Beyond the box

Among many a fine nugget shared at the inaugural SPACE+ Member Event The Agile City, this in his introduction as co-host to the event from Head of Futuring & Place at Legal & General Investment Management Denz Ibrahim: ‘As real estate people and designers, we’ve got these two worlds: the real estate world, which is extremely inflexible, often run by spreadsheets, trying to deliver environments to an audience that is very flexible and very aware. We have to find the equilibrium [between these worlds] and so create great places.’

As starters go, it doesn’t get much better, given the afternoon’s remit. As shared elsewhere, we were here – at The Crown Estate’s headquarters, courtesy of Kristy Lansdown, Head of Development – to discuss how best to begin to break the (political and cultural) deadlock that results in ‘the processes of planning, design and construction [being] inherently inflexible and fragmented and often slow moving, prohibitively expensive, and lacking in creativity’.

Speaking to a 40-strong circle of developers, designers, asset managers, and analysts, FreeState’s Adam Scott set the tone for afternoon, arguing for the kind of agility championed by the late statistician and quality management expert W Edwards Deming, who helped revolutionise the Japanese manufacturing sector and is the source of the astounding success of the likes of Patagonia. A key tenet of Deming’s philosophy is the notion of continual improvement, the so-called Deming Cycle of planning, doing, checking, and acting, a methodology that allows for experiment, for learning from failure, and for dynamic systems that invite and thrive on input from all manner of stakeholders. Intentionally or not, it’s an approach espoused by organisations as disparate as Munich Airport and Curtin University, each a lesson in how to lead with purpose, adapt through piloting the good idea, and thus innovating to evolve and so grow

The scene set, Ibrahim and his fellow co-host Executive Director at developer of mixed-use places Socius Olaide Oboh spent the rest of the session using their own practices to both illustrate and add to Scott’s premise. Until April of this year, Ibriham had spent five years leading LGIM’s innovative retail and futuring arm, much of it through Covid, and it is the success of that philosophy and practice that he brings to his new role, constantly pushing (upon his asset managers) the idea that everything begins with understanding the needs and wants of people. We need to think, he says, ‘beyond the box’, beyond the ‘hard stuff’, to be led by (and in turn influence) behaviour, and have the capacity and intelligence with which to act, adapt, or even pivot in real time. Hence the emphasis he places on both hard data and on long term on-the-ground research-driven relationships with tenants – ‘soft’ and ever flexible life sit inside and centre of the ‘hard envelope’ that is the traditional business of asset management. As example of how this can work, see the regeneration of Kingland Crescent in Poole, Ibrahim’s first project when he joined LGIM and now methodological guide for much of the organisation’s approach to the revitalisation of its regional retail estate.

Ibrahim’s call for the asset manager to move from ‘being the librarian’ of real estate to hands-on ‘editors’ of the experience they facilitate echoes the work Oboh and Socius. Socius specialises not in developing real estate per se (‘the buildings are the buildings’) but rather in what its work ‘can do for the life chances’ of its end user. This in mind, finding out what does and doesn’t work is critical to the success of landing exactly the right kind of intervention for a given community. A foundational principle of the developer’s work is the ‘testbed’: ‘In our world, we create safe spaces for us to test ideas and really safe environments to fail – [we do so] because we know that it’s in the process of failure that we can create really interesting, magical moments.’ As example, Oboh points to Socius’s work developing the London Cancer Hub in Sutton in London, an intervention – having spoken to patients and their families – that is so much more than a bunch of ‘labs and office space to work in’: the Hub needs to be a world class facility ‘that doesn’t feel like a hospital’ and which flexes to the needs and wants of its many users. A building, in other words, and as Stuart Brand would say, that learns.

All of which led to much discussion, the details of which we will share another time. Suffice to say, there were questions around how to best to bring all the necessary (often inflexible) institutions together, in order to allow for the kind of people-led pilot-driven culture-aware interventions everyone is keen to see happen. It’s possible, of course: as Lansdown shared, for The Crown Estate, the pandemic had the effect of dissipating inertia and greenlighting an interim public realm scheme that would otherwise not made it out of the gates. And, to return to Scott’s introduction, there was clearly a hunger in the room for the kind of small test-the-waters pilots that in the case of the Curtin University intervention were proof of concept for increasingly large spatial moves.

We will come back to this and much more. In the meantime, huge thanks to the unremittingly fine SPACE+ and to The Crown Estate for the event and its hosting, to Kirsty Lansdown, Denz Ibrahim, and Olaide Oboh for their wisdom, and to everyone who attended. Until next time.

If you’d like to learn more about SPACE+ Member Event in general and The Agile City specifically, please do get in touch. This is just the beginning of the most vital of conversations.??