Social inclusion is rising up the agenda for the property industry. But is it something that real estate does well?
“The short answer is ‘no’,” says DAC Beachcroft’s head of planning Christopher Stanwell, speaking as part of EG’s Future of UK Cities event. “Developers,” he adds coyly, “are often motivated by slightly different goals.”
Glasgow councillor Angus Millar agrees. “The best developments that we have in terms of social inclusion typically come from the social rented sector, from RSLs,” he says.
“Where you have purely private sector-led development, you tend not to see that as much.”
It’s not a great verdict on an industry that is trying to promote itself as a force for good and an enabler of positive change. But at least he does think the industry is getting better. “It is happening more than it used to,” he adds, encouragingly.
For Amos Simbo, founder of the Black Professionals in Construction network, the crucial question is threefold: “How is it planned? Who is it planned for? Who is it built by?”
The real estate sector is playing catch-up on these issues. “Society is turning a corner,” he says. “The social value element is a starting to play a big part of the decision-making process.”
As a result it is starting to compete in the minds of developers with other priorities, he says, such as financial aspects and time constraints.
“In the past it might not have been the most important factor, but that is changing.”
But it needs to do far more. The industry needs to be more representative itself, before it can claim to champion inclusivity and social inclusion through its product. After all, Simbo points out, it isn’t just a major employer. “It is the creator of all of our homes and work spaces.”
Time to listen
So how can the industry improve, and by doing so, make our cities more inclusive? The answer, quite simply, is to listen.
“There is no excuse and no substitute for taking your time to listen,” says Emma Cariaga, joint head of British Land’s Canada Water scheme.
At Canada Water, she says, the company listened to the community for four years. “They understand the place better than we can,” she states. “There is a wealth of knowledge about the local area that we could never have known from a desktop.”
Because of that, she believes, British Land is able to create something that will promote social integration and compliment the existing community, “rather than just trying to provide something shiny and new”.
Social inclusion has been revealed to matter to the bottom line. And, like almost every other issue, this has been exacerbated and accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“If this has taught us anything at all, and hopefully it has,” says Cariaga, “then it’s the importance of social connections, above and beyond anything that the built environment had ever thought about.”
One group that Covid has highlighted are the urban poor. As the first lockdown gripped our cities, the gulf between those who had access to green space and those who did not became stark.
“When we are looking to design communities, easy access to quality green space is an important takeaway from Covid,” says Millar. “We’ve had a real social issue for people who have not had that.”
Proptech potential
But what was more pronounced was how many people where shown to lack sufficient living space, says Simbo. “People came to see how small their spaces were, how effective their spaces were, in terms of work life.”
Another group hugely impacted by this pandemic is the elderly.
“We have an ageing population and we as an industry have woefully underserved that demographic for a very long time,” says Cariaga.
Making our cities liveable for older people is a demographic imperative – none of us are getting younger – but the health challenges of that have been made more acute by the pandemic. “We need to be integrating healthcare and healthy spaces into our cities,” says Stanwell.
Cariaga adds that technology is key to unlocking that issue. “What I would like to see is us engaging that community digitally, providing for them in terms of accommodation, but also in terms of how they access and move across our cities,” she says.
The real estate sector has enormous power for social improvement and integration. It literally creates the very fabric of our communities.
The focus now, Cariaga states, is to ensure that we do that for all ages and all abilities.
“This is a real opportunity for the real estate industry to make a lot of noise about how much impact they directly have on peoples’ lives,” insists Simbo.
But before we make a lot of noise, we must listen.
As Cariaga says: “There is no substitute for that.”
Image © Beretta/Sims/Shutterstock
