April 2009 Archives

A geeky mate of mine (who I suspect may not have quite enough to do right now) has sent me a report by some American economists - Professors Rose and Spiegel - entitled The Olympic Effect. Well, it's all a bit cerebral for me but even I managed to get my head around the summary, which states that economists are "sceptical" about the economic benefits of hosting "mega-events" such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, "since such activities have considerable costs and seem to yield few tangible benefits".

Well, blow me down!

I live quite near the shopping centre known as "Westfield London", still barely half a year old, and - like many others I would imagine - I have deeply conflicting views about it. 

On one level there is no question that it is a complete triumph: the brilliant Keith Mabbett at Westfield and the retail lads at CB Richard Ellis did a stonking job on the lettings. Would have been a pretty good achievement even in a bull market but was even more astonishing given that they opened straight into the downturn. Amazing.

On another level I get more than a bit cross about the waste of leverage I believe could have been got from this resource had it been more imaginatively handled, in terms of socio-economic benefits for the community. I understand from one of the local politicians that there are only 300 local people (I assume this means from within the borough of Hammersmith & Fulham) working in the centre and, in my grumpy way, I try not to lose sight that over 8,000 jobs were created for London, which I appreciate is a right result. The real reason for my grumpiness, of course, is that for many years I worked on the project, back in the Chelsfield days, when we were in a heavy duty partnership with Hammersmith & Fulham working on local labour initiatives. And in my idealistic little fashion, in my simplistic little world, I did see the new development as the passport to ending the deprivation that is STILL extant - shockingly so - on the immediately adjacent White City Estate. I look at the White City Estate today and just feel hugely guilty - we put in some very good foundations for real local economic development in W12 but it was never followed through. Goes to show, planning and delivery mechanisms are not enough. You have to deliver, deliver, deliver. The spirit has to be willing and the flesh has to be strong.

One of my field operatives (I have spies EVERYWHERE) reports to me that there has been a furore in Italy over young lovers attaching padlocks to street furniture and throwing away the keys.

This raises an interesting question about our engagement with our environment and, by extension, whose public realm it is and how it is managed. Like many others, I have been wrestling with this for many years.

On the same theme, a sign was spotted this morning, presumed written by a child (it may have been a rather wide-eyed adult of course) attached to a tree in Finsbury Park. It said "Please don't let your dog poop here. We have planted flowers". It was just a normal tree in the pavement that someone had laid claim to over the dog walkers.

Again, an interesting illustration of conflict in use in the public realm. And one with which I was rather sympathetic (being not great on dogs - or, at least, not great on dogs in cities - but that isn't the point).

This reminded me of the time when I was running the Business Improvement District in Paddington (not greatly assisted, of course, by the government giving us the wrong legislation - taxing (very unwilling) occupiers rather than (perfectly willing) land owners).

That mad Danish urbaniste, Eric Sorenson (then acting for St Mary's NHS Trust) and me (on behalf of Paddington developers) had been attempting to mitigate the sense of stepping out of the First World (the brand new Padders with high finishes and immaculately managed public realm) into the Third World (Praed Street with its gum clogged pavement, phone boxes full of prostitutes' cards, dodgy "bureaux de change" et al).

Well, we had been battling with Westminster council over ONE JUNCTION in Praed street for two years and, weary and punch drunk from the enervating struggle we retreated to the Gyngleboy Wine Bar one evening to lick our wounds.

 I am nothing if not hugely partisan and won't even attempt not to bang on too much about the virtues of BURA (the British Urban Regeneration Association, which I have the honour to chair) in this 'ere blogging malarkey.

I don't care if I am accused of puff and spin and eliciting "well, she would say that wouldn't she" responses from EG types.

I am unrepentant and I can't help myself ! I am so very proud of our new(ish) Chief Executive (well, ok, it's a fair cop but we've only had him a year) - the formidably pointy headed Michael Ward - who, in a short period of eleven months has totally re-calibrated our organisation to meet the challenges of this economic meltdown.

And, like all those who are successfully steering their organisations through the choppy rapids, he is having to do it all on the hoof !

With a newly formed and remarkably robust concordat with the new Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), BURA will now embark on serious consultation with HCA and other stakeholders around what new products and services will be needed by our members to meet this Brave New World.      

And that's good news for those of us who aren't feeling quite so brave, right now. I don't subscribe to the school of thought that we are witnessing the breakdown of capitalism as we know it. (I'm still not convinced there are many alternatives out there - would love to be proven wrong but hey !) But I do genuinely believe that a return to some form of collectivism will be how we will stay in the game.

Alright, call me a soppy and sentimental old Marxist if you like (somebody the other day described me as a "post-Marxist" - I'm not at all sure what this means but I have decided to take it as a compliment) but remember, BURA is now over 20 years old.

When first we started, the very concept of "partnership" was unheard of. There is now no equivocation about the need for a partnership approach in every endeavour around urban regeneration.

I have for some time been urging regeneration practitioners to take up the cudgels of training the rest of the world how to behave and work differently, for the good of all of us. Altogether now: "I'd like to teach the world to sing....."

Greetings from the land of King Tut!

Tell me, have you ever been to Sharm Elshiekh, Egypt? It is a truly bizarre resort cleaved from a scrap of reclaimed desert, which couldn't bear less relation to the pyramids if it tried. It consists of an airport, a road and hotels. The runway for the airport lies along one side of the road and a series of huge resort hotels built to an identical fomula lie along the other side of the road, facing the sea. And that's about it really; the desert stretches into the distance. It is a land of studied artifice and has a sort of 1980s conspicuous consumption feel to it; I seriously dread to think what must be the size of its carbon footprint!

It was in a moment of exhausted collapse on a freezing February Sunday morning that my daughters (a kidult of 18 and a poppet of 11 - the lanky loud lad of 16 was having none of it!) ambushed me to go onto one of these last minute websites to book some "winter sun". Needless to say 'im indoors wasn't playing either, muttering darkly about being "too busy at work" (he does PFI projects so your guess is as good as mine!) so the lads have stayed home and it is just the three of us gels out here in this strange place soaking up the rays. Or not, since it's too hot for me to lie out in (what a wus!), the kidult's got Montezuma's and the littley's got sunburn, so we're cowering under umbrellas reading trashy novels and - in my case at least (although the kidult has one too) - fiddling with our Blackberries. Oh happy holidays.

My mate, the lovely Paul Clark (that's Paul Clark of CBRE currently on secondment to the LDA, not the energetic Labour MP for Gillingham, although I am proud to say he's a mate too) has e-mailed me to say that I'm "against the curve" and really should be in Scarborough on my hols and that has got me thinking - again - about the fraught future of tourism for the UK citizen.

I am now at a strange point in my life of finding myself an eminence grise in the regeneration sector. Anyone who knows me will attest that this is not something I'm terrifically comfortable with, having got a life-long self-image of being an "urban guerrilla" banging on the door of the mainstream property sector. After all, I started my adult life with a bubble perm, Doctor Martins, red dungarees and a badge saying "wearing badges is not enough" and, frankly, I am still that rather absurd girlie underneath.

So I found it very odd indeed when that venerable old man of the sea, Howard Day (fag hanging out of his mouth of course) said incredulously (this was while we were doing Paddington, he was with Railtrack at the time but he does get about; he's the only person I know who has worked for both Godfrey Bradman and Stuart Lipton not - I hasten to add - at the same time) "Blimey Jack, you're becoming establishment". And although I didn't believe him at the time, I guess I really am now. After all, I chair the trade federation (hurrah!) and I'm Head of Regeneration for CB Richard Ellis, biggest real estate consultancy in the world (so ner) so I guess I'd better wake up and smell the hummus.

And it's rather nice being an eminence grise, of course. Students write to me to ask me for careers advice. Bless. What would I know? I hugely enjoy lecturing the APCs (the "Assessment of Professional Competence" cohort - or, in English, the graduate trainees) in CBRE. I lurve lurve lurve the CBRE APCs, they are the brightest and most sassy group of young people you could care to meet. Completely energising and stimulating to be around. Graduate recruitment is something that CBRE do brilliantly well - it's taken a bit of battering in recent times of course but I have no doubt they'll be back out in the colleges before long.

Do you sense any lightening up out there? Are there any...uh...green shoots? Is it just me (the glass-half-full maniac) who detects that things are turning? Or is it just that the sun shone for half an hour yesterday and the blossom is out in my back garden and I will grab any reason to be cheerful?

Look, there is no doubt that it is pretty grim out there but I have decided to take control (at least as far as my little bit of the world is concerned). This is partly prompted by the lovely John Carleton, of the PWC regeneration team (and an esteemed BURA Board member) calling me to report on the excellent BURA Dinner held in Liverpool the other night for the "Waterways Renaissance Awards" (which we JV with the Waterways Trust). He said "Jack, we all get so bloody hung up about the huge regeneration projects, but I was blown away by some of the small projects receiving awards. They didn't cost much but have made a huge difference to peoples' lives. It was truly humbling."

This from the geezer who advises on some of the biggest bits of infrastructure kit going! I am deeply proud to lead BURA which - uniquely - occupies the space between the public, private and voluntary sectors and which recognises and awards the small projects which have a profound impact on people's lives.

I understand that when he was working as a journalist, Ian Fleming (the creator of that great classic, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and that other thing about the testosterone-loaded blokey who habitually jumped out of aeroplanes, pulled leggy girls and drank Martinis) held a competition for his readers to come up with the 27th letter of the alphabet. We learn this from his latest biography which I am told is "excellent" (but I am not taking it on my hols next week - sun and sand beckon - as I'm still struggling to get through Peter Ackroyd's Biography of London which, for some reason, I keep getting distracted from and which I simply MUST finish).

Anyway, the winner of the Fleming competition was the Greek letter Theta (proposed as a replacement for 'th'). So that got me thinking... Given how much response I've had to the old blog and given my life-long mission to be creative around the town planning agenda, how about using my blog to elicit a new planning use class? Come on you lot, the gauntlet is down! This means YOU - Stuart Robinson of CBRE, Sandra Eyre of Creative Town Planning, Christine Reeves of Nathaniel Lichfield, John Cohu of Montagu Evans, Pippa (er, that's certainly enough planners thank you - Ed).

Here's some examples:

The government does have a propensity for making places up. And, needless to say, we regeneration types are very happy to join in, especially if there's the sniff of grant funding as reward for playing along.

Sometimes the making-up of places works very well in terms of communicating growth zones to the market, the most obvious example being the "Thames Gateway". But we do need to understand the grave limitations of these made-up concepts. These constructs have their place in the technical world that we all occupy but they are not the concern of real people. 

This is a personal bugbear of mine. One of the dafter things that was forthcoming during my sojourn in the Gateway was the then-ODPM spending literally millions on establishing the "Thames Gateway" as a recognisable brand in the eyes of residents who, needless to say, were not having any of it! If you live in centuries' old settlements such as Gravesend or Tilbury (or Dartford, North Woolwich or Purfleet) you will defend to the hilt your right to continue to live there rather than in some regional planner's paradigm. Have the residents of Elephant and Castle ever heard of "London South Central"? I think we should be told! And would it be of any use to them at all if they had? Where is Heathrow City? I don't recollect a cathedral there (although there is a very nice chaplain - who I have met!). 

Lawks! I have caused a stir. I never knew I was going to get so much response from my friends and relations over becoming EG regeneration blogger. It's all rather gratifying.

One very old friend of mine who shall remain nameless (oh alright then, Ian Lindsay of Network Rail) said "I see you are now an industry blogger, whatever that is. Had they said blagger I'd have understood and agreed!" Really I ask you, what a cheeky git! Blagger indeed! 

Ian Anderson (that's the talented and creative Head of Retail Planning for CBRE, not 'im with the flute) wrote me an e-mail saying you're really "down with the kids now" (whatever THAT means!) and goes on to say he looks forward "to seeing you on Facebook and Twitter!!!" well the very idea! I view all of this with faint horror. To cap it all, my eldest child (the kidult) accused me of being a "neek" which, I understand, is a cross between a nerd and a geek. And she now says she wants her own blog to counteract whatever it is that I'm saying!

Another old pal, the delightful Richard Page of Delph Properties, currently suffering like the rest of us from being in the wrong end of the housing sector (come to think of it, is there a right end?) has sent me some innovative ideas for the fixing of the UK economy. I think he nicked it from an American local newspaper - my mates get around you know - and I have anglicized it for the benefit of all you UK Estates Gazetteers (and for not being sued).

It is entitled Patriotic Retirement and it goes something like this:

Was invited out to lunch with Peter Brett Associates (PBA) at Mosimann's, which was a rare treat as I'd never been there before. I have always had a soft spot for the Brett boys - they're a user-friendly bunch and they like a bit of knockabout humour - which is just as well really. I am always very rude to the lads - it's tradition really - and they never care; they're unoffendable really.

After we'd got over the preliminaries of me saying that I "couldn't possibly eat lunch in a dump like that" and "why-oh-why after three decades was I still slumming it with boring transport engineers" etc etc, we settled down to a real working lunch on energy and ecology. This was far from a pure jolly-up (although it was very jolly too of course) but was a real opportunity to listen, learn and debate some issues facing the future of the regeneration sector.

We received two very different technical presentations - one on energy production and one on biodiversity - and then had a fascinating round table discussion. I found I learnt A Lot from the presentations, the most exciting idea being that corporates' property portfolios can be treated as single cross-subsidising entities in terms of production of energy for the National Grid. Given the shake-up that we're going to see in among the FTSE 500 corporates' use of real estate, this is a major contribution to thinking. And - says she, a tad hubristically - to the future of the planet.

Out on a reunion with my old team from the Park Royal Partnership (PRP) Thursday night in that well known crawling-with-surveyors-venue, the good old Balls Bros wine bar in Brook Street. We had a bucket of white wine and some of those lovely snorkers with sesame seeds that are so moreish, after you've had a few. You know the ones.

Great to see the guys - indeed they're a fine mob - but was sorry to learn that they, like so many others, are facing potential meltdown as the LDA is withdrawing funding from them and many other arms-length delivery organisations. This affects a number of partnership structures around London that we know and love - Gateway to London (GtL) being another obvious example. Cannot help but feel that this may be a false economy in these troubled times. 

Whilst the PRP does have a tendency to "mission creep" from time to time (I was Chief Executive of the PRP from 2005-2007 and I inherited - among other daft things - a football project! I ask you! Well, I soon put a stop to all that nonsense) which is a problem with too many regeneration agencies who (understandably) tend to morph to meet the latest public funding caprices, there is no disputing that there is a HUGE job to be done on the Park Royal estate. After all, it is the largest industrial estate in Europe with 2,000 companies employing 40,000 people - it is very precious indeed to the London (and hence the UK) economy; it is a diamond in the rough. And, as it straddles three London boroughs and has no votes, it has nobody looking out for it.

I am deeply honoured to have been asked by the EG to become regeneration blogger. Leaving to one side the comic value to my adolescent children of me even knowing what a "blog" is (and it is true that I am rather hazy on this score), and putting aside also the rather rude remark that my colleague at CB Richard Ellis observed when hearing of this ("those poor people at the Estates Gazette, they know not what they do!"), I am simply thrilled to be able to pontificate ad nauseam through the industry establishment organ (the great Peter Bill once told me that the EG is the widest circulation trade magazine in the UK!) about trends in regeneration in these straitened times.

And it is certainly the case that this is THE defining moment for the regeneration sector. The sainted Bob Kerslake is talking about a national dialogue about new models of regeneration in current economic climate and Michael Ward, Chief Executive of the British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA) and the BURA Board are actively considering proactive BURA engagement and response, to effect a quantum leap in regeneration thinking in the UK. There is no doubt that we need to start leading the response and stimulating the debate. And I need to harness energy: I need all of you to engage with me in this.

Immediate spring-to-mind points are: where will the new jobs come from? 

• Green industry (there is a very obvious and looming opportunity about establishing and managing local energy plants (whether they be waste-to-energy or recycling or whatever) still not fashionable but if things get so bad, we need to start thinking about local solutions to stimulating the local economy). 
• Social dislocation and mass consumption: if the party is over, who is going to clean up and why should they? Future-casting scenarios on the generation that just doesn't care and does not have skills base, aspiration, etc to help shape the agenda and live it. 
• How to develop a platform for more sustainable economic activity? What are the Mayor's economic regeneration advisers thinking and saying in relation to his Economic Renewal Action Plan? What are the three major parties saying about regeneration in the run-up to the general election (or are we all going to wait to hear what Vince Cable thinks, as usual)?

Whew! My head seriously hurts and I think I'll go and have a lie down. But make no mistake: I intend to try and tackle all this, and more, in the weeks and months ahead. Of course I will also attempt to lighten up the pointy-headed stuff with my usual dollops of gossip and scandal. You'd expect nothing less.