Who carries the can and who gets off the hook

This paper follows the author’s address at Footbridge 2017 in Berlin, and his contribution to the Henderson Colloquium held by the UK chapter of IABSE in July 2019 at Cambridge University under the heading ‘How can structural engineering be an unending stream of goodness’.

By way of this paper the author would like to contribute to the discussion on the relationship between the procurement process, starting from competitions, initial design, through detailed design, and construction to completion, and the quality of outcomes in terms of value for money, lifetime cost, and cultural, social, environmental and ephemeral values.

A competition winning design involving a footbridge in Gdansk, formally opened in September 2020, serves as an example of how the process and the outcome of such project could be derailed by the client’s and the authorities’ actions, or prevarication, and lack of transparency.

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