What a master plan is supposed to do

The qualities that make something a good and useful master plan are annoyingly ill-defined, creating a murky environment for those tasked with procuring master plans.

The qualities that make something a good and useful master plan are annoyingly ill-defined. Making matters worse, urban planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects and in some cases, engineers all claim the title of Master Planner, each bringing their own values and hangups to the process.

For some, a master plan is simply a deceptively-pretty image of some buildings, sites and spaces. For others, a 400 page manifesto, containing everything from God's-eye strategies, down to granular minutia. At best, a master plan is a precinct manager’s most valuable tool. At worst, they can be a wasteful investment that completely misses the mark. The looseness of the jargon allows the quality and scope of the work to vary widely, creating a murky environment for those tasked with procuring master plans, lacking a clear understanding or standard of what outputs, functions and qualities they should look for in a master plan. 

This article attempts to describe the useful qualities of complex, highly-specialised mixed use precinct master plans, such as health precincts, university campuses, innovation precincts, airport precincts - essentially any complex precinct where a one-size-fits-all approach to strategy will not suffice. These precincts are the most significant drivers of economic, social and knowledge capital of our cities and deserve to be planned and designed to a level of depth and thoughtfulness that reflects this importance. 

Managing modern mixed-use precincts is hard

Have you ever walked around a campus and wondered “Why on earth would they do it like this?”. From the outside looking in, it’s easy to judge, but managing the evolution of complex precincts is incredibly challenging. Precinct managers have the difficult job of being the connective tissue between an institution’s strategic aspirations and the cold reality of real-world implementation. In the day-to-day, precinct managers are constantly reacting to challenges, putting out fires, responding to internal and external politics, advocating for support, keeping projects on track and keeping consultants accountable. This is the reactionary state precinct managers find themselves in that leads to ad-hoc decisions that compound over decades - resulting in in the all-too-familiar rat's nest of operational issues and inefficiencies.

Complex mixed use precincts are never “finished”

The job of a precinct manager is never done. There will never be a day when we can walk away from an airport, a university campus or a health precinct saying "mission accomplished". Forever evolving, precincts must constantly respond to growth pressures, contextual issues, new trends and shifting forces in the market. It is the job of the precinct manager and the master plan to proactively navigate this environment in the way that best aligns with the aspirations of the institution.

Keeping a complex set of drivers at front of mind at all times is impossible

The demands we ask of our mixed use clusters have evolved to a level of complexity where it is unreasonable to expect precinct managers to keep this myriad of issues and opportunities at front of mind at all times when making decisions. This is the job of a master plan process - to stop, take stock and determine the optimal direction of travel, informed by the totality of an institution's contextual issues, drivers, aspirations and opportunities.

So what specifically is it that makes a master plan good?

A holistic vision built on process, not prose

A master plan vision should embody the sum of the inputs that fed into the master plan, distilling them into a strategic framework and responds to them at every opportunity - comprehensively implementing the vision across the institution, at every scale of operation. Whether we're talking about a minor landscape upgrade, or a $300m facility - every decision of significance should be shaped by the process that created the master plan, slowly turning the ship towards the ideal future state established in the vision. It is this holistic, all-encompassing approach that allows an institution to make difficult decisions quickly and with confidence in the direction of travel, despite the complexity at play.

What to look for: 

• A process showing direct line of sight from the issues, needs and drivers brought to the project, through the vision and principles, down to the fine-grain strategy responses, implementing change at every scale relevant to the project.

• Identification of relevant opportunities and trends at the macroeconomic level and integrating proactive responses to into the design to ensure the institution is equipped to be competitive in the coming decades.

Values matter, so put the user experience first

Values play a powerful role in shaping projects, especially when planning and designing a long term vision for an entire institution. To paint with a very broad brush, engineering-led firms tend to prioritise the "stuff" of a master plan - aka the infrastructure, the facilities and the modelling. Every type of consultant believes that their expertise is the most important lens to view the world through. To put my cards on the table, I believe that the highest value driving precinct planning and design should be the experience, the needs and the values of the end user. The end user is ultimately the customer that drives the success of the precinct, so a master plan that does not reflect the needs and values of the end user will struggle to compete, attract visitors and retain key workers. While cold reality will inevitably get in the way of our highest aspirations – it's always better to work backwards from an ideal end state that prioritises the user experience, than an infrastructure-led scheme that is only concerned with the quantitative. This is the difference between working with engineers to achieve your aspirations, versus letting infrastructure-centric values define your aspirations.

What to look for: 

• Design-led master plans that are tested and reviewed by engineers and quantity surveyors, not the other way around.

• Master plans with more depth than key projects and staging. This means considering user experience, place qualities, clustering ecosystems and adjacencies, conveniences and amenities and everything else that makes institutions competitive and successful.

A Rosetta Stone for specialised expertise

The ability to implement a vision comprehensively across an institution requires a broader range of expertise than a single discipline can provide in isolation. A master plan must be the translational tool that unites the expertise of a broad range of specialised disciplines to build each layer of a truly holistic, multidisciplinary response. It is the role of the master planner to be the generalist capable of building this connective tissue that allows otherwise-disparate disciplines to interact, enabling overarching strategies to penetrate the fine-grain with maximum impact.

What to look for: 

• Design firms with clusters of industry-leading multidisciplinary expertise and a legacy of working together well.

• A comprehensive and coherent strategic framework that coordinates strategies and outcomes between every scale of an institution's operations.

A flexible, adaptable framework

Beware the master plan that promises certainty or relies heavily on a complex sequence of stages being executed perfectly. Only one thing is certain - exactly 0% of master plans are followed to the letter of the law. Recessions, elections, pandemics and all of the wonderful things life has to offer will challenge assumptions and cause priorities to change. Master plans that do not allow for the maximum range of motion to pivot when necessary are inherently destructive in how they can limit the ability to respond to crises. 

What to look for:

• Sites that are sized to accommodate a broad spectrum of potential uses, for when circumstances inevitably change.

• A regulatory framework that is not overly prescriptive, ie instead of “this use must go here and look exactly like this" - a better philosophy is “these uses could go in many places and take a range of forms".

• A spatial framework of connections and spaces that allows sites to renew over time without compromising the operational functionality and amenity of the precinct.

• Whole-of-precinct outcomes and shared amenities that reduce the overheads and development burden of individual projects - ie, each project is not an island unto itself, don't negate the advantage of being able to operate at scale.

More detail on near-term projects

The most urgent priorities of a complex, mixed use precinct are generally the first 5 years of projects. These are often long-overdue interventions that address the most pressing capacity shortfalls. With this in mind, a useful master plan will provide additional content and detail to better brief these projects and build momentum. 

What to look for:

• Separated vignettes focusing on important catalyst projects within the master plan that provide additional detail, visualisations, diagramming and persuasive narratives.

• Explorations of capacity, function, character, architectural and landscape qualities, infrastructure future-proofing and other cross-disciplinary expertise on early-stage catalyst projects.

A bespoke staging strategy

There is no single way to approach staging. When implementing a complex mixed use precinct master plan, the staging strategy should be bespoke to reflect the contextual issues of the precinct, such as maintaining continuity of key operations, working within the constraints of the funding environment, meeting pressing capacity issues etc. Through interacting with clients, these priorities will identify themselves and a process of layering them on top of one another will reveal the optimal path forward.

What to look for:

• Staging strategies that are bespoke and geared to the specific needs and context of the project.

• Staging strategies that minimise reliance of individual stages on other stages to improve flexibility of implementation.

• Be wary of overly-simplistic implementation strategies that reduce staging to “short, medium and long term” - these are often not tested beyond this level of detail.

A clear, communicative & persuasive tool for advocacy

A useful master plan is designed with a full appreciation of its role as a communicative tool in bidding for funding, attracting investment, advocating for political and community support and achieving internal stakeholder consensus. Precinct managers themselves need to be able to effectively communicate the vision and important ideas in a succinct and engaging way, whether in a board meeting, or an elevator pitch. The power of engaging visual communication, narrative storytelling, clear messaging and persuasion to make the critical difference in advocacy cannot be understated. 

What to look for:

• Aesthetically engaging documents, inspiring hero visualisations and simple, communicative diagrams to illustrate important concepts.

• A vision, principles, big ideas and higher order strategies able to be easily articulated and understood by somebody new to the project.

• A document that equips the client with clear and persuasive narratives and arguments to help drive change.

• A clear summation of the issues, drivers, macro-economic opportunities and trends that fed into the process of creating the vision.

• Master plan projects that have a proven track record of catalysing real change, building momentum and achieving implementation.

Briefs matter

The qualities listed above are not found in every master plan, nor are they necessary for every master plan. This is to say that each master plan should be geared to be bespoke to the needs of the project, but this is a two-way street. Briefs need to explicitly call for the qualities that they need, or they risk hiring the wrong team. As mentioned at the start of this article, the quality and scope of master plans vary widely, so being able to articulate the right outcomes in a brief is critical in ensuring a master plan does what you need it to do.

I developed these insights based on recent experience in delivering complex mixed use precinct master plans. If I can assist you in reviewing your brief for a master plan project, please feel free to reach out.