in a climate of political uncertainty and volatility, the development...
TRANSCRIPT
In a climate of political uncertainty and volatility, the development sector has been under increasing pressure. Notwithstanding this, there is a range of exciting development projects that are coming to the fore that demonstrate the UK’s commitment to drive forward growth and prosperity. Without world class infrastructure, exemplar transport, sustainable communities and interesting places to work, we won’t be competitive.
At Atkins, our team is involved in a variety of the UK’s most transformational projects. From over station development to making the case for infrastructure investment, we’re playing a significant role in unlocking assets and creating growth and lasting value.
In this magazine, we’ve gathered together thoughts and opinions from our development experts across the sector. Whether it’s optimising the infrastructure in and around stations or using modern methods of construction to build more homes, we’ve touched on a number of key topics shaping our communities today. If you have any comments on the articles, please do get in touch.
From the editor
James RoseCities and Development Director [email protected]
James RoseCities and Development DirectorJames is market director for Atkins’ cities and development market. James joined Atkins in 2014 and has held director and board level leadership positions with recognised international multi-disciplinary consultants in the property, development and infrastructure market sectors.
Helen DiasTechnical Director, Planning Helen joined Atkins in 2018 as a technical director. She is a Chartered Planner and Surveyor with over 35 years’ experience, primarily in planning and development delivery and applied economic consultancy and property market research.
Caroline ParadiseHead of Design Research Caroline applies knowledge from other industries to advance design across numerous sectors. During her career, she’s explored new construction methods through materials science and has applied neurosciences to better understand human responses to the built environment.
Richard WeeksAssociate DirectorRichard is the Commercial & Residential Sector Lead for the UK structures practice He is a structural engineer with experience working on a range of new-build, extension and refurbishment projects for both public and private sector clients.
Joanne FarrarDirector of PlanningJoanne is a Town Planning Consultant with over 20 years’ experience in urban and rural planning and development in both the public and private sectors in the UK and overseas. Joanne heads up our Planning team and has significant experience managing site appraisals, planning applications, EIA’s and appeals.
Richard CoburnDirector, Advisory & Economics Richard Coburn is our director of urban and regional economics. His role focuses on the economic and business case for potential investments in major infrastructure and development projects and assessing the economic impact of such projects.
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The challengeThere’s no hiding behind the fact that the housing market is broken, and the stark reality is that not enough homes are being built across the UK. Although the housing and affordability crisis is particularly prevalent in London, it is affecting urban centres across the UK, and there is a pressing need to think creatively about how we address this.
The opportunityWith recent and impending changes to funding and other regulations giving councils new powers to deliver the homes needed, the challenge is becoming how to identify areas and land at scale that can be planned to create new sustainable communities. The “Smart City” has evolved from technology driven solutions to encompass a more holistic, people-centred approach where local communities are engaged with to help plan and design resilient and smart urban quarters.
The current approachSome obvious places are the current focus of planning and political attention for new development such as locations near new infrastructure and urban extensions. However, increasingly, the focus has turned to redeveloping industrial and employment land. Although this can unlock land value
uplift to fund delivery, there is increasing evidence that co-location is not a panacea. In London at least, the rapid and unforeseen loss of employment land is having grave consequences – the lack of space for businesses that serve the London economy has led to unprecedented rises in rents and falls in yields. If employment land is released, planning policy needs to be more considered, and it needs to take an economic development-led approach.
What are the answers to addressing the housing shortage whilst ensuring that balanced and sustainable communities are created?What is required is a fundamental change in mindset amongst professionals working in the built environment about where and how to deliver new housing. Much more needs to be done to design and deliver attractive new higher density and smart urban quarters within existing urban areas. But a pre-requisite is a political will, both nationally and locally. Well-designed infill and major regeneration schemes can not only improve community areas, but they also have the potential to supply many more homes and jobs.
There are major challenges around how we engage with resident and decision makers to identify major urban
regeneration areas and we need to take a systematic approach to identify possible redevelopment areas, particularly in inner and suburban areas. Most importantly the public sector needs to have the vision and the political will to take the lead by acquiring major redevelopment sites to ensure delivery. But in doing this, they need to engage with residents and owners from the earliest stages to involve them in the decision making. Faster delivery of housing through public sector-led urban redevelopment has to be backed by a fundamental rethink around compulsory purchase and how property owners and residents are compensated in ways which do not fragment existing communities.
New sustainable and smart communities can be established in failing inner urban and suburban areas, it just requires creative ways of thinking and approaching planning and delivery. A new people-centred approach is needed to maximise development potential and create vibrant places within tired parts of our towns and cities that are attractive to the community, residents and investors alike.
Where’s the land? Addressing the shortfall of housing delivery in the UK
Helen Dias Technical Director, Planning
The human, digital connectionYou’d be hard pushed to find a designer that would say they didn’t take a human-centred approach to design. We all want to create spaces that work for people. There also won’t be many designers who aren’t aware that technology is transforming the way we work.
What is often missing is a true understanding of the connection between these two elements – the human and the digital. What is the value a digital approach brings to the spaces we create for people? Is it analysis? Creating virtual environments? Interactive stakeholder engagement? Accurate monitoring of building performance? Or digital twins?
For me, it is all of these things. It’s about knowing more about people and how they respond to their environments. Technology can help us understand this better. It can help us understand ourselves better.
What we should be asking ourselves is: What insight can technology give us that we don’t currently fully understand?
We explored this question in our ‘Key to the City’ proposal. As designers, we want to get people more engaged with their environment. Key to the City, an Atkins/Schréder collaboration, uses digital platforms to achieve this.
The output is an app that unlocks the hidden layers of culture and history in the city, providing users with unique augmented reality experiences within the public realm.
The app encourages people to engage with their environment, both with other people and the city around them. The ultimate outcome is people who are more aware of the value of the public realm, particularly green space, and who care about, and are invested in, the place they live.
As well as working with technology partners to develop solutions applicable today, our teams are looking into the future and exploring how advanced technology could transform the high street. ‘Unhindered’, a concept Atkins created for Croydon’s istreet competition, is about how we can use technology to create high streets fit for the future.
It uses technology to not only create responsive designs, but to understand the specific human needs those designs are responding to. It imagines a high street that can predict when someone wants to sit or park their bike, where sidewalks automatically widen to accommodate more pedestrians. The outcome here isn’t a high tech high street; it’s a high street that makes people feel at home, built to respond to their needs.
To ensure we derive the optimum solutions, Atkins is pulling together
diverse, multi-skilled teams including behavioural psychologists, data scientists, digital developers and UX designers as well as architects and engineers. We are also investing in developing our own digital tools, like our human-centred design tool that won the AJ100 Best Use of Technology Award, that provide our teams and clients with data and insight into the complex world of building performance and user experience. The earlier we do this in a project, the more informed our decision making and certainty in the success of the ultimate built solution.
What’s interesting about the examples mentioned isn’t the technology itself, but the outcomes they achieve. As designers today, we aren’t just creating spaces, we’re shaping the way data and digital tools can improve the places we live in. We’re the piece of the puzzle that can connect the human to the digital.
This article first appeared in the NLA’s New London Quarterly magazine.
Caroline Paradise Head of Design Research
With limited budgets and growing populations, we can’t take new infrastructure provision for granted anymore – we need to know we’re investing in the projects that will bring the greatest impacts.
Station developments can transform the property market in an area by unlocking housing and opening up opportunities for new jobs, directly and indirectly. They can be the catalyst for new offices, retail spaces and homes and a general uplift in value of the land.
Recent major projects, in both London and the North, have been a step change in transport infrastructure. They’ve changed the way we see stations and pushed us to think not of a station or
a rail line, but of transport-oriented development – the station as a catalyst for growth, regeneration and reinvention of overlooked parts of the city. Previous transportation projects have been heavily focused on capacity and connectivity; these projects have been more all-encompassing, looking to deliver transport benefits and drive wider social and economic benefits right from the start of the project. So what can we learn from recent transport infrastructure projects for the planning of future infrastructure?
1. Over station and adjacent station development needs to be considered from the beginning, whether that’s
how we create new stations or improve what’s already there. We need to consider what new residential and commercial units we could create above or around stations whilst delivering a world-class station.
2. We also need to look at how we can improve all of the connections to a station, from the bus to the walking and cycling routes. Well-designed public realm is hugely important in delivering safe and healthy connections, and it’s a very visible benefit to the public.
3. We need to be clear on the wider social, economic and environmental costs and benefits in the business case. We need to clearly communicate from
the start why the scheme is worth doing. It’s important that the public understand that the ultimate impact is much more than new stations and a rail line. So even if it takes some extra time and resource to get the project over the line, people can appreciate that the benefits will outweigh the cost.
4. Large scale transport infrastructure investment will impact different places in different ways. In some areas the impact is one of reinforcing market strengths (this is particularly the case for Central London), whilst in other areas improved transport connectivity can have a transformational effect on the regeneration of areas that have not been the focus of recent significant
development activity. This is important for changing the perceptions of these areas and helping to justify both a step change in development density and the mix and type of land uses.
5. To make the most of these schemes we need to ensure that the economic impact trickles down to everyone. It’s often argued that if housing values increase, it can potentially push people out of the area. This means we need to ensure we’re providing enough affordable housing of the right type (both size and tenure) to meet housing needs as part of residential developments that are unlocked by transport schemes. Viability will always play a big part in the level
of affordable housing delivered, so maximising affordable housing on public sector land, and capturing more value for public benefit from transport infrastructure investments is key.
With these five principles in mind, we can ensure that future transport projects have social and economic impact at their very heart.
When we talk about new infrastructure projects nowadays we don’t just talk about new spaces or better transport. We talk about impact. And more precisely, what impact the infrastructure will have on our economy and ultimately us as citizens.
Lessons learned from stations planning
Joanne Farrar Director of Planning
The rising value of property, the decreasing availability of developable land and the inherent transport connectivity of station sites means that, on paper at least, over rail or over station development (OSD) is becoming an increasingly attractive prospect for developers. But the reality of delivering these schemes is often much harder.
The railway is logistically and operationally complex to work in, so whilst many OSDs are technically feasible, it is often difficult to unlock their commercial viability. Having worked on numerous complex OSD schemes, I believe there are three fundamental engineering principles for every scheme: integration, flexibility and phasing.
Integration The traditional response to enabling OSD is to build over the railway with long-spanning structures that minimise interaction with the infrastructure below. But this can be costly and may unnecessarily limit the massing, quality and value of the development above.
This approach may be driven by a team that is overwhelmed by the challenge of working within the railway and does not understand how doing so can enhance value and quality, reduce cost and risk, and improve safety.
Engaging with the railway environment, understanding what can and cannot be achieved within it, and integrating the development and infrastructure can shape the optimum scheme that extracts best value from the site. We need to think optimal rather than viable, and of rail-integrated, rather than air rights, development.
Flexibility When it comes to flexibility, it is critical to understand that the optimum development will change with time. As density increases and planning policy evolves, we must ensure that complex over-rail or over-station sites are enabled with this in mind. To maximise the return on a site, we need to enable the scheme that could be built, rather than the scheme that
can be built now. And this flexibility need not incur significant additional cost if the engineering solution is developed intelligently, understanding where enhanced capacity can be economically provided in new structures and how spare capacity in existing structures can be used.
Phasing Delivery phasing must be considered a key part of the technical engineering solution and is critical when assessing the viability of larger OSD schemes. Cash flow will typically be a key assessment criterion when reviewing a range of technical solutions and delivery phasing strategies.
OSD schemes will often be unlocked by identifying an early release plot and associated usage that requires minimum upfront spend on enabling works, and secures the capital required to fund subsequent phases which might rely on costlier and more time consuming enabling works.
The most successful OSD schemes are not usually those driven solely by commercial viability, or indeed solely by technical and design considerations, but those that allow the technical solution to respond to and solve the commercial challenges of the site.
OSD schemes are already beginning to change the shape of our cities. But the challenge of delivering a commercially viable scheme on these complex sites calls for a different way of thinking that requires closer collaboration between the commercial appraisal and technical solutions. If we want to make these schemes work in London and beyond, we need to be willing to approach risk, viability and future proofing as an engineer would.
Richard Weeks Associate Director
The neglected value of infrastructure investment
In the UK, there are rigorous and world-renowned appraisal methodologies spearheaded by the Department for Transport, which have been developed and refined over many years to measure the relative costs and benefits of transport proposals. Whilst these methodologies are sound for this purpose, they remain timid in addressing the broader and less direct benefits of infrastructure investment.
Research has already demonstrated that the impact of transport improvements are wide-ranging; from user-benefits to productivity effects to employment.
However, to capture the full benefit of investment, I believe our appraisal
systems need to be extended and made more flexible to embrace fully the impact of infrastructure investment on things like business location decisions alongside dependent land-use changes, regeneration and place-making effects. For some infrastructure schemes, these ‘neglected’ benefits are substantial.
Could investors attract a premium for maximising social and economic impact in their plans and designs? Would schemes be more politically acceptable if we communicated social value? Could we create better JVs between the public and private sector if we blended their objectives to the overall benefit of end-users, communities and local economies?
There are many challenges to putting in place appraisal techniques which objectively and fairly assess the relative benefits and costs of infrastructure proposals. These include the problems of defining the benefits of a proposed infrastructure scheme; establishing a sound counterfactual (what would have happened in the absence of the infrastructure being built); and providing evidence that the effects of proposals are net additional to national economies.
The main challenge, however, is to overcome the existing constraint that all schemes are assessed in isolation of their local economic and political context. At Atkins, our approach to advising governments, investors and
scheme promoters is to build an evidence base and narrative that fully embraces local factors which sit along-side robust estimates of additional value capture. We consider that a straight-jacket approach to value estimation will continue to simply reinforce market forces, do little to re-balance the economic geography of countries, and prevent investors from making healthy returns whilst also delivering tangible social benefits.
To capture the benefits our appraisal systems have largely neglected, it’s imperative our business case assessments address the neglected value of infrastructure investment.
Investment in infrastructure is universally agreed to be a primary ingredient in the facilitation of economic growth and diversification, irrespective of where in the world such investment takes place. What is often missed from this conversation is that the appraisal systems put in place to estimate future ‘value’ or ‘benefit’ for investments are typically so rigid that local and regional socio-economic circumstances are effectively removed from the calculation.
Richard Coburn Director, Advisory & Economics
› A clear local economic context which describes issues such as previously lost inward investment and market failure alongside critical sectoral, labour market and economic performance data and forecasts.
› Focus on additionality and displacement effects at a metropolitan or regional level for localities which are acknowledged as being priority policy areas for economic investment and growth.
› A clear path for future potential land-use changes and spatial distributional impacts.
› Acknowledge the complementary effects associated with other physical and social projects in the area.
› Embrace the disclosure of various economic and financial scenarios used to test and explore optimum solutions.
› Establish an economic and financial modelling framework based on user-benefit calculations which flexibly allow local and regional effects to be captured and factored into cost:benefit measurements.
6 ways to ‘make the case’ for investment
PROCUREMENT MADE SIMPLEThe public sector now has direct access to SNC-Lavalin’s Atkins business, one of the world’s most respected design, engineering and project management consultancies.
Under the Crown Commercial Service’s Project Management and Full Design Team Services framework Atkins can provide a broad range of architectural, civil and structural engineering, building services engineering and many further non-core services, all under a single contract and Customer User Agreement.
Discover how we can help you plan, design and enable your projects and major capital programmes through the Government’s main infrastructure framework.
atkinsglobal.com/ccs
DESIGN SERVICES FOR THE PUBLIC SECTOR
Atkins releases first images of Newcastle Central Station development works The first images of the Newcastle Central Station development have been released. Created by Atkins, these images show the transformation of the station to improve connections with the Stephenson Quarter and the Forth Yards Development Areas to promote economic growth.
Atkins is the lead consultant for the project, working in partnership with Newcastle City Council, London
North Eastern Railway, Network Rail and local specialists in town planning and heritage. The team is providing a wide range of services, including architecture, to unlock the development potential of the surrounding area, and improve passenger and visitor experiences in and around the station.
The station has seen passenger numbers grow steadily since 2011 with 8.7 million passenger movements recorded in 2017/18, predicted to increase to 12 million by 2023. In the longer term, the station revitalisation will provide a number of regeneration
opportunities including new homes, business premises and leisure and recreation facilities.
For more information contact Mike Gardner, Project Director.
Atkins and Faithful+Gould appointed to £100m multidisciplinary framework with Homes England Atkins and Faithful+Gould have been appointed by housing delivery organisation Homes England to a multidisciplinary framework to support their ambition of creating new communities across England and building up to 300,000 new homes per year.
Over the next four years, Atkins will support Homes England in de-risking sites, promoting better placemaking, maximising the value of sites, improving public engagement, and streamlining the consent process to accelerate the delivery of new neighbourhoods. As one of 20 appointed framework members,
Atkins has qualified to deliver technical and site investigation; engineering design; architecture and landscape design; planning, consultation, masterplanning and urban design; and construction design and management. Faithful+Gould has been appointed to provide cost management and development monitoring services.
As part of the framework, Atkins will be offering its award-winning human centred design service, which
incorporates an innovative approach to stakeholder engagement and cutting-edge interactive stakeholder engagement technology, to improve communication and decision making, and ensure wellbeing is at the centre of building design.
For more information contact Jo Farrar, Technical Director.
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