Towards The Agile City

Just a quick word about SPACE+ ’s first Member Event happening in one week's time - The Agile City - which I will be hosting alongside the marvellous Kristy Lansdown, Head of Development at The Crown Estate. I will most certainly be reporting on where we get to, so this very short post is designed to inform, further interest, and bang the event drum.

If you’re a SPACE+ member, you will no doubt have heard about the Member Event. If not, it’s a chance for members to meet around how to ‘think differently about asset strategy and management’. A hot topic, The Agile City calls for a much more agile approach to the composition and mandates of developer and management teams and so to the way we design, deliver, and manage the places we make. At the moment, ‘the processes of planning, design and construction’ are, it will be argued, ‘inherently inflexible and fragmented’ and often slow moving, prohibitively expensive, and lacking in creativity.

The day’s structure for the event is simple. A deliberately provocative ‘Big Idea’ keynote speech is followed by a structured members’ discussion co-hosted by Olaide Oboh and Denz Ibrahim , where the idea is responded to, pulled apart, put through its paces, and built on. I’ll give the keynote, borrowing heavily from the thinking and doing of a number of those in attendance, many of whom have been pushing for ways of doing things differently, more quickly, and in a much more joined up way. Without saying too much, the problem I’d like to dig into collectively is how to get developers and asset managers joining forces with other key stakeholders to find common ground on returns on investment. If we can crack that particular nut, then we can begin to unlock opportunities that we can’t even see at the moment, and in a way that is immediate, affordable, and creative.

If you’re member and you haven’t signed up, I’d encourage you to. If you’re not a member and you’ve been thinking about becoming one, this might be the perfect catalysing agent. Hosted at The Crown Estate’s HQ (1 St?James’s Market, London, SW1Y 4AH, 4-7pm), it’s going to be a cracker.