A city on a program list, and a request for schematic design
A developer came to LÏEF Development, where I am a principal, with a rectangular site about an hour and a half east of Accra, in Ewe country in the Volta Region, against the Akwapim-Togo range. The idea had started as a taxi-union app with EV charging, grown into an EV factory with battery plants, and become a city as the land grew. What arrived was a program with nine use categories, industrial through retail, and every line of it read like the contents of a town: a hospital, a university, a stadium, a courthouse, hotels, a market on the scale of Kumasi Central Market, and the homes on the cover. The request was for schematic design.
The people in it were the developer's chairman and his coordinator, a land lead who knew the parcel, and, as we learned on the kickoff call, an architect the developer had already engaged. On our side, the whole Common Ground team worked it through LÏEF: our lead designer on the site planning, prototypes and massing; our brand team on the narrative, the design intent and the renderings; and me as the principal who tests every design decision against constructability, budget, phasing and the pro forma, and who carries the bidding and construction phases where design and construction usually come apart. The capital side of the team shaped the design narrative so it would stand up in front of the developer's investors and regulators.
Where the developer was, in plain terms: land in hand, a program list, no site data yet, an architect on board, a concern about paying a large share of a design fee before the collaboration had proven itself, and a capital raise that had not happened. Where the site was, in plainer terms: a tropical wet-and-dry climate with a rainy season that floods the low ground, a river nearby that could be redirected, laterite soils, termites, and a local grid the developer did not trust. What the program asked for was drawings. What it needed was an answer to who would pay for the city and who would build it, because Ghana has already seen the other kind of plan. Hope City was launched near Accra in 2013 on the strength of a striking rendering and was never built. The precedent that did work sits in the same hills: Akosombo Township, planned with the dam in the 1960s around a real economic anchor, and still functioning.
Who pays for it and who builds it, before what it looks like
Two gaps sat under the program, and a plan that ignored either one would have been a picture.
Money. On the kickoff call the developer's team put local wages at around $7,000 a year for an accountant, while the top homes in Accra sell for up to $3 million. The people who would buy most of the standard homes cannot pay what the enclave buyers can. Any plan for this site has to say where the money for roads, water, power and treatment comes from before it says what the houses look like.
Hands. Someone has to put up the homes and a city's worth of civic buildings. The alternative on the table was imported crews working around the clock. That builds fast and leaves nothing behind: no trained trade, no local fabrication, no reason for the next phase to be cheaper than the first.
My judgment on this came from two places. In 2007 an EF5 tornado leveled Greensburg, Kansas. I led Tellus's preconstruction and construction teams on the rebuild and coordinated the town's green redesign, and a town with no budget for high-performance building got rebuilt because national manufacturers wanted to be part of its story. Years later I ran the bid desk on SABS panel work in the Xtrata seat and learned how that system behaves on a job: how crews learn it, where it fails when the details are wrong, what it does to a schedule. Both taught the same thing. A place gets built when someone has solved who pays for it and who builds it. The drawings come after.
So the decision was to answer the request as a development problem rather than a drafting problem. Put the building system and the workforce inside the design scope from the first page. Ask the questions the plan depends on before drawing a line. And when the facts changed on the kickoff call, change the role rather than defend the proposal.
How I came at this one
The first question was who pays for the city and who builds it, before anything about how it looks. That question fit because the program was a list of a town's contents with no economy under it, on a site whose climate would punish any building system chosen for its looks. The second question, once the developer's architect appeared, was which seat nobody else was holding: the master plan that ties his buildings into a city, the buildable system, and the story.