MODUS Asia Edition | Q1 2018

MODUS ASIA ASIA Q1 QX 2018 2017 RICS.ORG/MODUS RICSASIA .ORG/MODUSASIA

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ASK THE BIG QUESTIONS

Q1 2018

IT’S NOT US IT’S YOU

CITIES

IN THIS ISSUE Town vs country 26 / Bouncing back 18 / Building a modern Asia 14

NATIONS

AND WHY THEY’RE GROWING APART

Hong Kong Annual Conference 2018 Establishing Hong Kong as the nucleus of a thriving Greater Bay Area

Friday 18 May 2018 09:00-17:00

Registration now open

Grand Ballroom, Level 1, Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, 1 Harbour Road, Wanchai

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Contents MODUS ASIA Q1 2018 RICS.ORG/MODUS

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Features

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11 PRESIDENT’S COLUMN John Hughes FRICS sets his sights on steering the profession through a period of rapid and far-reaching change

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08 THINKING: CHRIS MARRIOTT FRICS Savills’ south-east Asia CEO on how technology is unlocking the potential of a fully customisable built environment

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06 CITIES FOR OUR FUTURE What is the best approach to protecting flood-prone cities such as Mumbai, Shanghai and Osaka? We hear two points of view 07-09 NEWS IN BRIEF Industry news, advice and information for RICS members

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JEREMY KELLY, JLL COVER STORY, P26

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AGA down to city MAGA SM “As nations become more Dprotectionist, it’s US Z Z DU governments to network and set the agenda. Investors are following this trend. They’re interested in how cities are future-proofing”

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14 BUILDING A MODERN ASIA How surveyors have been helping to shape the continent for the last 150 years

44-45 CAREERS Time to take control of your meetings; Mitig8 managing director David Baxter MRICS

18 READ THIS NOW, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE Is “chief resilience officer” becoming the most indispensable role in the built environment?

46 BUSINESS Developing a risk management plan

26 METROPOLIS NOW As cities grow and become more powerful, are countries starting to lose influence?

32 ANSWER THE BIG QUESTIONS RICS’ Cities For Our Future Challenge 34 PASSIV SCALE Volume housebuilders embrace Passivhaus 38 WATCH THIS SPACE Better public transport, autonomous vehicles, online shopping … who needs car parks?

47 LEGAL 101 Running the rule over the Asia-Pacific region’s REIT regimes 48 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Become a BIM project management master 50 MIND MAP Deloitte Netherlands’ Wilfrid Donkers MRICS on the future of property data PLUS 49 Events

36 TAKING THE LONG VIEW A look at the world’s longest sea crossing Views expressed in Modus are those of the named author and are not necessarily those of RICS or the publisher. The contents of this magazine are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in any form without the prior permission of the publisher. All information correct at time of going to press. All rights reserved. The publisher cannot accept liability for errors or omissions. RICS does not accept responsibility for loss, injury or damage or costs that result from, or are connected in any way to, the use of products or services advertised. All editions of Modus are printed on paper sourced from sustainable, properly managed forests. This magazine can be recycled for use in newspapers and packaging. Please dispose of it at your local collection point. The polywrap is made from biodegradable material and can be recycled.

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Feedback USEFUL RICS NUMBERS CONTACT CENTRE +852 2537 7117 Enquiries / APC guidance / Subscriptions / Events / Training / Bookshop REGULATION HELPLINE +852 2116 9713 CONFIDENTIAL HELPLINE +44 (0)20 7334 3867 DISPUTE RESOLUTION SERVICES +44 (0)20 7334 3806 UK SWITCHBOARD +44 (0)20 7222 7000

NOT A DONE DEAL Sir, I am new to the profession and recently read the article Lies of the Land (p38, Modus Asia, Q4 2017) in my first copy of Modus.

I was pleasantly surprised to read the article, which outlined the lack of property rights for some of the world’s poorest and, regrettably, the presence of corruption in the area of land registration.

However, although the author addressed land registration from a somewhat critical standpoint, there was no contextualisation or critical understanding of the approach advocated by the referenced economist Hernando de Soto, whose theory underpins the entire process. I understand that surveyors advocating for land registration is appropriate and profitable to the profession, however, the underlying assumption that private property rights are a ready-made answer to poverty is inaccurate. Studies show that the process is not only a vehicle for corruption, but has served to push the vulnerable further into poverty and divide communities.

I urge everyone working in the sector to be aware of the socio-economic circumstances of the areas they work in, particularly in middle- and lower-income countries, to avoid formalising and perpetuating poverty and insecurity. Ethics are a defining characteristic of RICS and we are all better served when we understand to the best of our abilities, the potential outcomes of our actions.

Dr Philippa Stratford, assistant commercial manager, Transport for London, UK

Join the debate If you have any comments on any of the stories in Modus Asia, the editorial board welcomes you to send them – in Chinese or English. We will publish them in their original format with an English translation. Get in touch at editor@ricsmodus.com 如对亚洲版 Modus 的内容有任何回应， 欢迎以中文或英文电邮至编辑委员会。 阁下之意见将以原文（辅以英译本）刊登。 电邮地址为 editor@ricsmodus.com。

@RICSnews // #RICSmodus @CathieJ67 First Modus arrived

today! This whole process has just started to feel very real and very exciting! @RICSnews #lovesurveying @DACottingham Sitting in sun catching up with #RICSmodus but wishing there were QR codes with articles for future reference.

THAT’S THE SPIRIT Sir, How refreshing it was to read Ernest Bayton’s letter (feedback, p5, Modus Asia, Q4 2017). The fact that someone has had the courage to speak out about our spiritual impoverishment gives one hope.

We live in a society that seems increasingly to be focused on money, success and fame, coupled with a diminishing return on personal responsibility and integrity. While many will argue that spiritual awareness is merely an illusion, the fact is that it is our spirituality that enlightens us, and enlivens our humanity.

Without this realisation, we shall continue to flatter ourselves into thinking that an anything-goes mentality is OK. Peter Marks FRICS, Newton Stewart, UK

JUST NOT CRICKET? Sir, To ensure that the vacant “Strategy Seats” on Governing Council are filled “with the best equipped members of the profession”, the RICS Nominations Committee is adopting a process for evaluating candidates’ suitability before they seek votes. We are told that this “evaluation” is not mandatory, but the ballot will separate “Nominations Committee validated candidates” from those who refuse to submit to this vetting.

Once upon a time the Marylebone Cricket Club [the keepers of the laws of cricket] operated a similar process, whereby some candidates for the committee had an asterisk placed by their name if their candidature was approved by the committee.

It took several years of pressure from members for this blatantly undemocratic practice to be abandoned.

How long will it be, I wonder, before RICS members achieve similar success?

James Offen FRICS, Oxford, UK

MODUS ONLINE

Read the latest and all previous issues of Modus Asia at rics.org/modus.

To unsubscribe your hard copy and receive a digital edition only, email your name and/or membership number to ricseastasia@rics.org with the subject line “Unsubscribe Modus Asia”.

FOR SUNDAY Editor Oliver Parsons / Art Director Sam Walker / Deputy Editor Andy Plowman / Contributing Editor Alex Frew McMillan / Designer Katie Wilkinson / Creative Director Matt Beaven / Account Director Karen Jenner / Advertisement Sales Director Emma Kennedy / Asia Advertising ROF Media, Bryan Chan, +852 3150 8912, bryan@rofmedia.com / Production Manager Michael Wood / Managing Director Toby Smeeton / Repro F1 Colour / Printers ROF Media / Cover Image Mike Lemanski / Published by Sunday, 207 Union Street, London SE1 0LN wearesunday.com / For RICS James Murphy and Kate Symons [UK] / Le-Anne Lim, Jeanie Chan and Rory Tufano [Asia]

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Intelligence

News / Reviews / Opinions / Reactions

CITIES FOR OUR FUTURE

How can we protect the populations of floodprone coastal cities such as Mumbai, Shanghai and Osaka? Discuss.

Even in less destructive seasons, coastal cities in Asia are extremely vulnerable due to storm surge, rising water levels and subsidence. The increase in impervious surface area that comes with urbanisation, as well as development patterns that have often ignored natural conditions, have exacerbated flood conditions.

It is impossible for a city like Mumbai to be fully prepared for an extreme event like the floods that struck in 2017. City governments can, however, put policies in place that address vulnerabilities, investing in protective physical infrastructure and supporting communities in harm’s way. The real estate PHIL KIM MANAGING DIRECTOR, ASIA PACIFIC, and business sectors also have important roles to play, JERDE PARTNERSHIP, HONG KONG participating in public-private partnerships and safeguarding physical investments through resilient site design.

Planned obsolescence, a term coined in the 1950s, has Protective measures may take the form of “grey mixed connotations. In our near future, the concept merits infrastructure” like sea walls, in combination with adaptive consideration in addressing the vulnerability of our coastal cities. green infrastructure, such as wetlands and living shorelines.

Such cities have historically used a fortress mentality and engineering China’s “Sponge Cities” are one potential solution. These brilliance to protect people and property. Billions of dollars are spent on surge communities hold and reuse as much as 70% of rainwater barriers, seawalls and large-scale hydraulic engineering projects, such as the through berms, bioswales and rain gardens. underwater pneumatic gates in Venice or the Maeslantkering in Rotterdam.

In coordination with city-wide or district-scale But nature cannot always be contained. We need to handle the blazing rate infrastructure, the real estate sector has the opportunity to of change through technology, and source materials sustainably. Prefabricated, implement flood-ready practices at the building level. For lightweight modular units – stackable, flexible and adaptable to the way we example, it is a sound idea to invest in elevated mechanicals live and work today – are one such solution. Strategies that provide organic and building access, resilient landscapes and an ability to and dispersed methods of containment are another. The development of “island” or function off-grid. This reduces disruption for physical environments using significantly larger areas and depths, with water residents and businesses and contributes to a city’s ability squares, natural swales and runoff areas, reduces the load on storm and to bounce back after a destructive storm. sewage systems. Gardens and permeable surfaces can absorb rain water.

Nature’s forces are too strong to manage permanently, but we can reinvent ourselves and our habitat. We will continue to build solidly on higher ground, What are the biggest challenges safely and sustainably, and build adaptively near the water’s edge. In London, facing the world’s cities? Be part of for example, a floating village has been proposed for the Royal Docks – a the solution. Find out more on p32 potential model for life around the River Thames with 45,000 residents.

The ultimate expression of resilient behaviour is human. This draws on our boundless ability to learn, adapt to our environment, and share information on strategies to enable us to coexist with nature.

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INTERVIEW ALEX FREW MCMILLAN ILLUSTRATION BLOK MAGNAYE

KATHARINE BURGESS SENIOR DIRECTOR, URBAN RESILIENCE, URBAN LAND INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON DC

153% 144% MIDDLE DISTANCE

133%

Intelligence

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Growth of households earning $35,000-$70,000 shows where the new middle classes are living Source: Oxford Economics, 2017

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SHANGHAI BENGALURU

NEWS IN BRIEF

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Recognising south-east Asia’s Women of the Future

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INFOGRAPHIC IAN DUTNALL IMAGE TERREMOCENTROITALIA

RICS has published an easy-toread guide about key aspects of the International Construction Measurement Standard (ICMS), to help firms embed the new approach into working practices.

You can find the new ICMS User Guide at rics.org/icmsuser.

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Sydney also ranks first in terms of development prospects, with Melbourne third. Splitting the pair to take second place is Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. These three are the only cities in the region where development prospects are $ $ $ $ “generally good” for the $ $ adjudged $ $ $ $ $ $ year ahead. $For$ investment, those polled also envision good conditions 133% 110% 67% in Singapore, 46% 18% 16% 15% 7% Shanghai and, HONG again,SYDNEY BEIJING NAIROBI MUMBAI DUBAI AUSTIN SINGAPORE KONG Ho Chi Minh City.

The most attractive cities in Investors have essentially split Asia-Pacific for development into two camps. In the first are and investment are Sydney and risk-averse institutional investors Melbourne, according to the fleeing near-zero returns on latest edition of Emerging Trends sovereign bonds, which find in Real Estate, published by the Australia’s relatively high yields Urban Land Institute and PwC. and stable economy attractive.

The report polled 710 real estate Then there are investors buying developers, fund managers, lenders into emerging nations such as and institutional investors on their Vietnam. “We go in with a long-term intentions for the year ahead. For perspective about being part of this 2018, Sydney and Melbourne rank stellar demographic cycle,” one fund first and second in terms of city manager said, explaining that he is investment prospects, thanks to looking for capital appreciation while their perceived stability with enjoying a 4%-5% yield. “There is respondents. This marks a shift retail consumption, office demand, in sentiment from last year, when IT demand and domestic demand risky markets such as Bangalore that hasn’t come out yet.” drew the most attention. $

144%

BENGALURU SAFE HARBOUR High yields and a stable economy meant Sydney was a hit with risk-averse institutional investors

Tesla co-founder takes to the stage at WBEF Summit

Need help with construction measurement standard?

NAIROBI

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STRONG AND STEADY SYDNEY DRAWS THE EYE, HO CHI MINH SHOWS PROMISE

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Tesla’s chief technology officer and co-founder JB Straubel has been announced as the keynote speaker at this year’s World Built Environment Forum Summit.

At the flagship event, held on 23-24 April in London, Straubel will discuss how disruption in the form of new types of transport and energy storage are influencing urban design.

To read thought-leading articles on the conference’s themes, view the programme, and to register for the event, visit rics.org/wbef.

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Launched in south-east Asia for the first time this year, the Women of the Future Awards is a global initiative to build a collaborative network of women across $ all $ sectors. RICS is proud to sponsor the Property, Construction and Infrastructure category.

153% The awards honour women SHANGHAI aged 35 and under who have made distinctive and innovative contributions to their field.

The ceremony will be held in Singapore on 20 March, where RICS CEO Sean Tompkins will present the award to the first Property category winner. To find out more, visit rics.org/wotf.

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TAKE PRIDE DO YOU HAVE A SURVEYING STORY TO SHARE? Submit your Pride in the Profession nomination at rics.org/150

Sheung Li Uk was the first public rental housing estate to be built in Hong Kong, in 1952. It was the first manifestation of what was to become known as the “Wright Principle”; a housing standard in

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MICHAEL WRIGHT FRICS, 1912-2018: HONG KONG’S STANDARD BEARER which privacy and human dignity are incorporated into the design.

It was built to the specifications set by Michael Wright FRICS who, in his role in the Hong Kong Public Works department, created building standards to meet Hong Kong’s social housing needs, as the city faced a crisis of overcrowding.

Wright passed away in London on 26 January 2018. He was 105.

With a housing estate named in his honour, his outstanding contribution to the development of the built environment in Hong Kong and to the surveying profession is clear.

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“By mastering the full capabilities of technology such as BIM at a city level, we are able to create a completely customisable built environment”

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igitisation – getting everything you do into a digital language – is going to change the lives of 90% of the real estate profession.

Take building information modelling (BIM) – the Shangri-La for architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and developers. Knowing every brick, every pipe and every cable of a building, and being able to map them in a 3D plan that can be altered in live time, is only scratching the surface of the power and complexity of BIM. Armed with this information, professionals can optimise a project on a cost-versus-design basis.

Then they can pass a fully rendered 3D model of an asset to the property and facility managers. Those managers can, in turn, use building sensors to optimise the performance of the building for power consumption, emissions and many other criteria.

The 3D rendering of an asset also puts it in the context of a macro- and micro-environment. From the outset of the design, to positioning the building within the confines of the site, you understand the impact of that building in real terms on the surrounding location. It’s possible for the developer, architect, building engineer and surveyor to justify why the building design matches the topography of the cityscape.

Beyond the scale of individual buildings, there is the goal of creating a truly smart city. This is something that Singapore has gone all-out to achieve. They have paid French company Dassault Systèmes S$73m ($54m) to create Virtual Singapore, a comprehensive rendering of the entire city in 3D: its topography, current buildings, infrastructure and future plans.

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Sustainability factors, transport patterns, human footfall: once you have a rendered environment, you can start modelling the impact of change on that city, on that district, or on that site in that building.

One pertinent example for cities in Asia’s warmer climates is the environmental issues related to wind and cooling. Singapore wants to create a 3D model of existing and future developments to determine whether the massing of buildings will generate sufficient wind funnelling effects to create natural cooling. It’s a matter of gathering massive amounts of wind data through sensors monitored over time, then modelling that information in your 3D-rendered city.

With a dynamic, live 3D-rendered virtual representation of a building, you are then able to understand the cost of construction down to the quantities of input and quantities and qualities of materials. In the event that an architect decides to change the design, you can recalculate the quantities and therefore the cost of construction.

The nirvana would then be to have the rental or price projections relative to the design. If, for instance, you changed lower floors to more retail from offices, the cost may go up because of the mixed-use nature of the asset, but the returns may go up further and make this a more attractive investment. You could have those quantitative aspects assessed instantly.

Once you have the asset digitised and rendered, you can also start to monitor its performance with sensors. One of the most progressive areas in which we are seeing performance analytics being used is in shopping malls. Behavioural analytics of the individual retailers are determining the design, layout and tenant mix of those developments. This is blending data with financial performance to get an optimisation of building rates and rental performance.

Ultimately, technology will allow us to customise real estate completely.

The world will move away from the traditional concept of:“This is what we have built, you have to live and work in it,” to: “This is what I want to live or work in.

Can you build it for me?”

WHAT BENEFIT HAS BIM brought to your business? Email editor@ricsmodus.com

ILLUSTRATION ANDREA MANZATI

CHRIS MARRIOTT FRICS, CEO, SOUTH-EAST ASIA, SAVILLS, SINGAPORE

Intelligence

NEWS IN BRIEF

WE LIKE

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rics.org/modus

Become a judge or mentor of our global competition To mark its 150th anniversary this year, RICS has launched the Cities for our Future Challenge, to encourage young people to generate original and practical ideas that can make a real impact on the challenges facing the world’s cities.

RICS is now seeking mentors and judges to advise and assess these entries from each AsiaPacific region. Mentors will need to be available to provide feedback on at least three occasions between June and October 2018.

Judges will need to be free for two weeks in June to assess entries and select a top five.

Find out more about the Cities for our Future Challenge on p32, and to register your interest, email 150@rics.org.

RICS standard on whole-life carbon supports climate aims RICS has released its first professional statement to advise members on how to follow requirements for conducting whole-life carbon assessments for construction projects.

The new standard, Whole Life Carbon Assessment for the Built Environment, 1st edition, sets out how RICS professionals should assess the carbon emissions arising from built projects throughout a building’s life-cycle.

It addresses embodied emissions of all the components that go into a built asset over all stages of its life: from extracting raw materials to any maintenance, repair, replacement and potential future demolition and disposal.

The standard is another important tool that supports larger RICS objectives to make a tangible contribution to the built environment, achieving the commitments made in the Paris Agreement during the 21st Conference of the Parties in 2015.

Download the statement at rics.org/wholelifecarbon.

ON ALERT Berlin in 4D, a breakthrough development that can show the potential dangers to a city’s built environment

4D city modelling What’s that? Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are pioneering the development of four-dimensional (4D) point-cloud models of cities to help in the early detection of dangers to buildings, bridges, tunnels or dams. Being able to address damage to the built environment at an early stage could potentially save the industry millions.

How does it work? Using data from the German TerraSAR-X satellite, the most high-resolution civilian radar satellite in the world, Xiaoxiang Zhu, a professor at TUM, has developed an algorithm that makes it possible to reconstruct the third and even fourth dimension (time). The sheer amount of detailed information makes it possible to generate highly precise 4D city models, which can reveal tiny changes in the built environment with a precision on the order of approximately 1mm per year. “For example, the thermal expansion of buildings in the summer or deformations resulting from subsidence below the earth’s surface,” Zhu explains. “Satellite technology can make an important contribution to making our urban infrastructure safer.”

What’s next? Zhu and her team plan to augment the models with data from Open Street Map, as well as images, text and activity patterns from social networks. Having already made four-dimensional point clouds of Berlin, Las Vegas, Paris and Washington DC, the next step is to create 4D models of all major cities in the world, which can be potentially used by governments and construction firms. “Four-dimensional modelling has the potential to be commercialised,” Zhu adds.

ON RECORD I was livestreaming for 45 minutes HENRY PRYOR LONDON-BASED LUXURY BUYING AGENT

High-end estate agents such as Pryor are increasingly using smartphones to provide video tours of luxury properties for “time poor” super-rich clients, many of whom buy or rent without stepping a foot inside.

WHO’S SAID WHAT… AND WHY THEY’VE SAID IT

We subsidise other infrastructure, why not the Hyperloop?

BENT FLYVBJERG ECONOMIST, SAÏD BUSINESS SCHOOL The construction costs of Tesla founder Elon Musk’s high-speed magnetically levitated pods are uncertain. However, Flyvbjerg thinks they could be reduced by locating stations beneath airports, and by improving tunnelling technology.

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RICS AT 150

Concorde proceeds at walking pace down local roads, closed overnight by Transport for London.

The convoy heads east into central London, then diverts toward Isleworth’s tiny port.

A 2,000-tonne barge carries Concorde the length of the River Thames, to open sea.

The barge hugs the coast on its way to Torness, near Edinburgh.

LAND SPEED RECORD SURVEYOR KEN MORGAN FRICS HELPED MOVE AN ICONIC AIRCRAFT FROM LONDON TO SCOTLAND – WITHOUT TAKING TO THE AIR. HERE’S HOW …

In this year of RICS’ 150th anniversary, we’re celebrating the extraordinary achievements of chartered surveyors with the “Pride in the Profession” campaign.

It’s an open invitation for you to submit your nominations of great surveying stories, from the achievements of social housing pioneer – and the world’s first female RICS professional – Irene Barclay, to Michael Wright FRICS, who played a highly influential role in the building of modern-day Hong Kong (p7).

One of the most unusual stories nominated so far is that of Ken Morgan FRICS, who in 2004 played a key role in helping to transport the by-then retired Concorde airliner from London’s Heathrow Airport to its final resting place at the Museum of Flight, near Edinburgh. His particular surveying skills came into play at the beginning of that trip, transporting the fuselage along urban roads to the tiny

The final 22km leg by road to East Fortune, over hilly countryside. port of Isleworth on the River Thames, from detailed planning and negotiation with local residents and businesses, to clearing trees on the final stretch of its route to the riverside. The 110-tonne aircraft then continued its journey, by barge, down the Thames, and then up Britain’s east coast, to its final resting place some 600km away.

DO YOU HAVE A GREAT STORY TO SHARE? Submit your nominations at rics.org/150 Concorde is now a major attraction at East Fortune’s Museum of Flight.

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69.7% 64.7%

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LEADER OF APAC

Intelligence

43.1% 41.2% 36.1% 21%

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India leads the five-year change in Asia-Pacific house prices

-4.5% -5.6% JAPAN

SINGAPORE

Source: Knight Frank, 2017 INDIA

HONG KONG

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AUSTRALIA

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JAPAN

“UNCLAIMED” LAND THE SIZE OF SWITZERLAND

ILLUSTRATION BERND SCHIFFERDECKER

There is a gaping hole in the middle of Japan that will soon be the size of the Republic of Ireland. Around 11% of Japan’s land is “unclaimed” – where the owner cannot be contacted or even traced. That figure is due to almost double, to 19%, by 2040, a government-backed study group reports.

The situation has arisen in part because owners in the ageing society die and leave no will. There may be no local relatives to update the land registry, a process that is not mandatory. Other relatives may not be aware of an inheritance, or be unwilling to pay the taxes on it. In addition, much of the land is owned by financial institutions that, after Japan’s bubble burst in the late 1980s, they have sometimes found difficult to sell.

Between now and 2040, the unclaimed land will cost the government around ¥6tn ($54bn) in income that could have been generated from taxes or development, as well as unkempt land that cannot withstand natural disasters.

Land in rural areas is often falling sharply in price, making it not worth the hassle to claim it for some “owners”. With Japan’s life expectancy already at 84 years, and the average age already at 47, the issue is only likely to become more severe.

The abandoned total is now around 41,000 km2, equivalent in size to Switzerland. By 2040, it will amount to 72,000 km2, an area a little larger than the Republic of Ireland.

The group that prepared the numbers has suggested that, in the absence of clear owners, the government could grant temporary usage rights for the land to companies and non-profit organisations.

RUINOUS STATE About 11% of property is unclaimed, which could cost Japan’s government $54bn in lost tax income by 2040

“The profession can help drive positive change in our world” JOHN HUGHES FRICS RICS PRESIDENT RISING TO THE CHALLENGE The new president will focus on global risks and the opportunities the profession can grasp to help shape our future environment

i am honourEd by thE trust that has bEEn PlacEd in mE to sErvE as ambassador for our remarkable profession. I am especially excited because we are celebrating RICS’150th year throughout 2018. By happy coincidence, I am the first RICS President from Canada in the same year that my country reaches its 150th anniversary of confederation.

Within a year of the “Dominion of Canada” coming into being in 1867, a group of 20 eminent surveyors met in Westminster to establish the Institution of Surveyors. They did so because the practice of surveying was falling into disrepute. Anyone could claim to be a surveyor, apparently, and among those who did were undertakers, wine merchants and plumbers.

The profession was born out of a period of breathtaking and disruptive change, with rapidly growing cities, and the advent of steam-powered transport and the transatlantic telegraph. The challenge our profession faces today is change that is both more rapid and more far-reaching.

A look at the World Economic Forum series of reports on global risks gives some useful pointers. Extreme weather events are the top global risk measured by impact and likelihood. Other key risks include natural disasters, a failure to take effective action on climate change, large-scale involuntary migration, terrorism and cyber attacks.

Risks become more pronounced in a period when visionary leadership is in short supply, and while unilateral and transactional approaches and a “post-truth” environment of mutual suspicion are on the rise. At the same time, today’s developing digital technologies have at least as much potential to enhance our wellbeing as did the mechanical advances of the 19th century.

Faced with this challenging environment, our profession has a choice to make: live with the consequences or choose to act. While acting alone we won’t make an impact on global challenges, with the right partners, we might.

Throughout the year you will hear me talking about cities, infrastructure and technology; the connections between them and the opportunities they offer us. I believe that if we seize on new technologies to drive change while holding fast to our global vision, the outstanding reputation our profession enjoys will be further enhanced. Our 150th year is the ideal moment.

Follow John on Twitter @JohnHughesTO Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A

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APC APC acceleration acceleration program: program: quantity quantity surveying surveying in in Asia Asia A quantity surveyor is concerned with the costs and A quantity surveyor is concerned with the costs and financial management of the building life-cycle. financial management of the building life-cycle.

The need for chartered quantity surveyors is The need for chartered quantity surveyors is significant. By 2020 a predicted £18bn will be significant. By 2020 a predicted £18bn will be spent on construction projects across key spent on construction projects across key developing markets, therefore having the developing markets, therefore having the skills meet this global demand is essential. skills meet this global demand is essential.

This seven-month program has been designed This seven-month program has been designed to develop the technical skills and knowledge of to develop the technical skills and knowledge of professionals who work in the built environment, professionals who work in the built environment, to bring them in line with the competencies defined to bring them in line with the competencies defined

by RICS to become a chartered quantity surveyor.

by RICS to become a chartered quantity surveyor.

This program is now available in several territories across This program is now available in several territories across Asia. To find out more about this course, contact: Asia. To find out more about this course, contact: China – learning@rics.org China – learning@rics.org Hong Kong – etang@rics.org Hong Kong – etang@rics.org Singapore – shussin@rics.org Singapore – shussin@rics.org

Find Find out out more more about about APC APC courses courses at at academy.rics.org academy.rics.org 12 RICS.ORG/MODUS

Intelligence

NUMBER CRUNCH IS THE GROWTH OF OFFICE JOBS IN THE WORLD’S MAJOR CITIES KEEPING PACE WITH DEVELOPMENT, OR ARE WE OVERBUILDING?

SHANGHAI

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“Senior management, who are pretty much all white men, tend to hire in their own image”

ARE YOU INTERESTED in writing a future Secret Surveyor column? Send your musings on the profession to editor@ricsmodus.com

GLOBAL SUPPLY VS DEMAND 2017-19 DEMAND m ft2

NEW YORK/MANHATTAN 99,400 | 10.4% | 11.7

HONG KONG 69,100 | 11.5% | 5.9

109,300 15.6% | 17.5 TOKYO 71,300 | 6.7% | 16.7

MEXICO CITY

PARIS 119,400 | 8.2% | 11

SÃO PAULO 142,300 | 22% | 2.7

BANGALORE 243,800 | 4.3% | 31.2

CITY/ a OFFICE-USING JOB GROWTH b VACANCY (%) c COMPLETIONS (ft2)

JAKARTA 96,300 | 28.5% | 12.2

I

t’s been reported that by 2025 nearly a quarter of RICS professionals will be aged 65 or over. That means a whole lot of us will be retired in the next seven years.

Clearly, we need an awful lot more bright, hard-working people to enter the fold. But if we are successful in meeting that challenge, just by hiring thousands of white, British men, it’s hard to see how much of a cause for celebration that will be.

Take my office, a well-established project management consultancy. Nine out of 10 employees are men. In fact at times it can feel like an episode of Mad Men, without the rampant alcoholism and misogyny.

The issue is not lack of opportunity to expand and hire women, or anyone outside the mould – we’re expanding healthily. The problem is that senior management, who are pretty much all white men, tend to hire in their own image.

After working in Asia and across the Middle East, and having experienced the diverse nature of working at an architecture practice, I’m craving cultural diversity – and females – once again in my workplace.

Back in London, project managing a World Cup stadium in Qatar, I enjoyed seeing diversity pay off in the efficient working habits of the design team. It was a completely multicultural team where I, as the English employee, was the minority, and I loved it. We would often work late into the evenings and over weekends to meet deadlines, but we felt like a family.

People are at the core of the service we provide and diversity is beneficial: it challenges us and helps us innovate. I think we can all learn from the strong work ethics, problem-solving abilities, and cooperative natures of different cultures. But until we wake up and really do something about it, it’s going to be business as usual.

a

LONDON 78,300 | 4.8% | 19.9

SECRET SURVEYOR

454,500 | 13.2% | 44.9

Source: Cushman & Wakefield, 2017

706.2

414.7

SUPPLY m ft2 135

156.5

109 EUROPE

109.6 AMERICAS

More than 700m ft2 (65m m2) of office space will be built globally over the next three years, as the economic outlook brightens across the world.

On the back of greater office-job growth, the boom will be led by Asia-Pacific, where nearly 60% of the world’s new office construction

298.3 ASIA-PACIFIC

516.9 GLOBAL

will be concentrated. Furthermore, some European cities will hit a cyclical high in new construction over the next two years.

Although demand will remain robust, totalling around 520m ft2 (48m m2), it will fall far short of supply. From that perspective, there is a risk the world is overbuilding.

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A

13

RICS @ 150

BUILDING A MODERN ASIA The continent has undergone momentous changes in the 150 years since RICS was founded, says Alex Frew McMillan. And surveyors were as critical to its past as they are to its future

S

ince the foundation of RICS in 1868, Asia has transformed. British Hong Kong had only come into being 26 years before, in 1842, and Singapore was ceded to the British government in 1858.

Japan and South Korea, mainland China, and the former French colonies of south-east Asia have all been through profound change. World wars have brought the rise and fall of empires. India went through partition in 1947.

Virtually no Asian nation was in its current form when RICS began 150 years ago.

Through it all, the surveying profession has had to transform with the changing landscape – literally and figuratively – of the region. Now it faces its staunchest test to date. The legacies of dynasties and administrations that have long since faded remain. Many of the land uses and systems of title predate the formation of the modern nations we now know.

In Japan, it is incredibly hard to piece together large enough parcels of land to construct a project of any notable size. That is a legacy of Japan’s feudal past. It was only during the Meiji administration that the government confiscated the estates of the daimyo, or feudal lords, compensating them generously in return. As of 1871, the government began granting title deeds to land occupiers and people who had been receiving rents from land or who had a mortgage on a property.

It was a seismic shift – Japan had previously had no clear concept of private property rights. But the granting of permanent tenancy or “perpetual” cultivating rights only went some way towards rationalising the system – often with great protest among those who felt they had lost out.

The devastating Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which killed 120,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama, changed the shape of those cities further. In the recovery effort, the Tokyo government subdivided the 355m ft2 (33m m2) of the city that had been devastated into 66 land-readjustment districts.

The government was free to seize up to 10% of all private land, without compensation, to turn into public space.

14 RICS.ORG/MODUS

The resulting compartmentalisation of the city is still felt today. That is also the case in South Korea, which went through a similar transition from feudal to modern nation.

While Hong Kong as an island had few residents when the British arrived, the New Territories, leased in 1898, had many. The subsequent conversion of the land from freehold to leasehold in 1905 changed the ownership structure of the colony permanently. Those ramifications are still felt today in the difficulties in finding plots for the “small homes” promised to all male descendants of the native families.

The city’s rapid and extremely dense urbanisation followed, leading to other changes in ownership structure.

Strata-title ownership of buildings was effectively invented in Hong Kong, Lau Chun-kong MRICS, international director and Asia head of valuation advisory at JLL, points out.

Lau, who writes a column on land use and planning in Hong Kong for the Hong Kong Economic Times, notes that the first instance of this structure came at 46 Hillwood Road, in 1952. The five-storey building was subdivided so that the individual owners of each floor owned their portion. »

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 15

The developer signed the deed of mutual covenant with the owner of the first floor, and all the other floor owners were legally bound by the deed. The building was subsequently bought up by another developer and redeveloped into a commercial building in the 1980s.

This became a common way of dividing up Hong Kong’s tong lau buildings, well before the construction of its iconic skyscrapers. In a tong lau, which normally has between five and seven floors, the ground floor and loft space belong to a company and the upper floors are owned by residents. While this manner of ownership is useful and provides security of title for the individual owners, it was Hong Kong’s developers that actually “invented” the idea. They were able to sell the individual floors for more than the price of the building as a whole, giving them a better profit margin per floor.

Although the real estate profession in Hong Kong is highly regulated, that is not the case even in its near-neighbour.

Thanks to its history as a Portuguese colony, Macau is a much less-regulated real estate market. Property agents, for instance, did not have to be licensed until 2013, unlike other Asian markets. It is also notoriously hard to establish free title to real estate plots because many records were lost to fire during the Portuguese colonial era.

Mainland China is unencumbered by such historical hangovers. The Communist Revolution successfully erased any lingering legacy of the Qing Dynasty and indeed the centuries of Chinese development before that, wiping the slate clean, in terms of real-estate law. All land suddenly belonged to the state.

And now it is being parcelled off again. That process allows developers to amass very large plots of land for development without any of the complications involved in assembling individually owned parcels elsewhere in Asia. The developer need only negotiate with the local or provincial government.

“They don’t have segmented fragmented land at all because of the way they changed land ownership,” Lau notes.

Deng Xiaoping, the leader who set communist China on the road to reform, in fact based the country’s system of

16

RICS.ORG/MODUS

THERE WAS [PREVIOUSLY] NO QUESTION OF TRYING TO REVITALISE EXISTING CITIES. NOW, MANY [TAKE A] MORE COMMUNITYDRIVEN APPROACH NICHOLAS BROOKE FRICS Professional Property Services Group

RICS @ 150

long-term government rights on the UK leasehold system.

That is not something current leaders are likely to admit, but it gives them the basis for the formation of the huge new towns and cities that are flying up before our eyes.

Nicholas Brooke FRICS, chairman of the consultant Professional Property Services Group, feels China is not doing enough to preserve its history. Beijing is doing a better job than anywhere else, but even it attracts its share of heat for the destruction of the hutong courtyard buildings that made a maze of the old parts of the city.“Typically, in China it’s been remove and rebuild,” Brooke notes. That’s showing signs of the start of change. “But a lot of damage has been done. They’re a bit late in recognising the value.”

Singapore has led the way in terms of preserving its historic shophouses, for instance. But it is an expert administration at encouraging adaptive reuse rather than preservation for preservation’s sake. It is a lesson Hong Kong and other Asian cities have been slow to apply.

“There was no question of trying to revitalise or rejuvenate existing areas – it was condemn, destroy and rebuild,” says Brooke. “What was then built was very different to what was there before, and people were displaced and had to be rehoused in new towns. It was very disruptive to real life.”

Brooke, who mentors several young surveyors, has noticed a change in the mentality of the younger generation. “Now across Asia many cities are rather more gentle,” he says.“It’s a much more soft and community-driven approach.”

T

he surveying profession has had much to say in the development of urban Asia. Architects may claim to have built the continent’s metropolises, but surveyors have shaped them, monitored them, and managed them.

Organisations such as RICS have helped to implement international best practices in the region. It used to be the case that the surveying profession consisted of outposts in far-flung British colonies that reported back to London. The situation persisted until virtually the turn of this century.

Now the profession is far more international, spread into virtually every corner of Asia, with local Asian talent representing multifaceted, rather than Euro-centric, interests. “I describe it as a professional passport,” Brooke says of RICS membership. “It’s become a truly global qualification, recognised internationally, and that’s an exercise that has been ongoing for the last 10 or 15 years now.”

Now, surveying and other property professionals face another challenge: the digitisation of practically everything.

What has been a very physical brick-and-mortar world is being translated into a melded real-and-virtual world. That has yet to make itself felt in terms of the types of construction methods but, as far as Brooke is concerned, the future is modular: “We’ll end up with Lego buildings one day, buildings you can take apart, put together again, and move around,”he says.“If we were having this conversation in eight years’ time, I suspect concrete and steel will have gone and we’ll be using other materials. It’s that scale of revolution.”

A full 150 years has gone into making Asia the place it is now. If Brooke’s prediction is correct, the landscape will have transformed again in less than 15. And no doubt the pace of change will startle those who look back in another 150 years – as being astonishingly slow. n

NICHOLAS BROOKE FRICS Professional Property Services Group

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A

17

Infrastructure

18 RICS.ORG/MODUS

IF YOU’VE NEVER BEFORE CONSIDERED WHAT A CHIEF RESILIENCE OFFICER DOES, YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THIS NOW, BEFORE IT’S

Words Gregory Scrugg s

ee owan F raphy R Photog

Floods, riots, market crashes: the risks that cities face grow with every new day. But preparing for their impact, and ensuring the city can get back on its feet quickly, needs one person to bang heads, force decisions and generally take responsibility. Modus meets the people making it happen Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A

19

F

lorida’s vulnerability to storm surges was laid bare in September 2017, when Hurricane Irma slammed into the state, leaving a trail of devastation in her wake. Low-lying Miami is, arguably, the US city most at risk from climate change, and a more permanent rise in sea levels could leave swathes of its beach-front under water.

None of these conditions bode well for the city’s public utility system, especially one whose wastewater treatment facilities are clustered along the coast. In 2013, the US government determined that Miami-Dade County, the jurisdiction home to Florida’s largest city, had violated federal environmental law by not maintaining its water and sewer infrastructure to an adequate standard. Federal and county officials ultimately agreed upon a consent decree whereby the county would invest at least $1.6bn in the second-largest water and sewer system on the US east coast, serving some 2.3 million residents and thousands more visitors in a service area of 400 square miles (1,036 km2).

Faced with the challenge of how best to meet the terms set by the regulators in Washington, Miami’s public officials opted to go far beyond what was required of them under the law. Instead, they outlined a $13.5bn capital improvement programme that emphasises “resilience” – the ability of the water and sewer utility to withstand and bounce back from destructive events, such as a storm surge that subsequently inundates critical infrastructure.

In the last several years, resilience has supplanted “sustainable” as the buzzword

20 RICS.ORG/MODUS

of choice in municipal governments worldwide, thanks in large part to the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative. Cities enrolled in the programme receive funding from the foundation to employ a chief resilience officer (CRO), and technical support to help formulate a city-wide resilience strategy.

Launched in 2013, the initiative now counts nearly 100 cities from across the globe in its roster, and in July 2017, around 80 CROs met in New York for 100 Resilient Cities’ third global summit.

Miami-Dade County appointed James Murley, a lawyer and urban planner, as CRO in 2016. He sees his role as “an evolution” from what previously might have been a chief sustainability officer.“In sustainability and LEED, a lot of the focus was on individual structures,”Murley explains.“When you get into resilience, then you’re looking with more of a spatial framework: how is sea level rise going to affect vulnerable areas? What is your exposure to storm surge? It’s a more interconnected approach than looking at single buildings.”

Using the resilience approach, MiamiDade County will redesign its coastal wastewater treatment facilities to withstand the projected 3ft (0.9m) of sea-level rise expected by 2060, as well as storm surges.

“We’re spending more money now at a time

when we’re involved with the upgrade, knowing that we’re going to have the added protection and be more resilient in the future,” says Murley.

Chief resilience officers prepare their cities for the worst that the elements, global economy, and political upheaval can throw at them. To that end, they break their task into two types of challenges: shocks and stresses.

Shocks are sudden events that stretch a city’s defences to their limit. Stresses are more chronic issues that grind the city down.

Shocks are the obvious threats that make news headlines around the world. Barely a week before Irma had Miami’s residents anxiously checking their own hurricane forecasts, they were watching pictures of Houston and Mumbai under water, as the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in the former, and monsoon rains in the latter,

WE’RE SPENDING MONEY NOW, KNOWING WE’RE GOING TO HAVE THE ADDED PROTECTION AND BE MORE RESILIENT IN THE FUTURE JAMES MURLEY Miami-Dade County

PORTRAIT ILLUSTRATIONS SAM KERR IMAGES GETTY

Resilience

flooded streets, displaced thousands of people and caused millions of dollars of property damage. And although the death toll from Harvey was low, the same could not be said in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, where at least 1,200 people died.

Although most cities are well aware of their potential shocks and likely have been preparing for them long before the chief resilience officer came on the scene, the new role does not preclude surprises. Recently, Chilean seismologists discovered that the San Ramón Fault east of Santiago was in fact active, contrary to long-held beliefs, and could cause a subduction zone earthquake – where one tectonic plate pushes up another.

“We’ve never had that type of earthquake before; it’s much more devastating in terms of impact on infrastructure and human lives,” says Gabriela Elgueta, CRO at Santiago Humano y Resiliente, the resilience division of the Chilean capital. Now she is working

NEW ORLEANS: PREPARING FOR ANOTHER KATRINA Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in late August 2005, proved to be the worst natural disaster in the city’s history. The storm surge was responsible for the deaths of almost 1,500 people and caused an estimated $70bn of damage. The postmortem analysis determined that the city’s levees were woefully inadequate at containing the fury of Katrina. New design standards were set so that future levees would be able to endure a so-called 100-year storm event, although some experts warn even that may not save the city in the future.

with the relevant agencies to coordinate the delivery of new warning systems, launch public awareness campaigns, and implement zoning regulations to help prevent further construction near the fault line.

Elgueta’s job is further complicated by the city’s fragmented governance structure, which is comprised of 52 municipalities, each with its own government. There is a municipality of Santiago, but that only covers what is, in effect, the city centre. »

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 21

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Infrastructure

Exposed to the elements

Storms, storm surges, river floods, earthquakes and tsunamis are the biggest natural disaster risks for cities. And as this graphic shows, they affect some urban centres much more than others, in terms of both population exposure and potential productivity losses.

Resilience

So although her job is to prepare protocols in the event of, for instance, a subway line shutting down, getting 52 governments to agree to make the local bike-sharing scheme free for the day is harder than it should be.

For her, this piecemeal system of city governance is one of Santiago’s chief stresses.

“Without a doubt, the lack of planning is a recurring theme,” she says. “It’s impossible for each one to go it alone. Otherwise we end up with 52 plans for every topic.”

Elgueta, who is a public administrator by training, is based at the Santiago Regional Metropolitan Government, a new department that hopes to solve this problem and strives to offer the same metropolitanscale coordination that, for example, MiamiDade County has been doing for decades.

But her boss, the regional metropolitan governor, is not directly elected, and has limited powers over the 52 mayors who run the constellation of jurisdictions that are home to some 7 million people – nearly 40% of Chile’s population.

Another city with an atypical stress is Surat, the economic capital of Gujarat on India’s west coast. For centuries, it served as a port of call for European traders. In the early 20th century, Gujarati diamond cutters made the city their home. It is also India’s textile capital, producing 9 million metres of fabric a year. These bustling industries have thus far proven potent for the city’s economy. A 2011 survey by the City Mayors Foundation declared Surat the fourth fastest-growing city in the world.

B

ut Kamlesh Yagnik is thinking ahead and making a push for diversification.

Yagnik, a mechanical engineer who two years ago became 100 Resilient Cities’ first CRO in India, wants to see jobs along the full value chain for the raw materials that have made the city prosperous.

“We manufacture fabric, but we’re not making garments,” he says.“Ninety per cent of the world’s diamonds are cut and polished in Surat, but we are not making jewellery.”

As CRO, Yagnik has been liaising with the city’s universities and polytechnics over new opportunities that would build on Surat’s industrial heritage. Most machines used to cut diamonds or weave fabric, for example, are imported. And the IT jobs that are the bedrock of other Indian cities have yet to materialise, despite what Yagnik sees as obvious connections.“Textile and diamond producers are essentially tech companies,” he says, referring to the advanced techniques at work in both sectors. However, precious

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR EACH MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT TO GO IT ALONE. OTHERWISE WE END UP WITH 52 PLANS FOR EVERY TOPIC

little of the computerised components used in those industries are being developed in Surat. “We use IT services but the development here is minimal.”

From hurricanes and floods to terrorism and refugee crises, the list of calamities that could befall a city would keep any mayor up at night. While some are new – so much critical infrastructure in a city now depends on vulnerable cyber networks, for instance – others have defined cities for decades if not centuries, from the Great Fire of London in 1666 to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

“The rationale is effectively that every city should have a chief resilience officer, the same way as every bank should have a chief risk officer,” explains Samer Bagaeen FRICS, London-based associate director of city and practice management for 100 Resilient Cities. The analogy is no coincidence: the organisation’s founding president came from the banking sector.

But given that many cities are already addressing the issues that now fall under the resilience purview, why bother hiring a CRO? Simple, says Bagaeen: “It cuts across several government departments, and therefore cuts across silos.” »

FUKUSHIMA: COST OF COMPLACENCY The tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011 caused three meltdowns and has left the surrounding area severely contaminated by radiation. A subsequent investigation revealed there was no plan in place in the event of such a disaster. Generators that could have saved the reactors from meltdown sat in storage, and helicopters were still on standby after the earthquake that triggered the tsunami had hit. Studies on the probability of a 10m-high tsunami reaching the coast had been carried out, but executives decided there was no risk.

GABRIELA ELGUETA Santiago Humano y Resiliente

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A

23

Resilience

PARIS: KEEPING COOL IN A CRISIS In August 2003, France found itself at the epicentre of a European heatwave that claimed nearly 15,000 lives, mostly among the elderly. As temperatures in Paris peaked at 39.5ºC, hundreds died alone in their apartments and went undiscovered for days or even weeks. In response, the French government adopted the Plan Canicule (Heatwave Plan), now considered an international model by the World Health Organization. The plan’s strict guidelines trigger mandatory provision of air-conditioned cooling centres and extensive outreach efforts to make sure the elderly do not whither away in isolation when the mercury gets too high. A 2006 heatwave killed far fewer.

sector business management, but one way or another they must gain proficiency in the built environment realm.

“There is a learning curve for those who are not built environment professionals,” explains Bagaeen. “So we make sure they have support from project managers, because they are going to have to deliver on a built environment project.”

Above all, a CRO’s most effective skill is the ability to cut through the layers of bureaucracy and become a one-stop shop for the multifaceted needs of a city.“You’d have to talk to five different people to understand how transportation, housing, and emergency management are connected in the county,” argues Miami-Dade’s Murley. Now, you can just go to him.“I’m the point person in a large government for an integrated response.” n WATCH 100 RESILIENT CITIES’ presentation at the 2017 RICS World Built Environment Forum Summit in Shanghai: bit.ly/wbef100

That has certainly been the experience of Sarah Toy, strategic resilience officer for Bristol City Council in the UK. Toy describes herself as a “grand matchmaker” who has been most effective “synergising lots of actions where we’re at risk of duplication.”

For example, Bristol already has a civil protection manager, but Toy has exploited her office’s connections across the council – as well as the private sector – to consider how Bristol might respond to a terrorist attack. She helped coordinate an hour-byhour scenario planning exercise that would cover the first two weeks of a potential large-scale event.

“Terrorism has risen up the agenda massively,” Toy says. Thinking about such a scenario has encouraged those responsible for everything from IT networks to childcare to consider the risks to the services they provide. The exercise also yielded proactive responses, such as the realisation that council helplines could temporarily become public-facing sources of information, or a department’s stash of extra mobile phones could be loaned out to emergency services.

And although that means Toy must be better versed on the threats of a lone wolf versus a sleeper cell, it does not mean she has to become a counter-terrorism specialist.

“The great advantage of being a CRO is the capacity to articulate without being an expert,”explains Elgueta.“I go to the experts for each topic area.”

24 RICS.ORG/MODUS

As a result, chief resilience officers are able to work across the full scope of local government. They can focus on technical details without having to dwell on the political messaging that consumes mayors and elected officials.“I don’t control my own budget, which has given me the freedom to step back and look at the bigger picture,” says Toy. “At a time of austerity in the UK’s public sector, the initiative has raised our sights about what might be possible if we work together and pool our resources.”

CROs come from a variety of professional backgrounds, from town planning to private-

IT HAS RAISED OUR SIGHTS ABOUT WHAT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE IF WE WORK TOGETHER AND POOL OUR RESOURCES SARAH TOY Bristol City Council

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FindFind out out more more at rics.org/IRED at rics.org/IRED

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 25

City vs country

METROPOLIS NOW

Major cities used to be the fulcrum of the national economy. Now they’re nodes of the global economy. Are they starting to care more for their relationships with each other, than with their own hinterlands?

T Words George Bull

Illustrations Mike Lemanski

he city mayors of London, Paris and Barcelona signed an open letter in October 2016, arguing that the burdens carried by cities is greater than the funds available to deal with them.“Where states are finding it increasingly difficult to respond to citizens’ needs and address the present’s most challenging issues,” they said, “local governments are already working well on these issues, albeit with limited resources and poorly defined powers.” They went on to say that countries should allocate 25% of their tax revenues to municipalities and enable cities to “access global funding mechanisms currently restricted to nations”.

It is an example of the rhetoric calling for a greater political role for cities, many of which are already bypassing national government to tackle global governance issues. September 2016 saw the inaugural convening of the Global Parliament of Mayors, with a mandate to “promote collective city decision-making across national borders”.

The growing status of world cities should come as no surprise. They represent clusters of economic growth, talent and political stability, making them magnets for foreign investment.

26 RICS.ORG/MODUS

Tokyo and New York, for example, both have metropolitan GDPs of more than $1tn – that is an economic output similar to Canada or Spain. Products of the 1970s “Washington Consensus”, which favoured open markets, trade liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, these cities have soaked up the benefits of globalisation, and are in many instances the major engines of the economy (infographic, p29). They are open, diverse and connected, but they are also increasingly detached from their hinterlands. What does the rise of the city mean for the nation?

Chris Choa, director of cities and urban development at Aecom, sees a time when it makes more sense to reorganise nations around networks of megacity regions. There are two things happening in parallel, he says.

“On the one hand megacities are growing organically. These cities are not always legal entities, but broad metropolitan areas such as the Pearl River Delta – Guangzhou to Hong Kong – or the [north-east megalopolis] running from Boston to Washington that are effectively becoming a single region and boosting all the urban bits in between. The key here is transport infrastructure and how much of a population you can pull together in a oneor two-hour journey.”

Separately, and especially in older economies, nations are becoming harder to govern because life in the urban cores and rural hinterlands have less to do with each other than in the past. National policy is »

City vs country

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Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 27

City vs country

often too blunt an instrument to resolve these urban conflicts, says Choa.“In a country like the US you have low-density, low-population states technically governed in the same way as high-density, high-population states. But economically, demographically and socially, they’re very different. This creates a crisis for governance; there’s a feeling that the benefits aren’t equally shared.”

The result of this inequality is a desire for devolution. For the major city regions, going it alone looks straightforward enough; their scale, density and political stability enables them to “trade” directly with each other.

International capital is organised between the major city economies, often with little consideration for the rest of a country. Talent pools connect city to city – moving London to Paris to Singapore – not nation to nation.

Planned transport links, such as the Chinese-funded high-speed rail line from Belgrade to Budapest, or the Tokyo to Nagoya maglev train, will shrink distances.

JLL has even observed that commercial trends such as “just-in-time delivery” are starting to drive a reurbanisation of some logistics and manufacturing operations.

O

ther cities have risen to prominence by using low- or zero-tax strategies to attract companies and capital. Dubai is a good example of this. By combining a favourable business environment with a strategic relationship with Emirates airlines, it has become the busiest international airport in the world. All this has happened in less than 50 years and, while a comparatively small city of 2.8 million people, it has become an essential node on the global city network.

Dubai’s success has not been at the expense of its surrounding areas. “Many parts of the Gulf are too hot to be habitable, so well over 70% of the population [of Gulf nations] already live in cities,” says Chris Seymour FRICS, Mott MacDonald’s Dubai-based head of advisory for Middle East and South Asia.“The Middle East is very much defined by its culture and its narrative is generally around its cities. For that reason, the Emirate of Dubai is effectively the city of Dubai.”

Its rural regions are so sparsely populated that there is no comparable transition. The human experience might be more and more focused around the cityscape, but Seymour says that has always been the case: “From where I’m standing in the Middle East, do I

28 RICS.ORG/MODUS

CITIES THAT WERE ONCE NOT CONNECTED ARE NOW EASILY CONNECTED

BY RAIL WITHIN AN HOUR. YOU ARE EFFECTIVELY DEFINING AN ECONOMIC TRADING PATTERN

CHRIS CHOA Aecom

see cities becoming more important than nations? No. I can see this urban network notionally – Dubai is part of it – but then overlay some local arrangements like the laptop travel ban on flights from the Middle East to the US, and geopolitical forces quickly exert themselves.”

Jeremy Kelly, director of global research at JLL in London, says that “as nations become more protectionist, it’s down to city governments to network and set the agenda on things like sustainability initiatives.

Investors are following this trend. They’re interested in how cities are future-proofing.”

Some city mayors are even developing what Kelly describes as “their own foreign policy”. Holland Metropole is an example (infographic, p27), a new urban region in the Netherlands comprising its four largest and most specialised cities: Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague. Faced with a housing shortage and growing populations, the city mayors and a number of development partners have joined forces to promote the benefits to international investors of a single urban region with a combined GDP of €288bn and a half-hour commute between cities.

Holland Metropole is an example of good branding. Like the mega regions Choa talked about, it is not a legal entity but an alliance that enables the mayors to shout about

“10-plus tech clusters within 90 minutes” and“special residence permits for innovators”.

“If there’s a regionally coordinated transport initiative, isn’t that effectively the same thing?”suggests Choa.“Cities that were once not connected are now easily connected by rail within an hour. You are effectively defining an economic trading pattern.”

What is interesting about examples like this is that cities that once competed are now working together, says Richard de Cani, head of UKMEA planning at Arup. Take Bath and Bristol in south-west England. “Two cities with strong identities that now have the same mayor. It will be interesting to see what they offer to create space for housing, attract investment and draw people out.”

However, it is more challenging for the smaller towns clustered around them, says de Cani.“Many of these cities have suffered.

They don’t have the infrastructure. It will take a very long time to connect Grimsby and other parts of Lincolnshire into what’s happening in the north-east and west [of the UK] for example. But often these places have strong heritage and cultural identities – to flourish they need to be able to exploit those.”

Tom Follett, policy and projects manager at London-based thinktank ResPublica, says that it is just not possible for all places to be as productive as the UK capital. “The »

City Infrastructure vs country

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When does an engine of the economy become divorced from the nation that it grew from? These 10 examples show just how large cities can become in comparison to the nations to which they belong. In every example apart from Seoul-Incheon and Rotterdam-Amsterdam, the contribution to national GDP outstrips the city area’s relative percentage of national population.

47 .4

%

Spheres of influence

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 29

City vs country

rhetoric has always been to ‘catch-up all the other regions to London’. That’s existed for 20 years now and it hasn’t worked.”

It is time to face the reality that economies operate differently, says Follett. “Physical regions need different economic models.”

An experiment in what this might look like is under way in Preston, north-west England, itself inspired by the “Cleveland Model” in the US. First developed in Cleveland, Ohio, the idea is to set up worker cooperatives that can supply local anchor institutions, such as hospitals, councils and universities, so as to redirect that money locally.

In 2013, Preston City Council brought in the Centre for Local Economic Strategies to help identify 12 large institutions locally with a total annual spending power of £1.2bn. The thinktank then found businesses that could win contracts, such as a £600,000 printing contract tendered by the police, and the council food budget worth £1.6m, which was broken into lots and awarded to farmers across the region. Post-Brexit, the number of contracts these businesses are able to pick up could increase if public institutions, from health to construction, are no longer bound

by EU procurement law.

Preston’s council has since spent an additional £4m locally – up from 14% of its budget in 2012 to 28% in 2016. Preston has also recorded the joint-second-biggest improvement in its position on the multiple deprivation index between 2010 and 2015, and in 2016 it was voted the best city in north-west England to live and work.

“These might not necessarily be the highperforming economies that [former British chancellor] George Osborne once envisioned in his productivity plan,” says Follett, “but they might retain jobs and spending power in local areas.”

Choa is also alert to this concern. “Social inclusion is going to become a major priority.

It is more likely that there’s deeper exclusion if we don’t reorganise our cities to include their hinterlands. So this itself is driving the need for this reorganisation.”

The challenge for nations is to make sure that these hinterlands are both connected to the country’s urban cores and given the autonomy to pursue economic structures that tap into their merits. Some mayors are already experimenting with this thinking.

Perhaps the saviour of the nation state will turn out to be the cities themselves. n

30

RICS.ORG/MODUS

Partnership towns LONDON

PARIS

London receives more inward investment from Paris than any other global city, attracting £2.6bn and generating almost 10,000 jobs over the past 10 years. Paris, in comparison, is the largest European destination for foreign direct investment from London.

The day before Article 50 was triggered in March 2017, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and London mayor Sadiq Khan announced the Paris–London Business Welcome programme. Aimed at facilitating the joint domiciliation of companies in the two cities, it aims to ensure that entrepreneurs are able to develop their business in both markets. The programme offers assistance with company set up, access to co-working space, introduction to the local tech ecosystem and networking, and discounted accommodation.

ST LOUIS SEATTLE NEW YORK LOS ANGELES WASHINGTON DC BOSTON

In June last year, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced that it would invest $200m in the American Cities Initiative, which is designed to promote leadership in city halls, and advance policies and legislation in areas such as education, climate change and reducing gun crime. The first stage of the initiative is the Mayor’s Challenge, giving every US city with at least 30,000 residents the chance to pitch their ideas for funding.

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg launched the scheme, saying: “As Washington has grown more dysfunctional, cities have begun to play a vital role in determining our nation’s reputation as a global superpower.”

Coincidentally or not, a day after the announcement, it was reported that 300 US mayors had agreed to back the Paris Climate Agreement, despite President Donald Trump pulling the US out of the deal earlier in 2017.

SAN DIEGO

TIJUANA

The uncertainty caused by Trump’s plans for the US–Mexico border and his potential overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement have given some businesses in San Diego and Tijuana cause for pause. Despite this, San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer has said that his city’s cultural and economic ties south of the border “have my unwavering support”.

On 13 March 2017, Faulconer and Tijuana mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum publicly renewed an agreement about how the cities will continue to cooperate. To date, the memorandum of understanding has resulted in cross-border training for firefighters and joint promotion of the economic advantages of what has been dubbed the “San Diego–Tijuana mega-region”.

BIM BIM Conference Conference 25July July2018 2018 25 Kuala Kuala Lumpur, Lumpur, Malaysia Malaysia Over the past year, there has been a significant rise we had in 2017: inWhat the number of emerging ASEAN economies adopting Building Information Modelling (BIM) and embedding BIM-enabled work companies processes in their • 55 industry-leading day-to-day business.

• 16 influential speakers At 2017 BIMtopics conference, several influential • our 7 critical speakers and panels discussed their journey • 3 engaging panels towards BIM adoption in ASEAN, with a focus on mega projects taking place in Malaysia. This attracted over 55 industry leading companies.

Will you be part of the conference this As we July? look ahead, the BIM Conference 2018 will

discuss the next step for public and private-sector organisations — the implementation of BIM. What challenges does this present, and what skills are required to embed BIM in your organisation?

Find out at ourFind July out conference more atrics.org/bimmalaysia rics.org/bimmalaysia

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 31

32 RICS.ORG/MODUS

Cities

What can cities like Durban do to ensure they protect natural environments as they continue to grow?

What can cities like Nairobi do to encourage a low-carbon economy?

How can cities such as Lagos build more affordable housing to keep pace with their growing populations?

What can cities like Mexico City do to ensure supplies of drinking water?

How can sprawling cities with growing slum populations like São Paulo create safer and more affordable neighbourhoods?

What can cities like New York City do at a local level to make a meaningful contribution to global issues like climate change?

What new ideas can cities like Toronto use to help increase the appeal of low-carbon transport such as walking, cycling and public transport?

How can cities like Washington DC protect rivers and the natural environment from pollution?

How can cities like Hong Kong provide the affordable housing they need to attract young talent?

How can coastal cities like Mumbai better protect their populations from the increased threat of flooding?

What new ideas can help rapidly growing cities like Delhi reduce the number of slum dwellers?

Cities like Beijing have already taken steps to improve air quality. What more can they do to ensure cleaner air as they expand?

How can rapidly growing cities like Shanghai adopt innovations such as gamification to improve energy efficiency further?

How can cities with declining populations like Tokyo attract the talent they need to remain competitive?

What innovative ideas can help developed cities like Melbourne cope with future waves of population growth?

How can disaster-struck cities such as Christchurch attract the people, investment and entrepreneurs they need to rebuild?

What more can densely populated cities like Singapore do to cope with ongoing urban growth?

What new ideas can help cities like Glasgow tackle high levels of homelessness?

How can cities like Milan reduce the space required for car parking to make more room for green spaces or affordable housing?

What can popular tourist cities like Amsterdam do to ensure they remain great places to live for residents?

How can cities undergoing rapid regeneration like Budapest ensure that local communities share the benefits of infrastructure spending?

What can cities with poor air quality like London do to make their air cleaner?

How can growing cities like Manchester use smart technology and data to increase the quality of life and work for their inhabitants?

How can cities in the Gulf Cooperation Council diversify from petrochemicals and embrace solar energy to combat climate change?

RESOURCE SCARCITY C L I M AT E C H A N G E R A P I D U R B A N I S AT I O N

ANSWER THE BIG QUESTIONS Modus is all about the big questions, and now there’s an opportunity to have your voice heard over how these questions should be answered – and win a major grant in the process. The Cities For Our Future Challenge is a global competition run by RICS in partnership with Unesco.

If you’re a professional or student involved in urban design, architecture, surveying or engineering, then share your transformative ideas for projects and policies that solve some of the defining challenges of our time: rapid urbanisation, climate change and resource scarcity.

The winner will receive a £50,000 grant and be mentored by industry experts to help make their concept a reality.

To find out more, visit citiesforourfuture.com

X X X X XQ1 X X2018_MODUS X X X 2016_MODUS A SI A 33

City vs country

Sustainability

Passivhaus might be a great way to build superefficient, eco-friendly homes, but its exacting standards are too expensive to work for volume housebuilders, right? Wrong, says Andy Pearson

PASSIV SCALE

B

ahnstadt in the city of Heidelberg, southwest Germany, is one of the most ambitious urban developments in Europe. More than €2bn is being invested in converting a 287 acre (116 ha) former freight-train terminal into a pioneering eco-community of around 5,500 people. The site is a mix of residential and commercial buildings, schools and shops.

When completed in 2022, this new district is expected to produce less than half the carbon dioxide emissions of a conventional city district. The reason? Bahnstadt is being built entirely to Passivhaus standards.

One of the blocks under construction on the campus is the 162-home Heidelberg Village, designed by Frey Architekiten. It is one of several large Passivhaus projects that the Freiburg-based architect is currently working on; the other notable examples

ILLUSTRATION MATT MURPHY

being in China. These include a 198 acre (80 ha) site at Qingdao on the east coast that will be Asia’s largest Passivhaus development, and a project to redevelop 21 acres (8.5 ha) of Zhuhai, in southern China, to Passivhaus standards.“The scale [of the Zhuhai scheme] is the biggest Passivhaus scheme our office has done,” says chairman Wolfgang Frey.

In the UK, Passivhaus development has largely been the preserve of a select group of small or self-builders. But several large-scale social housing projects currently nearing completion, among them 345 homes at Agar Grove in the London borough of Camden, and Norwich City Council’s 105-unit Goldsmith Street development, suggest a Passivhaus revolution might be under way.

Next year work is expected to commence on Exeter City Council’s Extra Care scheme of 55 Passivhaus homes for elderly residents.

The overarching principle of Passivhaus helps to explain its rising popularity among social housing providers. To be certified as a Passivhaus, a home must have an annual heating and cooling demand of not more than 15kWh/m2/year. In other words, the energy required to keep the property at a comfortable temperature is so small that a traditional heating system is no longer essential in a northern European climate.

The upshot for Exeter council’s housing development manager, Emma Osmundsen MRICS, is that “60% of our tenants in

Passivhaus homes haven’t switched their heating on in the last seven years”. The opportunity for occupants to reduce fuel bills, coupled with the savings in running costs from not having to maintain a heating system, partly informed Camden’s decision to specify Passivhaus at Agar Grove as well.

But while lowering heating bills without sacrificing tenants’ comfort is an attractive proposition for social housing providers, the oft-cited argument against Passivhaus is that construction costs are greater than that of a conventional home. It is, however, an argument that appears to be losing credence as its use becomes more prevalent.

“We always used to say it was an 8%-10% premium to build to Passivhaus, because you have to use high-quality components like triple-glazed windows,” says Richard Broad, an associate at the Passivhaus Trust UK. “But Exeter [council] has managed to build some of its schemes at the same cost as a standard build.”

Gary Stenning, housing development officer and certified Passivhaus consultant at Exeter council, explains: “On our first schemes we probably paid a premium, but not any more. When we compare our build costs on BCIS, the cost of building a Passivhaus is now within the range for a typical Building Regulations-compliant home.” The reason for the improvement, he says, is that the council employed the »

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 35

Sustainability

WHEN WE COMPARE OUR BUILD COSTS ON BCIS, THE COST OF BUILDING A PASSIVHAUS IS NOW WITHIN THE RANGE FOR A TYPICAL BUILDING REGULATIONSCOMPLIANT HOME

GARY STENNING Exeter City Council

same designer on its first three Passivhaus schemes, which enabled the team to “take the learning through a number of iterations”.

Stenning cautions against a simple comparison of capital costs for a Passivhaus project against a conventional housing development, because the Passivhaus homes will use far less energy over their lifetime.

Research carried out by sustainable building consultant Encraft in 2014 showed that in most scenarios – and even if the build was 10% more expensive – a Passivhaus will have lower whole-life costs than a traditional new-build. Archie Corliss, a consultant at Encraft, says that three years on, these findings still hold true: “Since the research was published, the cost of Passivhaus components has been falling in the UK as it becomes more mainstream.”

B

uilding Passivhaus apartments at Heidelberg Village in blocks made it more economical and easier to achieve compliance than if the same number of domestic-scale properties had been built, says Frey. “Ten single Passivhaus homes have more external surface than a multiPassivhaus block with equal usable floor space, which means the heating and cooling loads will be lower in a multi-Passivhaus,” he explains.

The flipside of having a smaller surface area, particularly when it comes to roofing, is that there is less space for solar panels. So, in addition to the blocks’ roofs, Frey has also blanketed the walls with solar panels

36 RICS.ORG/MODUS

– including balconies. “The panels produce energy, provide shade in summer and in the case of the balconies they also act as guardrails,” he says.

Frey’s theory is backed up by postoccupancy research by the Passivhaus Trust, published in July 2017, which shows that for schemes of three or more homes, average heating demand was 8.8kWh/m2/year. This is compared with 13.1kWh/m2/year for schemes comprising one or two homes.

Arguably, of even greater importance than its low energy demand is the certification process that is central to Passivhaus, which is much more rigorous than in conventional procurement. The design, the manufacture of components, the construction process and, finally, the commissioning process, are all checked for Passivhaus compliance. This process is one of the reasons why it is one of the most reliable design and construction methods for low-energy buildings.

It is also the reason why Exeter council took the decision a decade ago to start specifying Passivhaus for its large housing schemes. “What we like about Passivhaus is that it is a quality-assurance standard, which means we can be sure that a design will perform as intended,” says Stenning.

Such a rigorous certification process usually comes at a price, because each unique thermal envelope has to be certified separately. But on large schemes, where buildings are identical in everything but orientation, costs will come down because a block of flats can be certified as one unit,

and much of the modelling can be reused.

“Certifying a large Passivhaus development will be cheaper on a per-unit basis, because there is a lot of replication,” says Corliss.

Leicester City Council made Passivhaus certification a planning requirement for East Midlands Homes’68-home development at Heathcott Road, in the Saffron Lane area of the city. The scheme, which won Residential Project of the Year in the East Midlands round of the RICS Awards 2017, comprises semi-detached and terraced homes orientated in various directions. Encraft modelled only the most challenging plots and subsequently developed four different fabric specifications to ensure all of the development’s homes met Passivhaus criteria. “Once the basic designs were set, we could see which would be the worstperforming buildings based on their orientation, which affects the amount of solar gain a building will receive,” explains Corliss. And, by modelling only the most challenging plots, fewer calculations had to be produced, which kept fees to a minimum.

H

eathcott Road is typical of large-scale Passivhaus projects in the UK, in that almost all have been developed either by councils or housing associations for social-rented use. However, the tide is starting to turn. At the end of last year Exeter City Council launched a wholly owned development company to build both affordable and market-rate Passivhaus homes. “We’ve identified 3,000 housing units we want to deliver as certified Passivhaus, as well as a commercial portfolio,” says Osmundsen. “We want to introduce Passivhaus at a much bigger scale to the marketplace, because currently it is nigh on impossible to buy one.”

Meanwhile, at Elephant and Castle in south-east London, developer Lendlease claims to have integrated Passivhaus standards into 15 homes at its Elephant Park regeneration project. The developer says these are the first new homes being built to Passivhaus standards in central London.

But perhaps more importantly, they are some of the first Passivhaus homes to be developed at volume for private sale. It is a brave move because, aside from occasional bursts of publicity on TV shows such as Grand Designs, most house buyers in the UK are unlikely to be aware of the potential benefits of living in a Passivhaus.

However, with councils putting greater emphasis on sustainability in their Local Plans, it may only be a matter of time before other developers start to look to Bahnstadt for their Passivhaus inspiration. n

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Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 37

C T A HT W H

Infrastructure

IS

C E A P S

Adaptive reuse

They’re usually big, often ugly and increasingly empty.

They also occupy some of the most valuable patches of real estate in our cities. And we’re not the only ones who think multistorey car parks could be put to better use

Words Adam Branson

Y

ou’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape,”observed Michael Caine at the start of seminal British gangster film Get Carter. Fast-forward 40 years, and he could have been speaking about one of his co-stars: the brutalist, multistorey car park that once glowered at Newcastle from its perch across the Tyne in Gateshead. By the end of 2010 it had been razed to the ground.

In retrospect, it is debatable whether the car park’s demise led to an improvement in Gateshead’s aesthetic appeal. The site was subsequently redeveloped into the Trinity Square shopping and leisure centre, which went on to win Building Design’s Carbuncle Cup in 2014. The award, it goes without saying, celebrates the ugliest development of the year.

The story is, however, indicative of an issue facing many urban centres: how to deal with the plethora of concrete multistorey car parks that sprang up in the 1950s and 60s when we were in thrall to the automobile, and which many now regard as outdated and unnecessary blots on the landscape.

An under-reported research paper from JLL, Car Parks to Residential: Driving Innovation, published in January last year, suggested that many could be put to better use. It noted that investment in public transport, greener council policies and the rise of alternative transport options such as Uber are collectively reducing the need for parking in urban centres. The potential of autonomous vehicles, it added, should only accelerate the trend: a 2015 OECD study, Urban Mobility System Upgrade, predicted the new technology could ultimately reduce car ownership by 80-90%. This declining »

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 39

Adaptive reuse

The Miami car park putting the “multi” into multistorey In most places the issue with concrete multistorey car parks is to work out how to make them more attractive, put them to better use or get rid of them entirely – but that is not a universal view. In Miami Beach, for example, the decision was made to build a brand-new example of the form. This was no brutalist monstrosity, however. Rather, 1111 Lincoln Road (below) was – and remains – a genuinely positive addition to the streetscape, designed by internationally renowned architect Herzog & de Meuron. In addition to providing space for idle vehicles, the structure hosts parties, yoga classes and weddings – and includes on its uppermost level an apartment designed for its proprietor, local developer Robert Wennett.

Longer-term – but still temporary – uses for multistoreys are also popping up. Frank’s Campari Bar, designed by Paloma Gormley – daughter of sculptor Sir Antony – and arts organisation Bold Tendencies, currently occupies the top level of a car park in the centre of Peckham, south London, but more is about to be delivered in the form of the Levels project.

In 2015 Southwark Council put out a tender seeking ideas for alternative uses for the remaining floors of the car park. A fierce battle ensued between two of the capital’s most exciting young entrepreneurs: Rohan Silva, co-founder of flexible working space Second Home and proptech firm Hubble, and Reza Merchant, founder of co-living developer the Collective.

In the end, Merchant won out with his proposal to provide space for the area’s thriving artistic community. The project has been delivered by Make Shift, a collaboration between Merchant’s Pop Community venture, and architect Carl Turner. “The car park has created an amazing platform for the arts during the summer months and our proposals seek to carve out spaces within the redundant middle floors of the building to extend these possibilities year round,” says Turner. Levels one to four have been turned into studios, workshops and shared workspace for young creative businesses, while levels five and six contain gallery, performance and event space. Make Shift’s lease is due to expire in 2022, at which point the council has mooted demolishing the car park – although if the project is successful that may not happen.

demand is forcing local authorities and their development partners to turn to alternative uses for multistorey car parks – whether that means demolition or something more creative. In the case of the latter, this has often involved finding temporary, or “meanwhile” uses, while developers either waited out the global economic downturn or worked their way through the planning system.

In 2011, developer Cathedral Group – now rebranded as U+I after it was acquired by Development Securities – alighted on the idea of installing a pop-up cinema in the car

40 RICS.ORG/MODUS

park it intended to redevelop in Bromley, south-east London. Not only was the initiative a success in and of itself, says U+I’s deputy chief executive Richard Upton, it also played a crucial role in shaping the project.

“The meanwhile space let us experiment with uses on the site and to see how people related to the place,” says Upton. “By doing so, it helped us to shape the direction of the development that is now under way. The pop-up cinema was so well received, it was clear that there was a demand for a permanent one, which is now being built.”

IMAGE HUFTON + CROW AND MBEACH1, LLLP

A

n alternative theory has been put into practice in the US city of Atlanta, where in 2014 Christian Sottile, dean of the School of Building Arts at Savannah College of Art and Design retrofitted micro apartments into an existing car park. It is an interesting idea, but not without difficulties: how do you get natural light into the units?

Do they meet modern building regulations?

“The reality is that most developers would want to knock them down and rebuild,” says Grant Leggett, director at planning consultant Boyer. “When you’re refitting a building like that it would be difficult to build in all the sustainability credentials that residential developments now need. I suspect that councils would take a pretty hard line.”

Adaptive reuse

THE MEANWHILE SPACE LET US EXPERIMENT WITH THE SITE. BY DOING SO, IT HELPED US TO SHAPE THE DIRECTION OF THE DEVELOPMENT RICHARD UPTON U+I

Back in London, the City of Westminster certainly has. In August 2017, the council approved the demolition of Welbeck Street car park to make way for a 10-storey hotel. Despite calls for the brutalist icon to be saved, the planning committee was unmoved, stating that the loss “complies with transport policies and the principle of hotel use is acceptable in land use terms”.

The council’s decision makes sense in a city thronged with tourists that is struggling to hit air pollution targets. But Leggett argues that car parks still play an important

role in many local economies and are often a valuable source of revenue for cash-strapped councils. As a result, many authorities are likely to fight hard against any loss of provision. “Parking has a value,” he says. “[Housebuilder] St George is developing a pretty chunky scheme around a car park in Hammersmith town centre [in west London], but the parking is being retained.

The council understands that if it took the car park away it would kill the town centre.”

And yet, the trends identified in the JLL report, combined with rising urbanisation,

lead to the conclusion that sites occupied by car parks would be better used for residential purposes. The report identified 10,500 car parks in urban areas – 25% of which are multistorey – and concluded that, sensibly reworked, the space could accommodate 400,000 homes and a million residents.

One option would be to simply build above existing multistoreys, suggests the report’s author Nick Whitten, a director in JLL’s UK residential research team. But in most instances, he adds, a comprehensive redevelopment of sites is likely to lead to a better outcome – and one that need not necessarily lead to a loss of parking provision.

“We found some case studies where, through redevelopment, the number of spaces in existing car parks was increased,” says Whitten, referencing projects carried out by arms-length regeneration body the Bournemouth Development Company.

“On one scheme, it managed to retain 155 car park spaces and added a further 73 for residents, while building 113 homes.

It made the land work much harder.”

It appears that the UK government is thinking along similar lines. The housing white paper it published in February 2017 pledged to support the redevelopment of car parks in urban areas that have good public transport links. “The government is clearly cottoning on,” says Whitten. “If its priority is to provide more housing, then it needs to find land in the areas where there is demand.”

So while successful meantime use can be made of some under-utilised multistorey car parks, in most instances, the land they occupy can often be put to better use. Sure, the temporary uses might provide us with more excitement, but in the longer term, more prosaic societal needs will prevail. n

Q1 2018_MODUS A SI A 41

TAKING THE LONG VIEW The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau sea crossing links the three cities by the world’s longest bridge over water. Brendon Hooper reports

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SPANNING A LIFETIME Engineers have overcome the challenges of complex weather and geological conditions, such as prevailing winds and tidal force, to create a structure built to last 120 years

When is a bridge not quite a bridge? How about when the bridge, halfway across, turns into an underwater tunnel? Expected to complete in the second quarter of 2018, after an eight-year construction period, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge (HZMB) is an extraordinary bridge-and-tunnel sea crossing, created to link the three biggest urban centres on China’s Pearl River Delta.

Starting from an artificial island close to Hong Kong airport, the project runs west to another artificial island off Macau. With a total length of just over 55km, the crossing now claims the record as the world’s longest over water – 20 times the length of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge – and includes a 6.7km tunnel, built 40m under the water to allow ships to pass overhead.

The RMB115.9bn ($17.5bn) transport link is a spectacular feat of engineering, which has also necessitated reclaiming vast amounts of land on both sides of the bridge.

“For land surveyors, it has been a very demanding project,”says Frankie Yip MRICS,

Case file

NAVIGATING NATURE An aerial of the main section of the bridge. Environmental issues were of great importance and navigation routes help safeguard the natural ecosystem

IMAGES ALAMY; DMC CONSTELLATION, UK-DMC2 IMAGE © 2016 AIRBUS DS

TAKING OFF The huge transportation clearance channel building, next to Hong Kong International Airport, is the start to a unique journey over and under water

senior land surveyor of the Hong Kong Border Crossing Facility (HKBCF) for Aecom. “First, because it is one of the first large-scale infrastructure projects to adopt building information modelling [BIM] in Hong Kong, and second, due to the unstable condition of the HKBCF artificial island.”

Located to the north-east of Hong Kong International Airport, the facility’s transportation hub provides clearance facilities for goods and passengers using the crossing. The artificial island was reclaimed from around 1.3 km2 of open water, and reinforced by giant steel cylinders, each 23m in diameter and 55m high.

Conventional land reclamation techniques involve the dredging of marine mud from the seafloor, which can cause significant environmental damage. But for the first time in Hong Kong, the border crossing facility’s island was constructed using a non-dredge reclamation technique, whereby steel cylinders were inserted into the mud and filled with inert material,

forming a seawall. However, the method caused the island to physically shift, delaying the project. The Highways Department reported that parts of the reclamation shifted by up to six or seven metres.

“It was a huge challenge for our surveying teams,” explains Roy Lim MRICS, resident land surveyor at Aecom. “We needed to constantly update our survey control network to achieve the minimum accuracy limits for subsequent site activities, such as the insertion of the steel bore piles and the construction of the passenger clearance building. After installing monitoring points in various locations to detect land movements, it helped us build a more stable [pile cap] structure.” Although it has been stabilised, the reclaimed land is still settling by 40mm a week, adds Lim. Yip is confident of the benefits the project will bring. “The bridge has shortened the distance from Hong Kong to Macau and Zhuhai from 160km to just 30km,” he says.

The four-hour land journey from Hong Kong

to Macau could come down to half an hour, according to official estimates.“With such a time saving, there is no doubt it will benefit the development of Hong Kong’s economy, and increase social communication.”

As the crossing nears completion, behind the fanfare, the project has been at the centre of a controversy over working conditions and safety. Hong Kong’s Labour Department recorded five construction worker fatalities and 234 injuries between 2011 and 2016.

However, pro-democracy lawmakers have disputed these figures, arguing there have been at least nine deaths.

With the number of megaprojects of this nature on the rise in markets the world over, the role of construction and infrastructure professionals in upholding good practice and safeguarding worker safety has never been more important. It is therefore imperative that professional organisations such as RICS are at the forefront of efforts to ensure that much-needed infrastructure is not built at the expense of worker safety. n

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Careers / Business / Legal / Training

Foundations CAREERS When did meetings become such a chore? Time to restore them to the dynamic forums they were originally intended to be

HOW TO LEAD A MEETING

First there was “death by PowerPoint”, now there’s something far worse: “death by meeting”. Eric Barton, partner at management consultant Bain & Company, ought to know. His firm leads thousands of them each year, but he argues that unless they are run properly, they are a total waste of time. “The average manager loses 23 hours a week to meetings,” he says.

“Not only do most meetings ramble on, but they cut into the productive time people have outside them, which prevents projects from being completed on schedule.”

While no one would suggest there is no place for meetings in a modern workplace – particularly in the more collaborative industries – it is their pervasiveness and propensity to go off-piste that often annoy most. Volumes could be filled with examples of the almost desperate measures taken to try and make them productive – from businesses insisting they only last 15 minutes, to being done standing up to promote brevity, or even conducted as “walks” outside the office. But there are some easier wins – particularly to help steer conversations out of needless cul-de-sacs – even if you are not the de-facto leader.

“Virtually all meetings fail because there’s often no clarity about what the output is intended to be,” argues Susy Roberts, founder of people development consultant Hunter Roberts. “The more time people have, the more time they have to go off track, so it’s essential the meeting has a purpose: whether it’s to come to a decision, or to brainstorm ideas, or share information.”

Limit numbers You can’t lead if there are too many people.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos never invites more people than can be fed with two pizzas to any meeting.

Do your homework Getting yourself straight with everything you need to cover will present you as a credible, useful person in meetings. Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, demands that everyone sends her important materials in advance of any meeting.

Don’t be too forceful Keep meetings friendly by being conciliatory and understanding of people’s views, and make sure that you don’t appear too pushy when suggesting alternatives.

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“All meetings need an agenda, and any information that needs sharing needs to be done so in advance. This way, only the points of the meeting are what consume time,” adds James Allen, CEO of Creative Huddle. “Surprise information, or using time in the meeting to consider stuff that should have been looked at earlier, is wasted time.”

Both argue that despite all this, it is still possible for meetings to be creatively rewarding, and conform to how planners and architects expect them to be – which is a constructive exchange of ideas. However, they also agree control is the vital factor in preventing topic discussions from going astray. “If you’re not the leader, but you feel you’re moving away from the point of the meeting, interjecting is essentially about confidence,” says Allen. “But, that’s when you emphasise the expertise you bring.

If no-one else has your back, they’re just being spectators, and you need to move on.”

“The chartered surveyors with whom I have worked can often have fixed ideas about things,” adds Roberts, “so any redirecting needs couching in terms of presenting options, listening, and re-selling the skills you have, maybe by associating with things you have done before.

“Taking people back to the original output of the meeting is the fundamental aim,” she says. “You have to show empathy; it can’t be forceful, but it’s vital to suggest that exploring a new area is needed. And, just as important, if you know you can’t come to a conclusion there and then, suggest you need to move on to the next point on the agenda.”

The key, Allen argues, is simply to make sure what a meeting gets called for, gets covered: “The meeting is a necessary evil, just don’t make it worse than it has to be.”

ON RICSRECRUIT.COM How does someone just starting out in their career balance assertiveness with respect?

Follow our advice at rics.org/youngleader

WORDS PETER CRUSH ILLUSTRATION JACK BEDFORD PORTRAIT GRAHAM MACINDOE

PUT THE WOW IN POWWOW

Foundations

TIMELINE

1982 Joins the building industry on a youth training scheme 1986 Technical assistant, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council

MY WAY

David Baxter MRICS

MANAGING DIRECTOR, MITIG8 RISK MANAGEMENT, MIAMI

THE BEGINNING I left school in the UK in 1982, and because of the lack of permanent employment roles in Birmingham at the time, I enrolled on a year-long youth training scheme, to learn a trade as a general builder. I never really planned to have a career in real estate, but in 1986, I secured a job with Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council as a technical assistant. It opened up my eyes to the diversity of what the industry had to offer. Three years later, I became a maintenance assistant managing the portfolio of a local housing association.

1995 Moves to loss adjusting firm Ellis & Buckle

THE PRESENT After some years working at international loss adjusters Axis International, in 2007 I grasped the opportunity to start up another business in London, called Mitig8, which would blend insurance and building surveying. We offer loss mitigation control services, as well as technical post-damage inspections following disasters around the world. We opened an office in Miami in 2011, where I’m currently leading the firm as group president, and where I’m also the Chair of RICS Florida. It’s been a busy time after the damage wrought by recent hurricanes in the region.

2000 Completes BSc in building surveying, Birmingham City University 2001 Starts David Baxter Associates 2003 Director of construction, Axis International

THE FUTURE Big data and analytics are increasingly driving our industry. With that in mind, I’ve been busy launching a software company called iMitig8Risk. Accessible via an app and online portal, it aims to help insurers and underwriters manage construction and operational risk better, using key data to reduce insurance-related risk and claims. rics.org/davidbaxter

2007 Starts Mitig8, London 2011 Moves to Miami, Florida, to expand Mitig8

THE BREAKTHROUGH When one of the properties I managed for the housing association suffered major fire damage, I prepared the specification for the reinstatement of the damage. A loss adjuster suggested I’d be good at the job, so I moved to a loss adjusting firm called Ellis & Buckle in 1995, now Cunningham Lindsey. It was here that I found out about RICS, when I helped write competencies within the APC for the skills offered by insurance adjuster surveyors.

The experience spurred me to become chartered in 2000, and a year later I started “I never planned a career in real estate, my own surveying practice, specialising in insurance construction claims and but a job as a technical assistant opened hurricane damage assessments. my eyes to what the industry had to offer”

2016 Chair of RICS Florida

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BUSINESS You can’t predict the future, but a risk management plan will help you get there

KNOW YOUR UNKNOWNS

FIVE-POINT PRIMER

Risk is a simple concept with many meanings. This is a dangerous thing in business because it leads managers to think they have been crystal clear in a meeting, only for an employee, supplier or customer to walk out with a worryingly different understanding. And this is particularly dangerous when it comes to explaining to others how much risk you find acceptable in making your living.

The UK’s Institute of Risk Management (IRM) describes risk as “something uncertain – it might happen or it might not”. This is as good a start as any; it is brief but also shows what a wide-ranging task risk management can be. So, before getting started, understand what you want your business to achieve and how you are going to get there. Without this, it is impossible to assess what risks your company faces.

Michael Holden FRICS, who runs his own practice, says he started by doing an “environmental analysis”. “I wanted to place myself – in terms of market segmentation – where I would be in terms of my competitors, so I could look at offering something that provides a competitive advantage.”

This meant he could work out what risks he was comfortable with. For example, he explains,“the higher risks we avoided initially were things like volume-secured lending work. Now we’ve got enough surveyors to cope, we’ll look at picking up increased numbers of secured lending instructions.”

Draw a road map Work out what you want to achieve and how to get there.

Make a list Identify your potential risks – consult with staff, suppliers and clients.

Think of the consequences Consider how such a risk might manifest itself, and what parts of the business it might affect.

Know the score Evaluate the potential impact of a risk, the likelihood of its occurrence and how to mitigate its effect.

Be vigilant Don’t assume the job is finished at the end of the process – keep monitoring and assessing.

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IDENTIFY RISKS This is the open-ended bit of the process, and the most likely to go wrong. People who run small companies tend to spend a lot more time working “in” the business than “on” the business. They feel they lack the time to map out where they should be in five years time or, indeed, what is most likely to stop them getting there. But if you are head-down in the detail every day, it is likely that you will get surprised by something – one of your clients not paying their bills, for example.

While it is impossible to list all the risks the company might face – management consultants caution against “boiling the ocean” to show the futility of being too comprehensive – there is a happy medium.

Make sure you consult with colleagues, including those outside the firm, key customers and suppliers, and methodically list what they suggest. The IRM suggests using categories to avoid overlooking any risks, such as“strategic”,“project”,“financial” and “operational”.

You could phone or meet with people individually, you could convene a workshoptype meeting to do this, or you could run an online survey – there are numerous websites that let you do so for free.

ANALYSE RISKS Once you have your shortlist of the biggest and most worrying risks you face, you need to think about each one methodically. Work out what the most likely consequences are of the risk occurring, and what bits of your business they will most likely affect.

For example, if the government raises property taxes, what effect will that have in your area? How much of your business is dependent on this type of activity? By how

WORDS TIM STAFFORD ILLUSTRATION FAUSTO MONTANARI

Although this may seem an eminently sensible part of the business planning process, many small firms do not do it.

A survey last year by an organisation of insurance brokers did not find any firms with fewer than 10 employees with a formal risk management plan. This, the survey concludes, leaves them “often dangerously exposed to issues that in extreme cases could threaten business continuity”.

So it pays to spend time identifying the most likely risks to your business. Running a risk assessment comprises three stages, according to the ISO 31000 risk management standard, the world’s most widely recognised process. These are: identify risks, analyse risks and evaluate risks.

Foundations

LEGAL 101

much will that activity have to decline to make you rethink your cost base? Also, identify the risks that you do not understand well enough, and feel that you need to take advice on, or learn more about.

EVALUATE RISKS The easiest way is to score risks. Business advisory firm Gartner suggests three categories. First, score the potential impact of the risk – will it cost less than 5% of annual revenue or could it cost far more?

“I wanted to place myself [in comparison to my competitors in the market], so I could look at offering something that provides a competitive advantage” MICHAEL HOLDEN FRICS Will it harm your reputation? And will it stop you from operating the business, or part of the business? Second, how likely is the risk to occur? Third, have you got controls in place to mitigate the effects? This should get you a long way towards working out which risks are the most serious.

Finally, remember that an assessment never really ends. Paul Tacey, practice leader at Zurich Risk Engineering UK, says that risk assessments must “be living documents, embedded in the business”. You need to monitor the risks and reassess when needed.

Get this right and everyone in the company will be much clearer about what risks you are willing to take to build your company into the one that matches your vision.

CYBER SECURITY: KNOW THE RISKS One area of risk that is rising up companies’ agendas is the damage to reputation caused by a breach in cyber security.

Professional services firms are becoming a hot target for hackers around

the world. What is driving the trend and what steps can be taken to minimise reputational risk?

Howden, RICS’ preferred professional indemnity insurance and cyber liability broker, has provided an article on the subject, along with tips on how you can protect your company’s reputation in the event of a cyber-breach.

TO READ THE ARTICLE, go to rics.org/prohackz

REITs in Asia-Pacific: then and now JOHN LIM Group CEO, ARA Asset Management and chairman, Asia Pacific Real Estate Association, Singapore Real estate investment trusts (REIT) are a relatively recent phenomenon in Asia – covering, at best, the last few decades. Nevertheless, Asian markets have caught up very quickly, and possess such huge potential that they will one day leapfrog their predecessors. In fact, since 2010, the REIT market in the US has grown by almost 150%, while the market capitalisation of non-US REITs has more than doubled, according to research from EY. Although REITs were introduced to inject capital into the development industry during liquidity shortages, they are now seen as having a much broader positive impact: on the investment landscape, the property industry, capital markets, and the real economy of a country.

Securitisation laws and REIT regimes reflect the evolving role of these products.

Regional differences In the Asia-Pacific region, the most established REIT regimes are in Australia and Japan, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore – markets that have been established since the early 2000s. There are fundamental differences in structure at times. For instance, REITs in Hong Kong must be listed, whereas there is no such requirement in Australia.

Although there is some commonality in the REIT regulatory and tax frameworks in Asia, there

are marked differences, too.

In general, the regulatory frameworks governing REITs in the Asia-Pacific region follow a common theme.

REIT vehicles typically have a “pass-through” tax profile if they meet certain requirements, although there are subtle differences in terms of how prescriptive the requirements are.

Economic drivers The governments of China and India see REITs as nation-building vehicles that can help deliver ambitious urbanisation goals, as well as fuel social and economic development.

China is already exploring quasi-REITs in the form of asset-backed securities.

But market observers believe that regulations to kickstart the REIT market will be fast-tracked soon. In India, despite the passing of laws in 2014 to allow for the creation of REITs and InvITs (infrastructure investment trusts), and other reforms since, there are other tax and regulatory impediments to be ironed out.

The more-developed REIT markets in Singapore and Hong Kong have both passed amendments to their REIT codes in recent years relating to disclosure requirements, limits on development and aggregate leverage, and other operational provisions, heralding the healthy growth of both markets.

REIT regimes must and will continue to evolve according to the market environment and societal needs. As the manager of 12 listed private REITs in Asia, we aim to participate in the development of REIT markets in this region.

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CPD booster Related content from RICS

CERTIFICATE IN BIM: PROJECT MANAGEMENT Peter Morton (above) presents a distancelearning course covering the entire BIM project life-cycle, which can support you in becoming an RICS BIM manager. rics.org/bimmanagement ››CPD hours: 200 £895

UPGRADE TO THE LATEST MODEL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Mastering BIM is the natural next step for the experienced project manager looking to progress their career

Torch bearer This new approach to technologies, processes and behaviours has also created new roles, responsibilities and authorities. The BIM-enabled project manager, for example, now plays a crucial role in advising clients, and internal and external stakeholders on the benefits of BIM, and in implementing and managing BIM processes throughout the project life-cycle.

Engagement party Many clients are still disengaged from the BIM process, either through lack of knowledge or awareness.

Ultimately, they may not fully appreciate what they want to achieve TRAINING: ON DEMAND from using BIM on their The RICS Online Academy projects, or what value offers members a convenient can actually be realised. way to further their training This can leave clients as in a range of formats tailored passengers, rather than to suit their needs. Find out an integral part of the more at rics.org/ola process. It is the project 48

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manager’s role to engage clients and identify exactly what they want to achieve from BIM, and the purpose of any data requirements throughout the project life-cycle.

All together now A BIM-enabled project manager should demonstrate a deep knowledge of the BIM process, and be able to foster a positive and collaborative environment, in which a project can realise the full potential of BIM. It is also important to simulate the BIM life-cycle processes, both on the client side and the delivery side, before putting them into practice. Technical requirements have to be balanced with project management skills, so you can confidently implement a BIM methodology.

Mine of information It is vital to have a good command of delivery documentation, such as organisation information requirements, asset information requirements, employer’s information requirements (EIR) and the BIM execution plan, among others. The EIR is particularly important, as it enables you to communicate the client’s requirements to stakeholders in a clear, structured format.

PETER MORTON is a principal consultant at Turner & Townsend, and course tutor for RICS’ Certificate in Building Information Modelling (BIM): Project Management (above, right)

FIDIC CONTRACT MANAGEMENT – FOUNDATION Vincent Leloup of Exequatur (above) provides an overview of the main responsibilities when a project is governed by a FIDIC contract. rics.org/ fidicmanagement ››CPD hours: 1.5 £40

CONSTRUCTION PROJECT MANAGEMENT – VARIATIONS MANAGEMENT Tim Jones FRICS (above) presents a live web class on the best-practice contract procedures for the variation of a contract. rics.org/variations ››CPD hours: 1.5 £40

ILLUSTRATION MARINA MUUN

Empower tool Building information modelling (BIM) has brought greater efficiency to projects, added value for stakeholders and increased awareness of physical and data security. Its use empowers engaged clients to specify their asset requirements to achieve operational efficiencies with their built assets.

Foundations

EVENTS Full RICS events listings online at rics.org/events

HONG KONG

››RICS Awards, Hong Kong and Annual Dinner 23 March, Grand Hyatt Hong Kong The RICS Awards, Hong Kong celebrates excellence, professionalism, achievement and overall contribution of projects, teams and development to our built environment. The awards are open to everyone working within the property profession.

A presentation ceremony will be held at the RICS Hong Kong Annual Dinner. rics.org/hkawards ››RICS Hong Kong Annual Conference 2018 18 May, Grand Hyatt Hong Kong Hong Kong is poised to become a key economic driver for the success of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA). As China’s most internationalised metropolis, Hong Kong has an irreplaceable role among the 11 GBA cities in building the Greater Bay Area, and strengthening the connection between China and the world.

How can Hong Kong establish itself as the nucleus of the GBA? And how can it benefit from and contribute to GBA development?

This year’s conference will gather industry professionals and decision-makers to analyse how Hong Kong can leverage its edge to steer GBA development. Expert-led panels will explore a possible blueprint for Hong Kong to capitalise on the vast potential unleashed from future growth.

CPD: 7 hours HK$1,700 rics.org/hkconference

OCEANIA

››RICS Awards, New Zealand and Australia 17 May, Hilton Auckland; 7 June, Plaza Ballroom, Melbourne Recognising outstanding achievement, teamwork and companies at our biggest networking event of the year.

More than 300 professionals from land, construction, real estate and infrastructure will come together with their clients to showcase excellence in the built environment.

In our 150th year, we celebrate with several new categories that showcase the achievements of RICS professionals, including the Women of the Built Environment Award, to recognise and promote professionals from all disciplines of the industry; and the Lifetime Achievement Award, recognising eminent commitment to RICS and the wider profession. rics.org/awardsoceania

CHINA

››RICS Awards China 4 May The RICS Awards China showcase the most inspirational initiatives and developments in China’s land, real estate, construction and infrastructure.

The awards celebrate the achievements and successes of RICS professionals and their impact on local communities.

The RICS Awards China was one of the first to recognise and celebrate the highest levels of industry achievement in China. It has since become an essential date in professionals’ calendars. Each year, we attract hundreds of entries that exemplify the talent, dedication and innovation of individuals and teams across all sectors.

It is the perfect opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the extraordinary breadth and depth of the work of RICS professionals. rics.org/awardschina

RICS WORLD BUILT ENVIRONMENT FORUM SUMMIT

23-24 April, Intercontinental London – the O2, London

SINGAPORE

››Smart Buildings Conference 2018 15 March, Holiday Inn Singapore Looking forward to 2020 and beyond, migration to cities will result in rapid economic and social change which is transforming the built environment Expansion of these cities contributes an estimated 70% of the world’s energy-related greenhouse gases.

As the world rapidly urbanises, the pressure to increase sustainability is on. Developers, policymakers, landlords and architects are already integrating sustainability criteria into buildings, cities and homes.

Riding on Singapore’s Smart Nation Initiatives, this conference – held in conjunction with REDAS – will look at some of the technologies available today to create smart buildings. Topics covered will include smart and sustainable initiatives in Singapore, smart design integration of buildings, transformation of existing buildings and the importance of technology providers in data collection.

CPD: 6 hours SG$350 rics.org/smartbuildings

This two-day, flagship summit, developed with internationally renowned and respected industry figures, will explore the transformative impact of digitalisation on global economic models and the consequences for cities and surrounding regions. Discussions will focus on the commercial strategies needed to harness the enormous potential of the 21st century’s people and places. Keynote speaker JB Straubel, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tesla, will discuss how new forms of transport and energy storage are influencing urban design. rics.org/wbef

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Mind map

WHAT’S THE FUTURE OF PROPERTY DATA?

But if they can get it all quickly, then the process can made be much faster, and will give property owners better valuations. If you don’t have to worry about the data, the analysis can be started immediately.

Wilfrid Donkers MRICS Director, financial advisory services, Deloitte Netherlands

At present, it takes a valuer a lot of time to collate all the information needed for a valuation.

In the future, we’ll see data partnerships in the real estate industry start to evolve. This will help bring about much more robust real estate data. Open access to data will also allow start-ups to flourish.

For example, in the Netherlands, by 2024, all relevant information such as zoning, permits and regional plans will be available to a user, just by clicking on a map.

ILLUSTRATION GIANMARCO MAGNANI

But standardisation could also threaten business models. Valuers and those involved in due digilence will need to evolve their processes accordingly.

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Summit London 23–24 April 2018 InterContinental London – The O2 Global strategic thinking and practical solutions to the most pressing challenges of our changing world.

Keynote address

JB Straubel, co-founder and CTO, Tesla

A global leader in large-scale solar and energy storage and electric vehicles, Tesla’s JB Straubel will highlight the role of innovative technology in creating disruptive business models.

Join the discussion about this rapidly changing sector. Register now at rics.org/wbef