Popular contempt for the property industry is running high. There’s protest against the joint venture relationship between Haringey Council in London and property developer Lendlease. Uproar over the sleaziness of the Presidents Club charity dinner. Disgust over the bumper bonuses of £110m at housebuilder Persimmon.
Popular contempt for the corporate world runs even higher. #Techlash berates Facebook for 50m breaches of privacy and Apple for its rapidly depleting batteries. Protestors boycott the drilling of oil in search of the ‘Gatwick Gusher’ and BAE Systems’ sponsorship of the arts. President Trump rallies a nation by attacking Amazon’s delivery deal with the United States Postal Service, while Theresa May promises to end “the energy price rip off”.
Much contempt circles around issues of trust. Breaches of trust suggest a capitalism out of control. Poor management is cast as intentional misdemeanour. The scepticism that follows and fills public life seeds a kind of corrosive melancholy. As ever, it’s going to be hard to win back user trust if people don’t feel like they matter.
Corporate social responsibility is fast becoming a key currency of response, with business cast as a force for social impact. Some see ‘social impact’ as a theme with which to shake off the past and connect with key demographics. A simple definition: how organizations' actions affect the surrounding community.
Since 2002, I’ve founded and managed many regeneration schemes and ventures dedicated to social impact – through new physical infrastructure such as bridges and playgrounds, the re-use of ‘dead’ spaces as locations for new social enterprise, or formation of new networks of people to generate new risk capital for entrepreneurs at the start of their career.
In the property industry, ‘impact’ is often defined through economic, social and fiscal measures – such as the number of jobs delivered, value that people attach to social spaces, cost savings to the public sector as a result of a particular intervention and other quantifiable things, such as commercial returns, revenues, rates and taxes.
I’d like to add another measure: inclusion.
To score highly on this, what should development plans encourage? Characteristics such as affordability, places to grow food, (off-leash) dog parks, spaces for the necessities of life, such as peace, quiet and breastfeeding, ground floor uses that connect to people upstairs (and make them better off), zoning that enables rich and poor people to share the same space and support one another, investment mechanisms and instruments that enable social change.
What should development plans avoid? Features that undermine inclusivity, that segregate people of different ages, promote sizes of accommodation that exclude poor, non-white households, screen poor neighbourhoods out from maps, stop people loitering, sitting down, walking where they want, ban buskers, people with prams, those who don’t speak the lingo or can spell radicchio.
This is a social impact strategy that seeks to avoid a culture of covenants, conditions and restrictions and to maximise market opportunity. It marks ‘social impact’ as a positive, venturesome thing, away from Godliness, philanthropy or charity – remember that Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company is a ‘social impact’ venture (and sold to Unilever for $300m) as is outdoor sports clothing company Patagonia. At its centre: the lost art of making people feel like they matter. Go ahead, step on the grass.
Picture credit: Alex Gardner
