The relationship between the property industry and public just now in the UK is at a very low point. The real estate magazine Estates Gazette expressed it delicately the other day as “Property has a public perception problem.”
Protestors take to the streets of North Kensington, London over the tragedy of Grenfell Tower; over the joint-venture partnership between the local Government and a private property development company in Haringey; and in Soho, against the gentrification of the area, or “urban colonialism” as one protestor put it.
In his Budget speech last week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer threatened developers with compulsory purchase of un-developed housing land. At the Labour Party Conference in September, Jeremy Corbyn set down a clear basic principal: “Regeneration under a Labour government will be for the benefit of the local people, not private developers, not property speculators.” And earlier this month, the tide started to turn, as the leader of the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham said that he would take back control of two housing estates earmarked for demolition in the £1bn+ redevelopment of the district of Earls Court, West London.
All of this matters because the public vests in the development industry and its partners the opportunity to deliver the places of the future. The healthiness of the real estate industry’s relationship with customers and stakeholders is central to the morale, mobility and confidence of the economy, and so the productivity of the workforce. And in an age of populism and anti-monopolism, if the development industry doesn’t get its house in order, a new age of regulation and taxation threatens.
For almost twenty years, initiated by Lord Rogers’ vision of ‘Urban Renaissance’, the delivery of equitable, healthy and sustainable cities has been top of the development agenda. At the centre of that initiative was a new contract between developer, Government and the public. Since that time, some 3m new homes have been completed and construction output has run at an average value of £80bn p.a. City centres across the UK have been transformed. But see today’s protests, listen to the threats of politicians, and it feels as if one party – the public - feels left out in the cold.
In the first instance, the development industry may be blameless. The rise, rise and rise of the Internet has created ‘digital public squares’ that we like to frequent – that we prefer to the built environment – a form of public space shattered into millions of personalised news feeds and full of people offering love, admiration and agreement. Our success at developing cities has turned them into investment opportunities and assets that answer the call of surplus savings and corporate reserves from across the world and are locally agnostic. A key consequence of the financial crisis of 2008 has been public distrust of capital, corporations and the millionaires and billionaires in control of a growing share of the economy - and private property, as far as the public is concerned, is the most basic building block of free-market capitalism.
Yet so much of culture just now is about returning power to the people, decentralising markets, that you’d think the public would not feel so powerless. Entrepreneurs are building networks and platforms on the internet that enable individuals and organisations to transact directly with one another. The democratisation of technology is empowering users and organisations to do things for themselves that they couldn’t do before. Some of the most important innovation in business and commerce is devoted to making data more free, portable, useable and available to the public to provide them with greater control.
Inevitably because of what I do – designing and delivering projects and programmes that enable communities to participate in the world around them and benefit from urban development – I see a solution to this lack of trust in the way in which real estate and the public interact.
The industry sees its most effective engagement of the public through new products – and of course, that’s right, but then there’s ‘community engagement’. This engagement is about growing customer loyalty, winning support for planning permission and sometimes, it is an act of corporate social responsibility – sales and revenue first, expressing or fulfilling a licence to operate second. Public benefit looks like it plays second fiddle to commercialism. It is the housing developers’ advert featuring the City trader that sticks in the public mind, rather than their pioneering and generous collaboration with a charity.
Because the industry aligns ‘the public’ with sales and marketing, what’s done in the name of ‘community’ is often attention-seeking, market-making and responsibility for place-making passes to those whose job it is to articulate, position and promote ‘the offer’ - architects. Community benefit and social impact gets mixed up with narratives of aspiration, rather than relationships, of buying, selling and not social inclusion. This is place-making as a vintage clothing store next to a cha-cha Latino soap stall, next to a pumpkin latte seller, not a place to meet your neighbour, broker new relationships and, as a venture capitalist might put it, create new liquidity.
How might the industry address this and forge a new, more trusting relationship with the public?
Allied to the development and delivery of new, affordable, appealing places to live, work and play there are other things that we can do – and at the grassroots.
First, involve people in the creation of the brief for the design and development of a place, and don’t rely upon the consultation process run by the planning system.
Second, find and promote ways and means by which people can contract with a place in a meaningful economic way: be it enabling them to create and participate in new entrepreneurship and enjoy each other’s company.
Third, don’t think of ‘community engagement’ as entertainment programming or the co-option of dysfunctional outliers into supporters of your real estate scheme, but as a way of capturing opportunists, entrepreneurs, fostering new skills and morale.
Finally, encourage the industry to create new positions of ‘Director of Community’ in their organisations – a role that reports to the Executive Board, not the marketing department and is a prototype for management roles in the future, such as that today can only be phrased in gobbledygook: the ‘Chief User Experience Officer’.
Like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Paul Polman of Unilever, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Jamie Oliver, industry leaders need to make ‘changing the world’ a positive corporate ethos, not a management problem, and enable senior figures to be purposeful leaders who inspire, elevate and communicate with the public.
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David Barrie is a consultant in urban renewal and real estate projects and programmes. He has founded and delivered several award-winning regeneration schemes in the UK and for-profit and non-profit urban ventures, including The People’s Supermarket, London and early stage venture capital investment network Wild Blue Cohort. http://davidbarrie.me
