTA, leading to the 2020 interim guidance note prepared by Peter Nunns and Nadine Dodge.

Q4: It’s now six years later. What has happened since then?

Stuart: The immediate follow-on was that Boffa Miskell applied the tools to real projects. We were commissioned to undertake assessments for Quay Street as part of the Downtown Programme, and we also applied the tools to feed into the economic benefits evaluation for the Wellesley Street project.

Since then, I am aware that other people have used the tools on comparable business cases. So, the research didn't just sit as a report; it moved into wider practice.

Q5: Did undertaking that research change your views? How have you applied it to your practice?

Stuart: It gave me an opportunity to properly engage with economists around these issues, which I had not really had the chance to do before. On projects, urban design can sometimes sit in a technical box. You do your part, then it flows into another technical box, and eventually into the business case. By that point it can feel quite removed from the design outcomes themselves.

The research helped me understand the importance of economics to the bigger picture. If we want the benefits of good urban design, walking and public realm quality to be recognised, we need something that speaks to those benefits in the language of investment decisions.

The tools are not perfect. They are proxy measures, and imperfect in some way. But they are the best ones we have, and it is better to have something that sits alongside the tools used to account for other benefits. Otherwise, we undervalue the benefits we could be achieving for walking and urban realm quality.

Even with the 2023 change in government and the change in the Government Policy Statement, the work is still relevant. It is closely tied to public transport investment, because walking is a key part of getting to and from bus and train services. So, for me, it broadened the way I think about design. The importance of economics never goes away.

Q6: Has the Boffa Miskell research programme evolved? It looks like there are a lot more science-related than design-related research proposals lately.

Stuart: Research by our ecologists and biosecurity team has been a strong feature of the research programme over. For scientists, research is ingrained in their education and training. For designers, perhaps less so.

But my project was an example of how design research can be applied. It does not always have to mean inventing something entirely new. It can be about taking an existing model, tool or template from elsewhere, applying it to a local context, and asking: does this work here, what do we learn from it, and what would need to change?

That's a form of research we could readily do across all sorts of design work; and I believe there's a renewed need for research around the value of design, full stop. The public conversation about design in New Zealand over the last six years, particularly post-COVID, has been influenced by economic conditions, budget constraints, and a desire to get back to what is seen as essential infrastructure.

Within that, there is a growing narrative that design is just "nice to have". I think that has undone quite a lot of the work that had become accepted over the previous 10 to 20 years, where project by project we demonstrated that design does add value. The problem now is that even where design is still acknowledged as valuable, it is often framed as an extra cost or something we can no longer afford.

Research could help break through that narrative. We need to show that good design can achieve greater value without necessarily just adding greater cost. That probably means deeper collaboration between designers, economists and people who understand money. For the research to have influence, it has to flow back into that world. It can't just be designers saying, 'Great design is important and you need to value it more' we need to prove it; and I think we can.

Q8: Sounds like we need to translate between the qualitative and the quantitative, or the subjective and the objective — because people who do not speak ‘amenity’ might speak ‘economics’.

Stuart: Yes. And alongside translating design into economics, there is real value in looking back at what has already been delivered. We need audits and evidence showing how completed projects have delivered additional value.

We often talk about post-occupancy evaluation, but even at a simpler level, we need to understand uplift in quality and how that drives wider benefits over time.

Te Komititanga is a good example. It feels vibrant and thriving now, but that is not an accident. If it had not been pedestrianised, it would not have the same value or outcomes. Once projects are delivered, people forget how they used to be — which is exactly why the evidence base matters.

The increased ability of streets and spaces to support events and installations that attract people connects to the event economy, the nighttime economy, and the visitor economy. Those projects are proving their enduring value because they can accommodate different things at different times. The beauty of a place is part of that, but so is its flexibility and its ability to support public life. You can see that value playing out in the next wave of development. That's all building on the value created through downtown development over the last 10 years and more. If we were better at monitoring and tracking that evidence, we could join the dots between public realm investment, urban quality uplift, and the wider benefits that follow.

Accessibility and proximity are huge factors in urban value, but urban quality is the third factor in the mix. You need all of those things together to support real urban transformation: people wanting to go there, being able to get there, and wanting to stay there. That is what supports more people being in the same place at the same time, which is where the value of cities really comes from.