EVOLUTION OF CITIES

This is a pivotal moment in the story of the city. 

Major changes to the urban form happen rarely over history and are typically found at the convergence of major technological change, and a social appetite to do things differently. Both of these conditions are palpable in the early 2020s. Housing and infrastructure challenges combined with sustainability and social issues provide the demand for change; whereas the widespread adoption of the internet and new communications technologies are supply the vehicle through which that change might be delivered. 

The purpose-built office arose in response to the emergence of large corporations. Before this they didn’t need to exist. However, their rapid proliferation, combined with new transportation technologies which allowed people to disconnect work and living, radically reshaped our cities. Particularly in the New World, virgin cities were designed on principles that moved work to the central zone in newly created ‘central business districts’ and pushed living outwards into new residential suburbs. 

This prototype has lasted over 150 years; however, we must remember that it wasn’t always that way.  The modern talk is of 15-minute cities; however, before the passenger railway, that’s all that there was. People walked to work. Two other inventions of the late 19th century: the safety elevator and electricity completed the picture for change. Before then our cities were low rise and dark. 150 years is not that long ago, and yet so much has changed. What might now feasibly change as cities evolve once again?

The internet brings with it a new concept of distance.  We used to move products and people slowly and this has shaped our cities. We now move ideas and information instantly, and this will define cities of the future. We have developed four scenarios for future cities, based on a unknown degrees of urbanisation and virtualisation.  Will people move out of cities or double down on urban living? Will we embrace virtual technologies, or will we move more moderately on our digital journey. These are the result four scenarios:

• ‘Social Animals’ –  Dense person to person contact is the norm – a continuation of the 20th century. 

• ‘Hermits’ – People break away from society, and lead more sustainable and simple lives.

• ‘The Grid’ – People embrace digital communications, and commute less frequently.

• ‘Hyper Reality’ – Dense urban living is augmented with new high sensory virtual overlays.

Which scenario will prevail? The authors have their own views, but will let you decide… Reworking the Workplace unpacks these scenarios in more detail, and you can also travel to the future here; where you can live life through the lens of inhabitants on these future city scenarios. Let us know what you think!

The implications for cities, real estate and the workplace in each of these scenarios is significant. Whereas it is highly unlikely that a single scenario will take over entirely, even a small shift in one direction will have a noticeable impact on the operation of society and the value of real estate. Both opportunity and obsolescence await.

Reworking the Workplace considers how investors and city governments can position themselves to manage this change, and makes 10 suggestions to create a successful ‘new normal’.

This blog summarises elements of content from ‘Reworking the Workplace’, in anticipation of its general release by RIBA Publishing on 1 June 2023. The book explores the future of work, workplace and the city in the face of global disruptors. It provides data, concepts and frameworks, historic analysis and 50+ cutting edge case studies, across three thematic areas of People, Purpose and Place. Further weekly sneak previews in this format will follow leading up to general release!  

Follow: #reworkingtheworkplace on Twitter and LinkedIn

Preorder: To pre-order your copy of Reworking the Workplace click the link here: At the RIBA Bookstore, and On Amazon 

To get in touch with the authors, Nicola Gillen, Richard Pickering plus other co-authors as appropriate 

THE PHYSICAL-VIRTUAL INTERFACE

Over recorded history, the physical evolution of humans has been limited and glacial. Instead, the story of human progress largely concerns our ability to deploy technology in new and better ways. Technological progress has created the economic surplus which has allowed us to invest in societal progress, such as the development of the welfare state, the legal protection of human rights and now potentially more sustainable living patterns.  Principally, however, it is the acquisition of knowledge and the application of technology in a work context that marks us apart from our Stone Age ancestors.

Since the industrial revolution, technology has significantly taken the form of automations, largely delivered through the interface of humans and machines. As time moved on, these interfaces between man and machine become both more complex and more ergonomic. Switches and levers gave way to monitors and keyboards in the 20th century. In recent decades the change has been profound. The physical and the analogue have been replaced by new digital media and devices. This interface, more than anything else, now defines modern clerical work. In turn, most modern offices have been explicitly designed to facilitate the interface between humans and computers. Most businesses fit out their offices on the assumption that for the majority of the day their employees will need to be sitting in front of a monitor.

In the past couple of years, the physical-virtual interface has taken an evolutionary leap. The presumed short-term but widespread adoption of homeworking, gave rise to a need to better support remote interactions. Video calling had already made significant incursions into consumer markets using smart phones, but for whatever reason had not penetrated the B2B work arena until the pandemic.  Pretty much overnight, however, every clerical worker (and even my 90-year-old dad) had started to use Zoom and Teams, coinciding with a leap in the use of remote shopping in the previously untapped grocery market. Of course, it wasn’t short term; it is now clear that the use of remote communications technologies and their associated interfaces will be a core element of the workplace from now onwards.

Alongside the restructuring of most meetings around video calling, the pandemic hastened a number of other digital technologies in the workplaces. Health concerns led to the introduction of temperature scanning for infections and an increased use of contactless design. Meanwhile density and capacity constraints led to an increase in desk booking and meeting room management systems. In turn the data collected from a more orchestrated and measured work-schedule and workplace has facilitated more advanced and predictive analytical methods that are now enabling us to plan and utilise our offices more effectively.

And it won’t stop there. 

We should see this leap in workplace technology, not as a step which will see us through the next decade, but rather as a propulsion into a new league where the gains will now come much steeper and faster than in previous decades. The technology interface trendline over history has been in two directions: smarter and more portable. Large factory looms have ultimately been replaced by smartphones; however, the shift from here is into the ether, where physical devices become less relevant. 

Video calling is scratching the surface of virtual possibilities, whereas the use of health-oriented wearables is the first step on a path to truly cybernetic augmentations. The need to augment our capabilities using these technologies cannot come quick enough. Technology has always been a dual threat and productivity opportunity for humans. However, there is now a new artificial intelligence emerging that threatens to radically disrupt how we work in all industry sectors.  

Together with artificial intelligence that will replace some elements of work, we now have artificial worlds which will replace some elements of the workplace. Metaverses are still in the conceptual phase of their existence; but over the next decade, cartoon-like environments will be superseded with fully immersive multi-sensory, high-fidelity experiences that will to all intents and purposes be indistinguishable from the ‘real’ world. Those designing physical offices today should prepare for a world where they are also designing virtual ones. And those that find today’s version of hybrid working disorientating, should prepare themselves for a trip much further down the rabbit hole. 

In this context, how will the office survive? Well, certainly not by clinging onto former value drivers. In a world already disrupted and with a work model facing further radical disruption, the office must go back to base principles, whilst embracing the advent of new virtual-physical interfaces. If yesterday’s office was designed to house rows of people interacting with computers, keyboards and mice placed on a desk in front of them, why on earth would that be true in the future? If people can meet online in photo-realistic environments, why would they use poorly fitted-out, capacity constrained meeting rooms? The response to these questions is for the industry to resolve; but my bet is that the future office will be about high-quality environments, authentic connections, wellness, and a space to think and be inspired. Ironically, there may not be much technology in sight. 

This blog summarises elements of content from ‘Reworking the Workplace’, in anticipation of its general release by RIBA Publishing on 1 June 2023. The book explores the future of work, workplace and the city in the face of global disruptors. It provides data, concepts and frameworks, historic analysis and 50+ cutting edge case studies, across three thematic areas of People, Purpose and Place. Further weekly sneak previews in this format will follow leading up to general release!  

Follow: #reworkingtheworkplace on Twitter and LinkedIn

Preorder: To pre-order your copy of Reworking the Workplace click the link here: At the RIBA Bookstore, and On Amazon 

To get in touch with the authors, Nicola Gillen, Richard Pickering plus other co-authors as appropriate 

THE VALUE OF PLACE

For those working in the real estate industry, the importance of location has been drummed into us from an early age. Over most of the course of history, the location of an asset has been the most significant explanatory variable of its value and utility.  But why is this and what does it really mean? And in the modern world where value drivers are shifting rapidly, are old maxims useful anymore?

Fairly fundamental economic principles establish that the value of an asset is typically a function of supply and demand.  Our world is vast, and only a small percentage of it is used intensively. And so, despite there being a finite supply of land, this is not the driving factor of real estate value. Commercial and residential demand is very focussed on a limited number of highly concentrated global population nodes. This has created a huge gulf in value between the centres of global megacities, where land can trade in the hundreds of millions of dollars per acre, to unfarmable land in remote locations, which is essentially valueless. Typically, the further that land sits away from these demanded locations, the less valuable it is, creating radial patterns outwards. But why is this?

We attribute the utility of and hence demand for location to three conceptual factors: amenity, agglomeration and serendipity:

• Amenity is the presence of a specific feature or locationally-bound service, which creates value for others. This could for instance be a beautiful park, a department store, or a centre of public administration. Often these are found in city centres, where they can service the largest population catchments. 

• Agglomeration is a colocation of symbiotic businesses, industries or people that create value for each other. This could for instance be a shopping centre, a tech accelerator or a science park. It is people rather than places that drive agglomeration, and high energy agglomerations can typically be found at the convergence of many different influences in our densely populated cities. 

• Serendipity in this context is an unplanned encounter that creates value for the individual that experiences it.  This could be an overheard conversation which leads to a business opportunity, or bumping into a stranger, who becomes your romantic partner. It goes without saying that the more people you bump into on a daily basis, the more likely it is that one of these encounters will prove valuable to you.

These three factors underpin most forms of demand for a specific location. Over time they have evolved from base factors of amenity (such as founding your village next to a river), through to complex commercial ecosystems found in modern day cities. In the modern world where we can build upwards and travel outwards at greater convenience, new value factors, such as density, accessibility and use limitations have also come into play, supported by regulatory and planning constraints introduced over the past century. This has created a much more complex and more managed pattern of values, upon which 21st century cities have been based.  However, once again, the game is changing, with digital disruption now unsettling old orders and creating novel value drivers. 

In particular, in a world where shopping and clerical work can be carried out without leaving your front door, the value placed on being near to something else (for instance a shopping centre, or a central business district) is starting to wane. This in turn releases some of the pressure on these dense demand pinpoints that have developed and intensified over the past 400 years. 

What is less easily digitally replicated (at least for now) is serendipity. You can’t bump into someone unexpectedly in your home. It has been a common criticism of post-pandemic remote working; that whilst designed 1:1 interactions have worked quite well using digital media, unplanned interactions and edge of network connections have suffered considerably. This is significant, and informs how the value, purpose and success factors around place might shift over the coming decades. As old factors of functional amenity become less relevant, more emotional and complex factors such as serendipity, belonging, experience and ego rise in importance. 

The challenge for the real estate industry is that our places and buildings have not until very recently been designed with these factors at their core.  Shopping centres have focussed on accessibility and functional layouts. Offices have historically been designed as places to keep dry and comfortable, whilst carrying out clerical tasks, largely in isolation. Digital disruption has driven a coach and horses through these former value drivers. Why would workers now bother incurring the time and costs of commuting to replicate value drivers that they could achieve at home?

This now frames a challenge to those designing, owning and managing offices to switch up the game. Successful new spaces need to put the ability to collaborate, derive personal identity and expose workers to valuable experiences and connections at the core of their offer, rather than as a retrofitted afterthought. This will require a new look at which locations, use mixes and service agglomerations are best placed to deliver this.

This blog summarises elements of content from ‘Reworking the Workplace’, in anticipation of its general release by RIBA Publishing on 1 June 2023. The book explores the future of work, workplace and the city in the face of global disruptors. It provides data, concepts and frameworks, historic analysis and 50+ cutting edge case studies, across three thematic areas of People, Purpose and Place. Further weekly sneak previews in this format will follow leading up to general release!  

Follow: #reworkingtheworkplace on Twitter and LinkedIn

Preorder: To pre-order your copy of Reworking the Workplace click the link here: At the RIBA Bookstore, and On Amazon 

To get in touch with the authors, Nicola Gillen, Richard Pickering plus other co-authors as appropriate 

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME?

This synopsis is taken from the soon to be published book: ‘Reworking the Workplace’ which explores how the workplace has and will continue to change in the face of global disruptive trends. The book provides exploratory and conceptual thinking and frameworks, historic analysis, cutting edge case studies, and contemporary data, across three thematic areas of People, Purpose and Place.

Office workers in general have the freedom to choose when and where they work based on the tasks they are completing, so why are organisations so surprised that the majority are choosing to predominantly work from home when basic economic choice shows that people are most likely to choose

1. The easiest option - not leaving the house, staying where I am.
2. The option with the most immediate short term benefit - working from home saves me time and money (no commute)

(the above example is true if you have the ability to work from home effectively).

To be enticing for employees, working from the office needs to

• Show a good return on investment on the time and money it takes to travel there;
• Provide magnetic and compelling experiences that are not possible when working from home or a coffee shop.

Looking to the future the role of FM teams needs to evolve from predominantly focusing on the invisible basics which people only notice when they go wrong, the building, equipment, maintenance and cleaning services the 'Mechanics' of the workplace experience to also focus more on the 'Humanics', the interpersonal workplace experience that creates emotional and meaningful workplace connections. We need to think about activating the space by ‘Operationalising the workplace’, This means optimising the experience opportunities, both mechanic and humanic. Being intentional about how the services complement the working environment and activate the desired employee behaviour and organisational culture:

• what is the purpose of the office beyond a place to get work done?
• are we providing what our diverse workforce actually needs, or sticking with the habit of history and doing what we have always done while wondering why occupancy levels remain low?
• How can we rethink how we traditionally deliver workplace services to maximise and compliment new patterns of office occupation?

We define workplace experience (WPX) as the aggregated touchpoints that connect people, purpose and place. When these touchpoints combine they provide an enjoyable, stimulating and productive experience they make a visit to the office worthwhile, and sometimes even essential.

Commonly these touchpoints fall under different organisational domains, and are designed and implemented independently.  Often the space strategy and design are completed with little or no consideration having been given to the long term service design and experience curation, resulting in a disconnected and unappealing WPX.

Looking to the future if we want our office to be relevant, and magnetic to draw people in, organisations and workplace practitioners should:

• Map and challenge the traditional workplace archetypes by rethinking the meaningful moments that matter, considering the holistic workplace experience.
• Take an integrated approach to design and delivery with input from service partners, facilities management, real estate, human resources, IT and business representatives.
• Know your audience, be intentional and design for the desired experience outcome, how do you want people to feel and what do you want them to remember so they return?
• Put in place measures that matter not simply ones that are easy to capture to drive the desired behaviors and outcomes.

This blog summarises elements of content from ‘Reworking the Workplace’, in anticipation of its general release by RIBA Publishing on 1 June 2023. The book explores the future of work, workplace and the city in the face of global disruptors. It provides data, concepts and frameworks, historic analysis and 50+ cutting edge case studies, across three thematic areas of People, Purpose and Place. Further weekly sneak previews in this format will follow leading up to general release!  

Follow: #reworkingtheworkplace on Twitter and LinkedIn

Preorder: ‘To pre-order your copy of Reworking the Workplace click the link here: At the RIBA Bookstore, and On Amazon 

To get in touch with the authors, Nicola Gillen, Zoe Humphries plus other co-authors as appropriate

HUMANS AT WORK

Despite a tumultuous last three years, the working landscape continues to shift in response to global events. Still trying to work our way through what a post-pandemic workforce could look like, this challenge has been further compounded by rising energy, commodity pricing and soaring inflation. The associated cost of living crisis has real implications, both for workers and also for how the work model emerges and a critical point in its reformulation.

The missed opportunity of DEI&B?

So how does this continue to reshape our relationship with work, organisational culture and community? During the midst of the recession, we dreamt of how the pandemic could reshape where we work, who was working, and how work was enabled.

A major cultural movement to gain momentum in the past few years is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEI&B); the latter making its way into our vernacular within recent months as a reflection of the expectations we have from our work and work-communities. Expanding the availability of hybrid or remote roles provided those who have previously been excluded from the physical workforce (or even education) the same access to opportunities. In 2020 this appeared to offer a significant opportunity for employment equality for those with disabilities who were unable to access the physical office environment. However, recent data from both the US and the UK highlight that rates of people with disabilities in the workforce fell during the pandemic and is yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels.

People living with disabilities are often disproportionately affected during recessions, facing additional barriers to finding and maintaining employment and may be more likely to experience poverty and social exclusion. With that in mind, the promise of expanding where work can be done to increase the proportion of the demographic who are able to work, appears to have not yet materialized.

As many organisations spend time developing ESG and DEI&B policies on how to create a culture of inclusivity, diversity and social value, we must ask ourselves whether we have optimised the opportunity that the pandemic offered us to create a more equal work community through hybrid and remote work.

AI and elimination of explicit knowledge

Three years on from the first mass-adoption of hybrid working, we stand on the precipice of the next major technology shift; Artificial Intelligence (AI). Over the last 12 months, there has been an explosion of online, free-access tools that have reshaped the way we write articles, design websites, even the way we take school tests. This technology has the opportunity to revolutionize the way in which we design workspaces and cities, by synthesizing large-scale data sets, such as user needs, energy pricing, consumer spending, office utilisation, commute patterns and employee health factors. Through AI's superior ability to take explicit information and consolidate at rates not possible by humans, we are on the brink of the first generation of mass-automation.

However, with these opportunities comes another major shift in the way we work. Jobs that are based on the transfer of explicit knowledge, such as those that rely heavily on routine and rule-based tasks could be automated. If there is a manual or a process to follow, AI is likely to be able to follow it. And now, even non-linear processes based on unstructured data are in scope for change.

So, what does this mean for the future of work and organisational communities? Recent research by Cushman and Wakefield, based on insights from Dr. Karen Stephenson's 'Theory of Trust', found that teams that work together (in an office) generally have more tacit, social capital. They invest in new relationships with a wider and more diverse range of contacts that develop better outcomes in learning, career development, innovation and ultimately, a greater sense of employee belonging and engagement. And there are organisational benefits too, studies from Gallup find that organisational with higher levels of social capital are 21% more productive and 22% more profitable.

In contrast when we work fully at home, we tend to focus on human capital; the job at hand, working in hierarchies and following the rules and processes set out by the organisations. The implication is that in much of the same way that over the last few years we needed to transfer tacit knowledge to explicit, to ensure the success of hybrid work, we must now prepare to hand over these explicit tasks to AI. If I can find ways to innovate and learn asynchronously using existing data; so, can AI.

So what is the implication for the future of work?

The limit for AI is the inability to work with tacit information that doesn't yet exist, placing the value of human thinking more so on lateral, problem-solving and emotional intelligence. Therefore it is likely that we will see the role of humans at work start to shift towards these capabilities. This is likely to precipitate a shift in the skills and types of workers employed within industry sectors, and a need for new actors to come together and share knowledge to develop ideas.

The implication on workplace?

Our research shows that activities such as creativity and problem solving may be more effective, enjoyable and deliver higher-quality outcomes, when people work physically together. Networks are more diverse, we reach out to people from outside our day-to-day engagements to learn, receive or give mentorship, making the value of togetherness more important than ever. It just so happens that organisations facilitate this togetherness in physical place, but as per post pandemic-rhetoric, the value of this space is to facilitate relationships and not just deliver head-down work.

What's next?...

Despite the many changes over the last few years, the role and value to individuals of being together has endured if not grown. However, the changing culture of work, placing hybrid work and health at its centre provides opportunity to create more inclusive work communities. In addition, digitalization continues to facilitate the transfer of tacit workplace relationships and networks into explicit products and services, such that the communities we build can be more geographically dispersed. However, re-working the workplace offers a unique canvas from which to facilitate human connection as we start to solve these challenges. After all, what is the workplace if not to facilitate the experience of being humans, together.

This blog summarises elements of content from ‘Reworking the Workplace’, in anticipation of its general release by RIBA Publishing on 1 June 2023. The book explores the future of work, workplace and the city in the face of global disruptors. It provides data, concepts and frameworks, historic analysis and 50+ cutting edge case studies, across three thematic areas of People, Purpose and Place. Further weekly sneak previews in this format will follow leading up to general release!

Follow: #reworkingtheworkplace on Twitter and LinkedIn Preorder: ‘To pre-order your copy of Reworking the Workplace click the link here: At the RIBA Bookstore, and On Amazon

To get in touch with the authors, Nicola Gillen, Sophie Schuller plus other co-authors as appropriate.