Our second of two special episodes recorded in-person at the World Economic Forum’s Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit features three experts involved in urban regeneration projects that place social impact at the centre of their work: Heela Omarkhail, Vice President of Social Impact at the The Daniels Corporation, Dr. Eloisa Klementich, President and CEO of Invest Atlanta, and Eime Tobari who leads a social impact practice at Avison Young.
Our second of two special episodes recorded in-person at the World Economic Forum’s Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit features three experts involved in urban regeneration projects that place social impact at the centre of their work: Heela Omarkhail, Vice President of Social Impact at the The Daniels Corporation, Dr. Eloisa Klementich, President and CEO of Invest Atlanta, and Eime Tobari who leads a social impact practice at Avison Young.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the City Age Podcast, and our second of two special episodes taped Live at the World Economic Forum's Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit. I'm Alon Markovich and I'm here with Lisa Chamberlain from the Center for Urban Transformation at the World Economic Forum. Lisa. Last month we were at the Forum Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit, and we had the opportunity for the first time in our three seasons of podcasting to interview our guests in person. Tell us a bit about the summit, what today's theme is and what it was like to interview guests face-to-face
Speaker 2 (00:31):
As
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Opposed to across the screen.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
The Urban Transformation Summit is an event spearheaded by the World Economic Forum to accelerate public private collaboration in cities. Typically, the forum works at the nation state level, but cities are where people live and cities are where a lot of urgent transformation is needed. In our last episode, part one from the summit, featured three experts in the transit and mobility world. Today in part two, we're talking with three experts involved in urban regeneration projects that put social impact at the center of their work. And I have to say it was quite lovely to talk with people in person and see their passion and their emotionality when they talk about the very important work that they're doing.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
It comes through in the conversation for sure. Who's our first guest today?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Gila o Markel. She is the vice President of Social Impact at the Daniels Corporation, a Toronto based real estate and master planning firm. Gila has both a professional and personal relationship with the project that she's going to tell us about.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Here is Lisa's conversation with Gila o Markel Can.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Regent Park is Canada's oldest largest social housing development. It was originally built in the 1940s and fifties. It's 69 acres, so quite a large part of Toronto's downtown East. Built with funding from the federal government as a hundred percent social housing. It was built on a planning principle called the Garden City, and the idea was actually to take out the street, do inward facing homes to make it safe for families. And at that time, there were about 2083 homes that were developed. And very quickly the neighborhood started to decline taking out the streets, concentrating some of the city's most vulnerable population, created both social issues and physical isolation. So much so that as early as the 1970s, so within a couple of decades, residents were actually calling out for change, and by the 1990s were really primed for that change as the housing went from the federal government to the province and eventually to the municipality in Toronto. So the Daniels Corporation partnered with the city and the housing authority, I presume,
Speaker 4 (02:59):
To figure out what to do. What was the groundwork to get that process started and where are we today?
Speaker 3 (03:07):
It was actually the housing agency and the city that initiated the development with community residents before they even brought in Daniels and the private sector. How that really worked was through an extensive community consultation process. And I'll rewind just a minute. By the time that the Housing authority, Toronto Community Housing Corporation, which is a wholly owned entity of the city of Toronto, took ownership of the housing portfolio, the social housing portfolio in Toronto, they inherited about 58,000 units and upwards of a $2 billion repair backlog just because of the state of disrepair across the housing portfolio.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Wow. That's a big bill, a big
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Bill. And of those 58,000 units, just over 2000 of them were in Regent Park. And with that planning framework that was initially put in place, they effectively had a 69 acre land assembly. And so the idea was how does the public sector really unlock that density and that land to address both the economic and social issues that were coming from the housing stock? And so they did a very extensive consultation with community residents, with some of the community service organizations in the neighborhood to develop 12 guiding principles of the revitalization as well as a social development plan that would go hand in hand with the zoning bylaw that would see the neighborhood transformed from a hundred percent social housing to a mixed income mixed use community. And that principle actually came right from the residents as did sort of the overall arching principle, the right of return. So if the residents were going to be part of this transformation and support it, then they wanted the right to come back into the neighborhood. This wasn't going to be a displacement or a gentrification,
Speaker 4 (05:23):
But did residents need to be moved in the interim though, because you can't build the plane while you're flying it, right?
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Absolutely. And that's why the plan is a five phase plan to allow for a phased approach to moving the existing residents out elsewhere in the Toronto community housing portfolio in the city of Toronto, and then as the new homes get built back into the neighborhood. So that's been quite a process, and that is handled by Toronto Community Housing directly and that revitalization plan, I mentioned five phases, taking the 2083 units which are being demolished and replacing them with about 7,500 units. So a full replacement of the 2083 plus the addition of 5,500 market value units and affordable rentals, neither of which existed in Regent Park previously. And then come commercial at the ground level, office spaces, new community facilities, park
Speaker 4 (06:34):
Space. It is called Region Park. Park.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
And there was no park, believe it or not. Of course, it was large fields of green, but there was no proper park and an aquatic center and an arts and cultural center and a sports field really underpinning some of the social infrastructure that's been part of this community renewal.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Please tell the story of how you grew up and where you live now.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
So I grew up in an inner suburb of Toronto, known as North York in a social housing community. So my family's originally from Afghanistan. We immigrated to Canada in the late eighties via Pakistan and settled in a neighborhood that was government housing and eventually Toronto community housing. My experience in that neighborhood was breakfast programs, community residents from all backgrounds from around the world, getting together on community projects, really rolling up their sleeves to work with each other and support each other. The social capital that we talk about being so important was really there in that neighborhood. If my mom was at work when I got home from school, there would be an auntie from the neighborhood waiting there to take me over until my mom could come pick me up. And then we moved further out into one of the greater Toronto area suburbs. And so when I started working in Regent Park, which was 14 years ago now, it really felt like a homecoming. It felt like sort of the vibrant, active, multicultural neighborhood that I grew up in. And so a few years later, when it came time to buy my first home and moved downtown, I had gone to the University of Toronto downtown. I chose none other than Regent Park. And so I've been living in the neighborhood for the past seven years now. I'm really proud to call myself a community resident.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
That's amazing. So this problem is not unique to Toronto. Cities all over North America built public housing that went into decline. What can other cities take away from what you learned during Regent Park? 1, 2, 3? What should they do first, second, and third?
Speaker 3 (08:57):
There's probably no chronological order because they all have to happen
Speaker 4 (09:02):
At once.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
At once. Fundamentally, I mean, when we think about public land as a public asset, the public sector governments have the ability to determine how they're going to use that land. So in the case of Regent Park, Toronto Community Housing was really intentional. Not only are we going to unlock this land to create market housing and replace the social housing, so that cross-subsidization model, but that then gives us the ability to achieve broader goals. So things like requirements in our contract, the private sector company to hire locally to engage in programs around training and not just an obligation for Daniel's the builder, but to be passed down to our subcontractors and consultants and commercial tenants. So really maximizing the value that comes from a redevelopment, not just physically, but socially. We've, over the past 17 years that Daniels has been involved in Regent Park, we've looked at the revitalization as a platform and that platform to create jobs, to engage with artists, to nurture small businesses, to create connections between tenants and homeowners, often from different socioeconomic backgrounds. And we've really honed in on three organizing elements there. So I touched on the partnership and then three organizing elements to really bring community together. First arts and culture. And we've already heard about that. We're on sort of the day two of the summit and we've heard about that quite a bit. Sort of the creative class using arts and culture as a very powerful convener. And that's worked for us brilliantly in Region Park and has culminated in a 60,000 square foot community owned arts and cultural center. The second is food and urban agriculture.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
So
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Regardless of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, bringing people together over food, over growing in garden plots around the park on their balconies, literally baking and breaking bread in a community bake oven. And then the third is sports and physical activity as another one. We all see sports matches, especially internationally, bringing out people from around the world. That's been another huge catalyzer of community for us. So I'll point to those. The second one is really centering plans around community voices and valuing the lived experience of those who are living in a neighborhood and have historically lived in a neighborhood. One of the reasons that Regent Park was sort of the first large scale neighborhood that Toronto Community Housing decided to revitalize is because residents had been talking about it for years.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Right? Yeah, I would say, I mean that's probably one of the biggest barriers in the United States in terms of public housing is that there is not a lot of trust that the residents will be heard, that they will be able to return, that they'll have a voice in how things move forward. How did you continue to cultivate that trust?
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Full credit to our partners at Toronto Community Housing for this, they really set the stage for that early on in the process where they actually worked with community residents to lead the consultations themselves. So instead of hiring a group to go do consultations, they hired a group to train residents to do the consultations often in their own language because at the time, there was something like 57 languages spoken in the neighborhood alone, and they were able to get really different feedback when someone was talking to a neighbor or a friend versus someone from a consulting firm or the housing authority,
(13:27):
And really put that feedback together into the guiding principles and the social development plan when Daniels was eventually selected as the developer. So this was once the social development plan and the zoning bylaw were in place, the housing authority realized that to build mixed use, mixed income housing, they needed to partner with the private sector. This has to be a true public private collaboration. It can't be, I do the market blocks, you do the social housing blocks, and we build that way. And as we came in, so once we were the development partner, we did our own consultation and engagement. You can imagine, yes, there's distrust of government and the public sector. Imagine being a private sector developer, often internationally, developers get a bad rap. And so our team, our CEO and our partner managing the revitalization did what we've started to call listen and learn tours and the listen and learn tours. Were really meeting community residents, community groups, building trust, building trust, listening to their hopes and dreams, telling them about ourselves, our track record building, affordable housing, building co-op housing building, seniors housing, and why we thought we were the right developers to work with the community and with Toronto Community Housing in Region Park.
(15:00):
And then the third one I'll point to is flexibility in the plan. The plan that was put in place in 2006 looks very, very different from the plan today. And that plan is changing yet
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Again as you go.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yeah, with a new plan for the last two phases, part of that has been responding to sort of community needs and priorities. So the initial,
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Give me an example of what changed.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Of course, the zoning bylaw and the social development plan, they were supposed to work together and be the blueprint for the revitalization of Regent Park. The social development plan has a whole chapter dedicated to the need for an arts and cultural space for the residents and communities of Regent Park to come together under one roof. And then we look at the zoning bylaw and we're like, but there's no arts and cultural center,
Speaker 4 (16:01):
And
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Our partners and the city we're like, well, there was no room left for it. And where would the funds come from? It's not in the business plan. The sale of the market density has to support the replacement of the rental. And so
Speaker 4 (16:17):
You can imagine, okay, I'm sure you solved the problem and we'll get to it, but can you imagine if that had not been solved, how the residents would feel about this?
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Exactly. In terms of the building trust, okay, we put all this out there and it was left out of the plan. And so very creatively shifted. Densities made some buildings a little taller, some a little wider, and very intentionally right at the center of the 69 acres created space for an arts and cultural center. And then we were able to secure $24 million from the federal and provincial government in infrastructure stimulus funding because this was 2009 after the markets had crashed and the global recession of 2008, and the governments were looking to stimulate the economy and construction projects were one way, and that sort of seeded the start of this arts and cultural center and to shift around those densities, we needed a rezoning in that same rezoning. We moved the park from phase five to phase two because when you're building a new community, when you're trying to build relationships between owners and tenants, and you're trying to sell condominiums in a market that's never supported, condominiums in a neighborhood that was highly stigmatized and known at that time for a culture of guns, gangs, and violence, you need to create both some of those destinations, but those public spaces that allow people to come together, that allow people to be sort of the eyes on the street that Jane Jacobs talks about.
(18:04):
And so those were some of the changes that we made. And the best part of this story is we worked with community residents, the city, Toronto Community Housing, all these groups came together. We created a beautiful plan for the park led by the city of Toronto. The plans get unveiled in the community and the community says amazing, great that we have an off leash dog area and a greenhouse and bake ovens and a playground, but where are the sports fields? And the city said, well, we couldn't fit sports fields into this six acre park. And that again, we went back to the drawing board, change the plan again, shifted around more density in the southeast quadrant of the community where there was an existing ice rink and said, what if we create an athletic rounds here? And again, that was in direct response to community feedback and again, did another rezoning, moved density off that corner, partnered with philanthropy this time around with the organization that owns the sports teams in Toronto, maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, who raised the capital to build a new athletic facility.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
I'm fascinated by these stories of success where you can identify points along the way where I could have gone totally south, right? Yes. And it sounds like there were multiples of those, and I think that's probably true for a lot of successful projects. You really can go sideways at any moment with these things. You
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Can and often, I mean, we talk about a lot of these successes, and that's very much not to paint a very rosy picture and say that it's been easy
Speaker 4 (19:50):
Peasy,
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Easy peasy, and it's been all successful. There have definitely been several trials and tribulations along the way. I will point to the relocation as one of those most difficult aspects of the revitalization, requiring people to leave their homes and their communities, watch them be demolished, try to set up roots even temporarily in a new neighborhood where it might be far from the school your kids go to or your job or your place of worship, and then you don't know
Speaker 4 (20:30):
They're coming back. It's probably very different. You can't just move them all together to one other place, no scatter. So they end up getting scattered. And even with a guarantee of return, you still have that interim situation that's very difficult.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
You do. And we've had moments where government changes and priorities shift, and the question is, oh, does the revitalization continue based on those priorities? And that creates a lot of uncertainty and concern in the neighborhood where folks are like, well, I've been moved out. I have this legal right, but if the project doesn't continue, what happens to me? And so a lot of our work has been working with all stakeholders to maintain as much momentum as possible and a consistency of vision, which is something that's come up in today's discussions in the summit about how do you maintain that consistency when there's a changing political landscape, which in the United States and Canada happens every four years or two years depending on the level of government we're talking about. And so to me, that's a real role for the private sector in these partnerships because often we have the ability and the stability to be there for the long haul, and we know development takes time, and so we can create some of that consistency hand in hand with our public sector
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Partners.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Lisa, great chat. I look back on the summit and as it so happened the day after the summit, I was in Toronto and I drove right through Region Park and having heard your conversation, your interview with Gila, it was particularly impactful for me to drive through there and marvel at the development and how to imagine that this could have failed at any one point is so wonderful to see that it succeeded because it has transformed not just that part of the city of Toronto, but a much larger region there as well. Next up, Lisa spoke with Dr. Eloisa, Clementi, president and CEO of Invest Atlanta, where she's particularly focused on downtown revitalization.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Tell
Speaker 5 (22:50):
Us a few of the things that you talked with the audience about today in terms of recovering Atlanta's downtown vibrancy in the post pandemic era. And tell me a little bit about the example that you used on the stage regarding what you think your secret ingredient is for downtown Atlanta today. I think
Speaker 3 (23:07):
What was so
Speaker 5 (23:08):
Exciting about this morning's panel was the opportunity to,
Speaker 3 (23:12):
One,
Speaker 5 (23:12):
Participate on a panel from different perspectives. So we had people from the federal government, people from a business that's actually on the ground, and then myself, which I see myself very much on the ground, real time having to deal with these challenges or often I like to say opportunities. And so one of the things that we talked about was the need
Speaker 3 (23:35):
For data to help us make key
Speaker 5 (23:37):
Decisions I think will be important for us moving forward and for us to your specific question, I think in Atlanta, downtown currently has about a 40% vacancy rate on commercial. We need to attract people. People need to come in to start to populate. So you're going to see us take active roles in taking old commercial buildings and turning them into housing. But what we actually think is our secret sauce will be our students. There are about 81,000 residents in downtown. There are 35,000 Georgia State students right downtown. These are people, these are individuals. These are professionals that want to take part in something bigger. They want to move the needle. So this will allow them the opportunity to help us with the revitalization. So we are actively seeking ways, kind of change the way our frame and really use our students to help us rebuild, regenerate, and to really take that downtown to the historic significance that it is. This is where the civil rights, I believe, not only for Atlanta, but for the entire nation, was really born. The strategies, the thought sessions, we have to ensure that Atlanta's continues to be vibrant, and I think it will happen with the same student movement, student focus that was there before.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Tell us about the Georgia Tech project.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
So Georgia Tech is a little bit up, so it's in midtown, so very close to downtown, but Georgia Tech has also been very crucial in our development. They made the decision to move across the connector. So literally we built a bridge and based on their development, we created Tech Square. So not only were we able to leverage the brilliant engineers, entrepreneurs that are coming out of Georgia Tech and create an innovation ecosystem across the street, but we have seen a complete revitalization of what is now Midtown. Entrepreneurs are congregating in many parts of the city, one of them strongly being technology square. Then what they're going to do is we're going to go back across the connector to a science park. So what we've done here is leverage innovation, entrepreneurship, that education with the creative class, we have the scad, and then you have the AUC center school. So talk about diversity, diverse creative innovation leads for tremendous opportunities for us to continue to grow because at the end of the day, if what my mayor and what the city would like to see is how do you make Atlanta a place for everyone? And to drive equity is small business, small business ownership. It's a way to create wealth. So at the core, it's about creating wealth opportunities so that Atlanta's can continue to benefit from all of this growth that they're seeing around them.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
And tell us how you have developed affordable housing, particularly how it was financed, because I think that's such a critical question right now. We do need more people, we need a lot more affordable housing pretty much everywhere. So please tell us how you did that. I think
Speaker 5 (26:46):
First and foremost, and we talked about it on the panel today, it starts with leadership. I know it sounds like, oh, leadership, but I'm not kidding. I think having folks that are driving decision makings at the top saying, this is a priority matters. So that's the first. The fact that we had a mayor and a philanthropic community saying, we align and agree that affordable housing is important also mattered. So when you ask the question about financing, not only did the city continue to receive debt through bonding of a hundred million dollars for a new housing opportunity bond, but the philanthropic group came alongside and putting in an additional 200 million. So we have 300 million to really focus on driving that affordability. So one, it's creating and leveraging the government resources, but also finding partners that's going to be important for us to move forward in terms of our affordable housing
Speaker 4 (27:39):
And how many housing units were developed through that amount of money.
Speaker 5 (27:44):
Well, we're in it today and we're moving it forward, but the goal is 20,000 units of affordable housing in eight years, and we're three years in and we are about 5,000 units, so we have 15,000 to go.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
Is this in the downtown core? Is it adjacent to downtown?
Speaker 5 (28:01):
It will focus throughout the city of Atlanta, and it really will be where we can finance it and our projects, we're trying to be strategic, but this is where private and public partnerships happen because we're not developing, we're using these funds to fill the gap for our development community to come in. Now we have some developers, market rate developers that we're trying to come into their deals and we have some nonprofit. Again, mission-driven. We're leveraging everyone. We're looking at all possibilities, and not only multifamily, but single family. The idea is meet people where they are for the type of housing, a type of affordable housing that they want to achieve. And that's the way you do it because you need to make sure you have the spectrum.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
What do you think the federal government should be doing more of to help you do what you're doing?
Speaker 5 (28:51):
I would say the federal government has been key partners for us moving forward. They've helped us funding several of our affordable housing projects. It's difficult having been at the federal government very much policy driven, I would say, is open up and allow us the opportunity for us to come in and do our work. Now, I will tell you at the panel, I thought there was an interesting discussion about the role that Fannie Mae played in growing single family units. Could there be a new type of Fannie Mae for multifamily? I thought that was a revolutionary idea. I think that could really move the needle. Yes, we have hud and yes, HUD invests in their affordable housing projects, but this would be much more than that. This could be open to the market, and market could come in and use the Fannie Mae type because right now financing is very tight and it's very expensive. And I believe there's developers out there that have land and projects. They just don't have the financing. So create a financing tool to come in. That would be amazing. I thought that was a great discussion today.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
Thank you. I think that's amazing too. That's a great idea. What have you seen in terms of the challenges downtown, just in terms of homelessness? We've seen stories about major retail companies pulling out of certain areas because of theft. How is it going in downtown Atlanta?
Speaker 5 (30:21):
It's interesting you said that, but obviously you're going to see a congregation or people coming to downtown because that's where a lot of the services are all downtown. So yes, Atlanta has an opportunity to handle, better handle how we handle our homeless population. And so the idea here is always housing first, but in that, we have to figure out how we do that. And so we have a crazy idea that we're trying in Atlanta. We are going to take underutilized property that the city owns and going to put containers and try to house before we transition. The idea is housing first. So once someone comes off transitional housing, get them somewhere and then that to the next step. So we're trying to open this up. I don't know how this is going to end. We are in the process now, but that would be the idea that we have.
(31:12):
The other idea, I do want to, we talked about it very, very briefly on the panel, but I think there's an opportunity here is what crazy idea do we have for downtown? And I'll tell you one of my crazy ideas for downtown is I want everyone to feel like a stakeholder in the growth and the benefits that happen in downtown. Oftentimes if I live in Midtown Buckhead or even in the further outside the region or just outside the city, I'm like, I'm not worried about downtown. That's sort of their problem I want to say. And leverage. We have the opportunity. We have World Cup coming, we have a couple big games coming. How do I leverage that as a call to action to say that we all benefit when Atlanta is shown in the good light that's here and that we can make Atlanta a nice welcoming city that it is our southern hospitality needs to shine through. And I think that is a great opportunity. How do we use some of these events that can be very costly to city, but to actually help with the revitalization of downtown? I think that's a tremendous opportunity. We have pride in where we live.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
That was another great conversation. I really liked understanding Atlanta and where it's at, and some of the ideas that Invest Atlanta is pursuing are particularly interesting. Who's our final guest from Detroit? Lisa? Finally, we are talking with Amy. Ari.
Speaker 4 (32:31):
She leads
Speaker 1 (32:32):
A social impact practice at Avis and Young, which is also a
Speaker 4 (32:36):
Canadian-based
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Company that works all over the world, including London. A lot, love for Canada today. This is great. Here is Lisa's conversation with Amy.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Tell me about the various elements that make up social impact.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
Yes. I think that what good looks like is different in different places. Certain things are universal. So I think that equity is one of the things that as a human, we strive to acknowledge the equality between humans. So the human rights sort of underpins that, what good looks like. So yes, that's part of it, but what actually the values, how do they actually look like and what the priorities might be? Also depends on the current state of the society and community. So in certain areas that the community cohesion might be a big issue. There might be.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
So for our listeners, community cohesion is about people feeling connected to each other, even if they're not necessarily family or immediate friends.
Speaker 5 (33:41):
And also there might be racial inequalities and divisions as well. So yes.
Speaker 4 (33:49):
Can you give us an example of a project that you worked on where you set out to achieve a certain social impact and how did you do that?
Speaker 5 (33:58):
The projects that we are working on might be a good example. It's an area in the UK near Liverpool, and we are involved in the regeneration revitalization of that town center called Sefton. And there is a big shopping center that started to be not working in the way that needs used to be. And so using that as the core of the region, regeneration of the whole area. And the way that we are doing, it's to use this what we are calling impact framework. So we are starting with outcomes and what outcomes, what good looks like. So defining that with multiple stakeholders,
Speaker 4 (34:41):
Public, private individuals even.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
Yeah, and that's a kind of co-creation process and then setting out objectives and then almost embedding that it's as a impact framework for this particular project so that the whole process of the project can refer back to, and there is as a framework, it's a consensus amongst the multiple stakeholders.
Speaker 4 (35:08):
So tell us what is the challenge of partnering with the public sector and getting everyone aligned? Because social impact can sound abstract, so you have to be very specific. So tell us about how you do that with the public sector.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
I think that's a very interesting one. And in public sector has also a lot of different hats. So in this particular case, the public sector local authority set on council is the owner of the shopping center. They bought it. They realized that actually having the ownership is important part.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
So they actually have a really big influence in this case in a lot of cases that the public sector does not own it. So it's super helpful that the public sector actually
Speaker 5 (35:53):
Owns it. Yes, but it's quite often the case that the public sector might be a landowner. So they're not only the planning authority or service providers in terms of social care and the education and so on, but there could be a landowner which basically gives them and the huge levers, and that often might be something that might be sort of overlooked.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
And so making sure that the public sector is in alignment, you're aligning with them or they're aligning with you, I guess is the question?
Speaker 5 (36:29):
Well, I think we are helping them to align. So you're helping the whole stakeholders align, but also in this particular case, the interesting thing is that they have almost conflict, potentially conflicting interest themselves as a public sector organization because they're landowner, they want to generate revenue, but they're also by definition custodian of social value of the place. So how do you make balance between those two things? We're using the word conflicting is a bit dangerous because they are not, if you look at take a long-term perspectives, they don't have to contradict you invest in creating a place and investing in the community, providing community amenities so that people would come creating a place and destinations, enabling people, enabling the community groups. That creates a foundation. And ultimately that any kind of commercial areas that would generate revenue will need destination and the footfall and the community sense of belonging and ownership over the place.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
So you're helping the public sector reconcile the short-term versus the long-term in some ways, right. The short-term interest, of course, is to make back as much money as possible. However, with the public sector, they want longer term resilience and sustainability and a place that people are going to love and care for. And that requires investment.
Speaker 5 (38:04):
That's right. I think that's actually a good way of putting it, that one of the things that we are trying to do is to encourage all the stakeholders to look at the long-term perspectives. Because even a public sector organizations, they have annual targets and a lot of things are judged by the kind of annual performance, and also they are not immune to the cyclical nature of the elections and the politics, that side of things. So yes, it's really important to remind all the players about the long term values and the processes.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
That's it for our interviews from Detroit and the World Economic Forum. Lisa, those six conversations between part one and part two that you had, I thought were fascinating in the importance of what they covered. Was there something that you look back on and take away as kind of the key that bind them all together? Or was there something that you look back on that will stay with you for longer than the rest?
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Well, I guess I would say every single person is focused on social impact in one way or another. Some of them say it more explicitly than others, but ultimately through those conversations it becomes clear that they're not just trying to build something or put in some infrastructure, but to have multiple impacts, one of them being to improve people's lives.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Lisa, thank you for bringing us into the summit, not just today and the last episode, but for bringing city agent to the summit. So much appreciated. We so enjoyed collaborating with the forum and thank you for sharing your conversations with us. We'll be back in two weeks. For more about the business of city building and our future events is make sure to visit city age.com, subscribe to our newsletter there and follow us on LinkedIn. We'll see you soon.