Richard Hayward

Richard Hayward is an architect, urban designer and educator. He has worked in a variety of settings in the UK, mainland Europe, North and South America, Australia and briefly, China. He is Professor of Architecture & Urban Design and Head of the School of Architecture & Construction at the University of Greenwhich, where he founded the Urban Renaissance Institute.

Since 1995 he has been editor of URBAN DESIGN International, the quarterly refereed journal published by Macmillan/Palgrave, which he founded with a colleague from Oxford Brookes University. His practice started in housing moving rapidly into urban design and urban regeneration.  A late formative experience was his involvement as urban design advisor for the Malecon 2000 project which successfully regenerated 2 ½ kilometres of city centre waterfront in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, for which the advisory team received a UK award for international urban regeneration in 2005.

His teaching and writing focuses on listening and reflective practice and has included a great deal of multi-stakeholder extended workshops in many different settings and countries.

Richard Hayward & Social Sculpture

Cultures are responses to the possibilities of being, informed by environment, history and practice. However we feel about globalisation, there can be little doubt that global capital works to reduce the diversity of the responses and the possibilities of being.

Professional expertise is largely caught up in the nexus of global capital and the relative political stasis that supports the overwhelming pervasive grip of rapidly evolving capital generation and accumulation. The art of social sculpture offers a place for dialogue about past, present and future possibilities of being : learning from diminishing global diversity, through listening and creative dialogue; extending possibilities through inter community support.

Social sculpture may be larger than this, but the sustaining life project in its uncertain progress has focussed on the possibilities of the established, place-rooted life-chances of some communities under threat, being able to call on the life-practices of others, and where necessary, the expertise of specialists, but with the latter brought in to be on tap, rather than on top.

A decade or more ago, I had the opportunity to work with a group of, somewhat unfortunately named, development practices students, as well as (to me) a more familiar group of urban design students. Both groups were engaged at the same time and in a similar setting on projects to change place, with diverse communities of interest, more or less involved in an interactive workshop process. Both had the objectives of making better places to enhance the life chances of the widest spectrum of inhabitants - erring on the side of the financially poorest members of the community. The development practitioners excelled in hearing what the various groups in the communities had to tell and establishing the power structures and personalities that controlled the possibilities. The urban designers sought to do the same but lacked the level of skill and sensitivity required. However, the latter excelled in being able to put forward and refine many alternative physical interventions, cognisant of place and context, as the basis for a forward looking dialogue for positive change. The development practitioners could neither contextualise their analysis spatially, nor offer feasible physical development morphologies and typologies to serve the priorities of those who mostly lived on around US$2.00 per day.

No discipline, including that of practitioner of everyday life, can meet all the challenges of necessary change to sustain and enhance positive and distinctive quality living. In my work developing the Urban Renaissance Institute, we have placed at the forefront listening to the articulation of need by professional and community groups, whilst ‘delivering' capacity building and change using the widest network of practitioners of all sorts and conditions. My own reflections on social sculpture and sustaining life inform my daily development in relation to my life, my education and conventional professional development. Whilst the external impact is small, I am happy to say that the listening approach, coupled with the humility of putting the best teams together to serve need, are paying dividends and, I believe, helping those involved to reflect on the generic and the particular concerns of diverse groups in diverse places. A long way to go yet............