CONNECTING TOMORROW’S LEADERS: Refining the way the industry talks to communities, such as cutting out buzzwords, can radically streamline the planning process.
As residents of an area have an increasing influence on proposals, understanding the right language to use and being innovative with consultations can cut the time it takes for a masterplan to get local authority approval.
Peter Dijkhuis, director of masterplanning at CBRE, said: “What colleges and universities don’t focus on is how much our industry is a people-to-people industry, whether it is to clients, politicians, or the community. It can be daunting, but the skill of communication is critical.
“All we use are buzzwords and politicians only hear sound bites. Communities are sensitive to how developments can distort their aspirations. Go that extra mile of engaging with people and it speeds up that process of objection, otherwise you can spend 10 years trying to get a scheme through planning.”
Speaking at EG’s Connecting Tomorrow’s Leaders event, he added that developers could benefit from conversations with the less vociferous residents and traders of an area.
“Once you tease out the structures with them you usually find they are quite supportive.”
Justin Black, development director at Landsec, said owners of schemes that keep returning to planning committees would need to be honest about their viability.
“My current project is three buildings. It has taken 14 years to finish construction. We had seven different schemes, 22 different planning applications, just for three buildings in central London. With the benefit of hindsight, knowing what we were proposing, we probably could have been better at it.
“If you can establish a champion in the planning committee it seems to help everything going forward, but if you are consistently fighting them maybe your masterplan is wrong.”
At the other end of the spectrum, it took just three and a half years for the Collective’s second co-living scheme, in Stratford, east London, to receive approval.
Ollie Spragley, the company’s planning and design manager, put this down to “talking to people in the States to see how they would do it differently, consulting advisers, talking to politicians and learning from projects we’ve been through, so it’s not just a wild stab in the dark”.
For Louise Brooke-Smith, partner at Arcadis, it is critical that a scheme is built with the flexibility to withstand changes in economic temperatures. A vision that is too rigid would be its downfall, she said. “It has to respond to market forces, to give certainty to investors.”
Darryl Chen, partner at Hawkins Brown, urged a “level of intelligence about how a plan could be made more sustainable and flexible in the long term, rather than sticking with a tried and tested model”.
On finding people with the skills to read the market, he said: “I ask them to draw. Don’t show me pictures you have already done, I mean a back-of-the-envelope sketch. It is a dying art and people fail. It’s not a deal breaker, but you’ve got to be able to connect brain to mouth to hand. That is a powerful thing.”
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