Mark Davy, founder of placemaking agency Futurecity, explains how developers around the world have woken up to the bottom-line potential of putting cultural elements at the heart of new schemes.
“Nothing makes you feel like the idiot in the room more than saying ‘do we really have to do things like that?’ But we have been that idiot in many rooms with many property developers over the last 10 years. And sometimes, they look up and say ‘well, why not?’ And that’s when we can give them an alternative.”
Mark Davy is the founder and chief executive of Futurecity, a London-based placemaking agency that aims to bake culture, creativity and art into schemes before they are off the ground. From one-off installations through to large-scale regeneration, Davy and his 20-strong team are poised to help developers and artists work together to deliver projects with a cultural element that goes “beyond the requirements of planning”.
Described as a cultural broker, the 10-year-old firm offers a service that could all too easily be dismissed out of hand as being about as far from business critical as you can get. But a quick look at Futurecity’s track record and client list paints a picture that suggests a much more compelling business proposition than many might first expect.
Futurecity was behind Nine Elms’ creative district status and Knight Dragon’s £1bn Santiago Calatrava-designed cultural hub at Greenwich Peninsula. It was also the broker that brought the English National Ballet to Ballymore’s 70,000 sq ft City Island site in 2015 and facilitated the partnership formed in 2013 between the Royal College of Art and St James at Riverlight. As for its client list, from British Land to Land Securities and Hines to Shaftesbury, it is a formidable roster of more than 100 major players.
On how he has built up such a prolific level of engagement with the real estate sector, Davy says that times have simply changed: “The most attractive occupiers in the world now are creative. Cities want a Google, a Facebook, an Apple, an Amazon. And those companies are all hugely cultural. We live in a world of creativity and the people working for the most exciting companies are drawn to art and culture. I think that is what is persuading developers to invest in these things. It is making them think differently.”
That and the fact that, according to research by Cushman & Wakefield, nearly 35% of commercial take-up last year in London was made up by creative tenants, representing a sector worth £71.4bn in the UK.
Culture, creativity and competition
“When I first started this agency I was always the last person in the room,” says Davy. “There would be a little bit of money for some art at the end and it would be an X marks the spot decision. The landscape architect would say ‘let’s stick an installation or a piece of public art there’. It just wasn’t key to anyone’s plans.
“Now we can sit at a table alongside the developer and the architect and if we prove we can deliver on big cultural projects, there is a good chance we will be given the go-ahead and the budget to do it. And the great thing is that these budgets are already in the system. If you ask a developer to find some extra funds to allocate to art then there is a good chance they aren’t going to like it. If you say ‘your whole landscape is a work of art, let’s build the culture in’ that’s very different.”
That may be true. But ultimately the property sector is still driven – for the most part at least – by the bottom line. So how does Davy persuade developers to allocate increasingly significant chunks of money to culture?
Competitive edge
It all comes down to competition. “Major world cities are all competing for the same thing: they want tourists, they want to attract the best young talent and they want those major creative occupiers,” he says. “Being a leading cultural city plays a huge part in that.”
As for buy-in from the developers themselves, Davy says they are coming to realise the power and value of a scheme with a cultural element thanks to a few significant trailblazers – and one in particular.
“Look at King’s Cross and what it did for Argent,” he says. “That was a key moment, particularly when St Martin’s art school went in there in 2011. Everyone saw something physical happen there in terms of a cultural occupier taking space. It was at that point the idea of having a cultural centre to your development became more mainstream. And developers also know that creativity and culture will help to attract the occupiers they want.”
Davy adds that as changing occupier needs have opened up new commercial hotspots in cities like London, Futurecity’s commitment to working on major brownfield sites and regeneration areas has become increasingly relevant.
“The Googles and Apples don’t automatically go to the traditional prime commercial centre, they head to King’s Cross or old power stations in Battersea which don’t really exist yet,” he says.
“Once London was a city driven by financial services and now it is a city driven by the creative industries and the knowledge economies, which want to explore new areas.”
Davy adds that when he started Futurecity a decade ago somewhere like Deptford was only of interest to a developer because it was near Canary Wharf. Now it is an exciting prospect in its own right. And this redrawing of city maps is something that is happening across the world, which is why Futurecity is now also operating in Boston and Sydney.
“We are creating a new cultural district in Boston and, as for Sydney, 18 months ago i would never have expected to be there, but I went out to give a talk there two years ago and had such an incredible reaction from the property sector that we started being offered roles on project after project, including the Sydney Opera House precinct masterplan. So we set up an office and now have six people working there.”
A gallery without walls
Back in the UK capital, and on the arts side more specifically, last year Davy co-founded Future\Pace, a partnership with Pace London.
Described as a “gallery without walls” programme, it works with artists using light and digital technology to bring large-scale art projects to cities across the world.
Future\Pace has subsequently won the international Illuminated River project to light 17 of London’s bridges along the Thames. The scheme, set up through the Greater London Authority and the Rothschild Foundation, will create a linear arts project along the river which Davy says will define London as a cultural city. It is this kind of art he wants to introduce into future schemes.
Sitting in the Pace Gallery in Mayfair for this interview, surrounded by digital art created by Tokyo-based techno-arts collective teamLab, Davy says that his ultimate goal is to weave this sort of modern, digital culture into the fabric of cities and upcoming developments.
“It feels like the right art for the time we are in; digital, interactive, light,” he says. “When we first met with Pace we felt that there was a new breed of artists out there who were really up for working on huge-scale architecture, development and infrastructure projects. And they weren’t really represented. I don’t think artists have even begun to explore tech and urbanism – and this will challenge architecture, landscape, interiors and the way we treat our public realm.
“Imagine the AI waterfall (main picture) that has been created for this exhibition, in an atrium at a new development. We will put the artists up for it and we are looking for brave developers ready to do extraordinary things. The world is hungry for creativity.”
