Ahead of the launch of the New London Agenda, Stephen O’Malley of Civic Engineers explores breaking boundaries to contribute real improvement in places and projects.

This millennium has witnessed a series of seismic and unprecedented climatic, cultural, medical, and technological disruptions. These have fundamentally changed our life expectations and what we understood to be our destiny, placing our society on a dramatically different evolutionary trajectory. 

 

These factors have strengthened our understanding of the interdependence between each of these strands. The fact that the world’s population and the planet belong to a single integrated system is now a mainstream view. The majority in developed nations recognise that the natural world is a single ecosystem, where actions in one part of the planet affect all of the planet.

 

From a technological perspective, we have at our fingertips the ability to access news and information from across the world. Markets and investors make commercial decisions and take action on political, natural disasters or competitor events that have real world consequences on our quality of life.

 

Over this period we have also witnessed an urban renaissance, with a distinct trend towards urban residential densification. In Manchester, for example, we have seen a compact, low rise city centre at the turn of the millennium with a population of around 5,000. As of 2022, we have a city centre population of 75,000, with an outer footprint that takes in Salford Quays, defining a population of a further 185,000 – with many housed in tall buildings over 20 stories. These urban environments and their corollary lifestyles have very different patterns and needs than those from the last millennium.

 

Politicians are responsible for providing us with the leadership, regulatory frameworks, economic support and investment strategies to propel us into a steady, just and equitable future. Yet all too frequently, our elected representatives are working within systems that are underfunded with the pressure of political cycles meaning MPs are operating in near-constant campaign mode. This sets policy decisions up for little cross-party collaboration and a preference for popularist decisions, offering oversimplified, unworkable answers to complex problems, rather than long term solutions. It can leave us all poorer – economically, physically, psychologically, emotionally.

 

Against this backdrop we are all tasked, as professionals and leaders of industry, with the duty to think beyond boundaries, and constructively challenge the governance and conditions we encounter. Civic has had the privilege of collaborating with progressive professionals, authorities and communities who are all trying to reconcile the wants of a myriad different parties at a variety of scales from national policy through to individual buildings, combining to deliver positive impact.

 

We have developed our Civic Conscience, a set of behavioural principles shaped by our values, that acts as a decision making framework and something that we use to guide our business strategy and operational choices. It’s our north star, orientating all we do as civil, structural, geotechnical and transport engineers. This provides us with clarity and consistency in how we evolve our own business, protect our culture while supporting the transition of the systems, communities and places that we get to work with.

 

At national scale, we authored Ireland’s National Transport Authority (NTA) published best practice advice note for incorporating greening and nature-based sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) in active travel schemes.  As a nature-based approach to managing drainage, SuDS help to reduce the risk of flooding and improve the quality of water that enters watercourses. They form part of the Irish Government’s goal to implement water sensitive urban design across Ireland, in line with its Climate Action Plan 2023.  

At local scale, we completed Shoreditch park, and Gascoigne park in 2023 at the redeveloped Gascoigne Estate in Barking, providing communities with new, multifunctional green spaces, car-free, climate resilient homes that will cope more effectively with extreme weather events, via storm roofs and SuDS. Our communities deserve these interventions and it’s imperative we keep stoking the creative fires within us that can realise such ambitious developments. 

At building scale we brokered the reuse of steel beams, from a Civic Engineers’ project at 318 Oxford Street to a FORE Partnership project site at Tower Bridge Court, which illustrates how closer collaboration can play its part in mainstreaming sustainable practice, setting new norms and industry behaviours that mean we don’t have to wait for the economic and legislative incentives to do the right thing. It also highlighted the importance of uniting as an industry to tackle common problems: the conversation was brokered on the back of a bike at a Club Peloton event. 

 

We must remain courageous if we are to use our corner of the world to bring about progress, sustaining positive momentum even when policies regress, or ambitious schemes are jettisoned, and when housing ministers come and go. Our relationship with our natural environment, especially when planning and delivering our built environment, is vital to providing the conditions which allow us to achieve these goals, enabling our society to thrive. 

 

Thinking beyond boundaries is about taking the initiative and contributing more fully to the places and projects we are tasked with improving: enabling our communities to live in closer harmony with nature, travelling shorter distances, accessing more, consuming conscientiously and living more efficiently. We can capitalise on the disruption we have experienced by applying creativity, emotional intelligence and technical excellence to deliver positive change for London and beyond.