Designing Procurement: The Case for Competitions

The most widespread forms of competitive bidding for city- or state-owned land are requests for qualifications (RfQ) and requests for proposals (RfP) directed at developer-led teams. The award criteria generally prioritize a developer’s experience and financial standing over the quality of an architectural proposal. This has several downsides: only large and already established development and design firms can afford the lengthy and uncompensated process, excluding emerging talent; the lack of incentives to foreground innovation and quality in design leads to the replication of existing housing types; and the often untransparent awarding of contracts decreases trust in government-led processes.

Design competitions are a different way to procure design services for housing. Competitions are directed at architects independently of the search for a development partner. The process allows for the comparative evaluation of urban design and architectural proposals based on their merit. Competitions create opportunities for smaller firms, higher quality due to competition and choice, and capacity in the public sector, which is tasked with writing a binding bid document as the basis for the competition.

The paper first outlines the shortcomings of RfQ/RfP processes and recent architecture competitions in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, based on interviews with architects, developers, and public officials. It then looks at how public entities in Zurich, Vienna, and London organize their procurement of development and design services, and what municipalities and states in the US could learn from their experience. Establishing design competitions as a real procurement process will mean creating binding guidelines, tweaking public procurement laws, and incentivizing or mandating competitions, whether through predevelopment financing, density bonuses, or accelerated permitting.