Property regeneration and investment with a smile

EPIC DRIFTWOOD SCULPTURE MJ


Google is building a small city within Toronto:

Toronto has about 800 acres of waterfront property awaiting redevelopment, a huge and prime stretch of land that amounts to one of the best opportunities in North America to rethink at scale how housing, streets and infrastructure are built. On Tuesday the government and the group overseeing the land announced that they were partnering with an Alphabet subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, to develop the site.

Not to be outdone, Bill Gates is thinking even bigger, a 25,000 acre site for a new city near Phoenix that might take advantage of Arizona’s forward thinking rules on self-driving cars.

All over the world, we can see the beginnings of a move from nation-states to smaller, more decentralized and agile communities such as common interest developments, special economic zones and proprietary cities. Your Next Govenment is Tom W. Bell’s primer on this coming revolution. If you want to find out the latest on the Honduran Zede or the Polynesian seasteading project, both of which Bell has been involved with, YNG is your first stop. Bell also covers the history of these movements from Henry Ford’s failed Brazilian city, Fordlandia, to the use of special economic zones and foreign trade zones in the United States.

For anyone starting such a community, Bell has up-to-date recommendations on the principles of governance including how to adopt an appropriate legal code

Off to Work, with a Smile

  

 Continuing the recent theme of feel good, work better, here is a great Cumbrian reframe concept around property investment and urban regeneration. The concept: take an unloved building or site, make it iconic and inspiring, turn it into co-working community where people are inspired, and even let start-ups become their own landlords.

The notion at the heart of Michelle Rothwell’s disruptive approach is that the environment we work in should inspire us - and a desk in a dim corner is just not going to do it.

Michelle, who is from Windermere just down the road from my digs in Grasmere, and who is a double world-record holder for endurance swimming, got disenchanted as a commercial property advisor leasing inflexible and uninspiring spaces.

Her insight was that being part of an inspirational community in a flexible collaborative environment is a rich recipe for business growth. “The idea is that businesses don’t lease the space because there’ a desk, but because they want their business to grow.”

Michelle’s first start-up opened an office at 31-33 Princess Street in Manchester city centre in August which it billed ‘the UK’s first property co-working space’. She based her own company there. “I’ve kept hold of the top floor as a co-working space to create and inspire a community. We’re running events there, we’ve got yoga classes, bike facilities, free beer. The next project is to transform a Cumbria pub into a creative business hub.

And get this from a recent HBR article “The Case for Investing More in People” by Bain & co partner Eric Garton, when an employee goes from satisfied to inspired, productivity doubles – and only one in eight employees are inspired!

Work should happen in amazing spaces and places. Bring on the disruptors.



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