Urban Innovation – establishing a new programme

Tuesday 03 March 2020

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly

Urban Innovation – establishing a new programme

A group of tech-experts gathered at London & Partners to discuss how property, planning, architecture, construction, engineering and city management can benefit from urban innovation – in all its guises.

The group, including developers and agents as well as governmental organisations and associations debated under Chatham House to move towards a ‘roadmap’ and identify some of the key issues to be addressed further in NLA’s new Urban Innovation Programme.

The key points and selected quotes included:

Innovation is a broad category which can extend, from a government perspective, from how SME developers find small sites right through to what the new digital planning agenda should be – a White Paper is to be released on the latter shortly
The ‘social strand’ of innovation – what it means to live in a city – should not be forgotten.
‘A big question for our sector is how you keep pace and try and stay one step ahead – we’re not in our planning cycles. We’ll be working on 10, 20 year development
Cross-sector collaboration with other industries such as the automotive sector should be better implemented in order to learn innovations
Innovation should also be targeted at issues such as loneliness as well as ways to navigate the city or climate change principles
‘Urban innovation is 100% connectivity. Connect the housing to the car; the car to the energy system; all of it has to be connected’
The construction industry needs disruptors to force change, as Tesla and others have done in automotive. ‘Otherwise it will not change’
Transport for London is looking at Proptech innovation through its plans to build 10,000 homes in the capital and beyond, in part to help it achieve sustainability targets
Due to the short-term cycles for most stakeholders in real estate, and due to the fact that the supply chain is so fragmented, it makes it very hard to align innovation around long term goals. As such, it is companies such as Lendlease which have long term hold strategies, and deliver construction, investment and management, which are delivering more innovative ideas into their projects, as they can calculate a return on that investment. Many can not.
‘Before five years ago, we were talking about the building as an asset. This is changing. The data now is an asset’. Even if construction companies don’t move on this, others will come into this area to take business, adding sensors in the house to track data, incentivised if necessary
In finance it is the new banks coming in that can challenge the old to set new ways of working, and while disruptors in property like WeWork or Monzo have been significant, few have been successful financially
Commercial real estate owners such as institutional investors or REITS are risk-averse and thus find it hard to similarly disrupt. ‘How do we adjust the business models to move quickly and embrace those new norms?
With 2.5 billion people living in urban areas in the next 30 years, are we doing enough on urban innovation? The industry needs to be better coordinated: ‘We are still prehistoric in the materials we use on construction sites and how we deliver’.
Could there be a measure of technology that becomes the norm over the next 10 years as BREEAM has done for energy/sustainability issues?
The GLA is building its own 3D modelling system
Occupants are driving innovation, too, in what they demand from their building owners – Microsoft being an example of a company setting high standards for what it sets in terms of energy/sustainability
This in turn is a big attractor and boon to recruitment
TfL is working hard to encourage innovation and start-ups through changing its own culture and running innovation days and a series of competitions on issues like retail, mobility, sustainability and buy to rent
Government understands its role as a customer and is working on proptech pilots in land identification and citizen engagement. ‘It’s a huge opportunity to overcome a lot of our housing and planning issues’.
The members of the Proptech Innovation Council will be announced soon, following its formation in November
An international perspective, including on what’s happening outside of Europe – especially in China and Japan – can bring useful insights
In the UK, however, some datasets are not freely available and the irony is that companies are paying money to recreate data, and government is funding projects to recreate datasets that already exist. ‘That’s just crazy’
Coordination with other industry- and quasi-governmental bodies would be an admirable objective, as would investigating how the professions should be taught in the future; expanding the conversation and establishing a one-stop shop to exhibit key advances; and allowing for real test-bed sites for innovation
‘I would really like the urban innovation programme to help us develop a roadmap of how we can deploy solutions, in real terms’
What does this all mean for how we educate the professionals in the build environment of tomorrow - how do we have to adjust the curricular in schools and universities?
There are many initiatives going on in parallel - it would be good if we could create one place where everything comes together - a place where everyone can get an overview of all initiatives, plans and pilot projects in the UK. (Ideally the world)
We need to create places where our current planning rules don’t apply - a safe space to try out new solutions - exploring better ways to contract, incentivise and manage risk - we have to create processes and rules that foster true collaboration and reward resource efficiency and long-term circular thinking.