Imagine gathering every designer who has ever shaped a single street for a retrospective design crit?
Every building — from the latest new-build to the medieval cottage still standing.
The streets, the services, the flood defences.
All the engineers (and other humans) who made all the decisions.
What would they discover about their design choices?
What would they regret?
Which decisions would they make again?
What patterns of place might emerge — the things that repeatedly work (or fail), whether we choose to notice or not?
What changes might they observe?
How differently would the place sound to different generations of designer?
And how would they all arrive?
It feels like engineers (and other humans) are constantly redesigning places.
But how do we take the long view?
How do we learn from what has worked — and what hasn’t — over time?
So that from generation to generation, we build a progression of holistic wisdom, not just another round of reinvention.