We’re still riding high from the value we got from the social value event we held last week, and it’s been a busy time rounding up our extended coverage of this for the June edition of TFE Review magazine. So watch for that.
There’s so much to cover – the four main sessions were jam packed with takeaways and insights.
Who knew that the built environment could be so influential in people’s lives? Well, it turns out to be key.
Petie Walker, group head of sustainability and delivery at Stockland, said the residential behemoth, with a $50 billion development pipeline, made no bones about how important sustainability was to the business.
“Social responsibility as a start is really a licence to operate,” she said.
Walker also made no bones about how hard her team had worked on developing a robust social value metric for its developments.
This had ramped up in the past two years, and Walker, who had come to Stockland eight years ago after a long career at Leighton, started to assemble a new team under the stewardship of Justine Felton, “a true social impact expert”.
Felton “really lifted our thinking and changed the way we thought about how we are investing in social impact and how we are measuring it,” Walker said.
The commitment was to achieve $1 billion of social value by 2030.
But how exactly?
One thing was clear. “I’m not going to say Stockland was great at First Nations engagement and design with country four years ago, we weren’t. We were skimming the surface,” said Walker.
First, there were no First Nations people working in the organisation.
“We had a Reconciliation Action Plan. We had a lot of well-intentioned people, because we are a very value driven organisation. But unless you’ve actually got First Nations voice within your organisation, you’re never going to get there.”
An Indigenous engagement manager was brought aboard, heading up a team of four.
Walker also provided some insights into the emerging major redevelopment of the Waterloo housing estate in inner Sydney.
The project consortium with Link Wentworth housing, City West Housing, and Birribee Housing is not just a developer undertaking a purely market-driven apartment project, as might happen in other contexts. The consortium is extremely focused on social outcomes.
Why Kellie Payne starts from an intensely creative point of view
From that big picture mega development point of view, we then zeroed in on Kellie Payne’s intensely creative way to imagine the many ways her building designs could impact the people who would occupy them.
You’d think putting up student housing or sporting facilities such as a swimming pool for a girls’ school would be an achievement enough. But Payne, a director of Bates Smart, would not agree. She says these are massive opportunities to shape young lives and embed good habits for life.
The audience was riveted.
Her referencing the event title, Blue Zones, is just a taste:
“Let’s imagine these places. This is a place where people routinely live to 100 years old, they are not only living longer, they’re living better. They’ve got clarity of mind and strength in their bodies, along with connections that have endured.
“These Blue Zones are rare, but they are real, and in these communities, longevity hasn’t been engineered by designers, architects, [or] master plans.
“It hasn’t emerged [from] medicine, despite massive investment. Instead, it has emerged from the quiet logic of how people have lived for centuries.”
These centenarians, said Payne, don’t need to full body MRIs or performance trackers, just streets where they walk with purpose and meals, they share without needing a special occasion.
“Their days are shaped by movement, community, and ritual.”
Lonelygenics is real – Professor Xiaoqi Feng
From her opening lines, Professor Xiaoqi Feng from the University of New South Wales showed she had the audience paying close attention. She kicked off her presentation on the dangers of loneliness and some of the solutions she’s helped governments develop.
“About one in three people are experiencing chronic loneliness,” she said.
It’s not just about the occasional loneliness we all feel – this is about “chronic loneliness.”
And that’s something that is often sheeted home to the individual, “a personal thing, because you are very shy, or not good at socials.”
But Feng showed that loneliness can be built into our urban fabric – the way we design buildings and cities.
“We are not designed to be lonely – it is the environment that is ‘lonelygenic’,” She said
An important solution, she said, was quality green space and green canopies.
But providing green space is not enough, nor the provision of libraries, pools or community centres.
“We also need to think deeply about how we can bring people to the space.” An example was extending the hours of libraries and aquatic centres past the common opening hours of 10 am to 6 pm, as most people at work might find it too difficult to get to the facility in time.
The vertical blue zone
Gabrielle McMillan, the CEO of Equiem, was probably one of Australia’s pioneers in thinking about the social potential of our vertical villages.
She started with a blunt fact: We spend a third of our time working, she said.
“Office buildings are essentially vertical villages, natural community hubs where we spend a significant portion of our lives.”
But most buildings were not designed with health and happiness in mind, McMillan said. Yet there were increasing tenant amenities, activations, and purposeful connections in office buildings.
“It comes down to money,” said McMillan. “Tenants are increasingly demanding these features in their office spaces. They want to bring people back together in the office for various reasons, including the fact that it boosts engagement, which in turn drives productivity.”
Landlords are not only responding to demand, but they can see “increased profits and building asset value” and “stronger ESG metrics” by creating Blue Zones in the offices, while tenants experience improved health, happiness and connection. These buildings see facilities managers’ report fewer complaints and happier tenants. McMillan said her company’s software platform data showed that 30,000 tenant events have been delivered in just the last four months, a surprisingly high figure that has grown by 10 to 20 per cent over the past couple of years.