Signals of the Future: from Connecting Citizens to Repurposing Department Stores
I had a break from writing my Friday Linkedin blog on futures insights for cities and the built environment. I have been completely immersed in a major project on the future of the university (more on that anon). Now I’m back in the saddle. Here’s a bumper set of Futures insights from the last month, including supermarket homes, negotiating noise, and making adaptability a virtue.
Old Stores, New Life
What to do with an empty department store? These shops became a feature of our high streets from the mid-19th Century, changed the nation’s shopping habits, and became part of our culture. One-hundred-and-fifty years on, undercut by discounters and online shopping, these iconic stores are closing one by one.
Lots of novel uses have been found. We have seen a BHS repurposed as a university campus, (Hastings); El Corte Inglés adapted into a health centre, (Valencia); a JCPenney becoming a co-working space, (Austin); a Galeries Lafayette converted into a vocational training centre, (Toulouse); a Sears turned into a public library, (Seattle); a Woolworths refashioned as a community space. (Dorchester); and Whiteley’s (where my uncle Philip worked in the furniture department) transformed into a luxury hotel, (London).
The latest metamorphosis is the Debenhams in the centre of Oxford, which is making the transition from haberdashery to laboratory. The Crown Estate, with partners, will transform the former store into 100,000 sq.ft of life sciences, technology and innovation workspace at the heart of the city, providing much needed new lab space.
Given the breakthroughs that Oxford science has produced — from antibiotics to adaptive optics, from covid vaccines to cryo-electron microscopy — will we see the next world-changing innovation coming from an erstwhile Debenhams department store?
Sound Versus Noise
In cities, one person’s sound is another person’s noise. I was listening, yesterday, to Lohan Presencer of Ministry of Sound describing his battles to protect the nightclub against encroaching development and gentrification.
Ministry of Sound has been a feature of London nightlife for three decades (I well remember first visiting in the early ’90s) but has been constantly threatened by re-development around Elephant and Castle. New flats are built cheek-by-jowl. The new residents (who can vote in council elections) complain. The nightclub then has to justify its existence.
This is happening to music venues across the land. Already struggling with spiralling costs and people spending less, they face additional pressures from the development of new homes around them. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing per week in the UK.
As we densify our cities and build hundreds of thousands of new homes on brownfield sites, this problem will get worse. And of course, the conflict won’t just be around music venues. There are cultural, class and age differences, too. One person’s banging tunes are another person’s headache. And because we have a very culturally-determined response to sound, ethnic minority groups are disproportionately challenged for the noise they make.
Part of the problem of noise in the city is that planners and developers don’t pay enough attention to sound. Acoustic barriers, new materials, proper insulation and green infrastructure can all help. As can sensitivity about where things are sited.
Cities can’t and shouldn’t be silent. How we negotiate between the sounds that are part of the character and culture of a place, the unwanted noise of traffic, planes, and — increasingly — drones, and people’s need for some quiet will be a big challenge for our densifying cities in the future.
Supermarket Homes
Asda, the UK supermarket giant, is turning to housing, with plans for 1,500 homes on a site in west London.
I’ve blogged before on John Lewis moving into build-to-rent and IKEA into modular homes. Asda is the latest big retailer to enter this market with plans for a mixed-use scheme, in partnership with Barratt London, on a 10-acre site which is home to an existing superstore.
The development will see a new 60,000sq ft shop, with homes surrounding it and built on a podium above the store. Asda promises high quality public realm, significant biodiversity net gains, and that 500 of the 1,500 homes will be affordable. The scheme has yet to get planning permission.
Supermarkets own huge parcels of land in strategic sites in and around cities. Unlocking this land for housing by densifying or building on top of stores could release dozens of brownfield sites for tens of thousands of homes. Watch out for this trend.
It is not clear how the retailers will brand their homes. For the overly class-conscious Brits, which supermarket you shop in is a solid social signifier. Will the same judgements apply to the choice of supermarket home?
Citizen to Citizen
I loved this portal to other cities that launched in Dublin this week. Open 24/7, it allows real-time interaction with ordinary people in another country. Initially, it is linked to New York; from July, it will connect with cities in Poland, Brazil, and Lithuania.
Back in the day, twinning cities was the thing, but it mostly seemed to involve the Mayor and the Chamber of Commerce going on jollies. Technology is being used here in such a playful way, for ordinary people to interact as part of the urban streetscape. Dubliners and New Yorkers are flirting, making rude gestures, having dance-offs. This is the randomness of the city.
In an increasingly globalised and virtual world, it is hard to develop a sense of global civic society. This project aims to use technology to connect citizens to citizens, leaving people to make of it what they will.
For Dublin, the city is promoted internationally using art, and this project makes the most of the character of the city — its friendly people and that warm Irish welcome. (If you want to see some videos just search for Dublin Portal).
I would love to see more technology enabling random citizen-to-citizen interaction — and also more celebration of the character and chaotic vibrancy of our city streets.
Flexible Re-Use
I was facilitating a futures discussion in Glasgow last week, and we were talking about how to future-proof development. Buildings last decades, even centuries. But the world — and what we require of our buildings — is changing ever more rapidly.
I think we need a two-pronged approach. There are some elements of the future for which we have some certainty — climate change, ageing populations, pervasive digital technology — so make those part of your new build or refurb. Other elements are less certain — working patterns, fashions, individual values — so build in flexibility to change the function, shape, and form. And of course, wherever possible, re-use existing structures to respect embodied carbon and heritage.
The building we were sitting in — Civic House — was a great example of this approach: an adaptive re-use of a 1920s print works, filled with people and energy, helping bring new life to the industrial area. Agile City, who run the building, had addressed a known future challenge by doing an innovative, low-cost, passivehaus retrofit. And the space is super-flexible, with co-working, a canteen, pop-up markets, and a multi-use events space.
The ethos of Agile City — activation, testing and learning — as they develop was evident in this building and the nearby Glue Factory: basing themselves in their own development so they can adapt responsively as things change; leaving some ‘meanwhile spaces’ for experimentation; seeing what the users (and the community around them) want and need, and responding.
As we walked around the old industrial area of Port Dundas, we saw lots of inventive re-uses that are creating social capital and economic value. As well as the Glue Factory now with its studio workspaces and green screen, there was a re-purposed industrial shed now home to ‘Church, Coffee, Conference Centre’, while the Forth and Clyde Canal now offers swimming, paddleboarding, and white-water tubing courtesy of the amazing Pinkston Watersports.
Developing with responsibility to the future means we can’t keep knocking down and building anew. And when we create new places, we need buildings that can change as the world changes.
