City of Melbourne councillors have unanimously approved the revised Design Competition Guidelines, following a period of community engagement.
The revised guidelines, prepared by the council’s City Design Studio, promote design competitions as an alternative method of procurement that prioritizes good design and provides a pathway to design excellence.
“Our ambition with the design competition guidelines is to live up to and innovate upon the ideals of other world-class cities around the globe where we have seen design competition used effectively to promote creativity and better design,” said acting lord mayor Nicholas Reece, in moving the motion to approve the guidelines at the council’s Future Melbourne Committee on 5 December.
Design competitions have been used successfully in Victoria on major state government-led projects, as well as in other Australian cities and around the world.
In the City of Sydney, 62 percent of design competition projects have won design awards between 2000 and 2017.
“Ultimately the guidelines seek to influence the diversity of practices designing project across the municipality, to drive innovation, to prioritize holistic and site responsive design that balances public and private interests and enable investment and growth in the design talent pool of emerging small and medium sized practices,” Reece continued.
The guidelines outline clear and transparent processes for all participants, with two or three stage competition structures of varying options for anonymous or non-anonymous judging.
The council also resolved to asked the management team to identify potential City of Melbourne projects that may be suitable for design competitions.
“We need to lead by example,” said councillor Rohan Leppert. “There are many ideas but lets pool those ideas together, come up with a shortlist and see how we can really demonstrate that not only do these design competitions guidelines work but they are of extraordinary benefit to whoever the proponent is.
“Once we’ve demonstrated success, that is when we can see if this scheme can be embedded in a more general way in private development as well.”
Design competitions will be completely voluntary, but the council hopes it can encourage the private sector to adopt them as a procurement method.
