Increasing urbanisation of the global population means stronger demand for the infrastructure and built environments of world cities and developing regions. For the first time, over 50 percent of the world’s population lives in an urban environment, and there are more humans alive today than there have been at any other point in history. This puts a huge pressure on the planning and allocation of the earth’s resources for agriculture, power and energy generation, transport infrastructure, industry and the built environment that supports communities and quality of life.
Many urban environments have ageing infrastructure and out of date facilities, which provides opportunity for regeneration. City environments need innovative master planning strategies on how these areas are to evolve and often require an initial development catalyst to set off the chain reaction of broader development.
Market context
Different regions, countries and cities face very different challenges, opportunities and barriers to achieving successful large scale development. Irrespective of the economic or political environment, strong visionary leadership combined with appropriate technical skills will influence the ability to shape, fund and deliver a major new community or redevelop a major area of a city.
A compelling vision, sound business model and strong political and client leadership are probably the most important ingredients for success. However, all large-scale developments have multiple stakeholders who can significantly influence a programme’s outcome, hence it is an important skill to astutely manage them. Large projects demand accurate governance and control to have the capability to manage the risks inherent in design, procurement and construction.
Meeting the challenge
We have applied a programme management approach to the creation of new communities, such as Masdar, a new low energy City in Abu Dhabi through to a brand new urban community in Cambridge that is securing the growth and long-term success of the University, as well as the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station in London. Battersea is anchoring a new community of 17,500 residences with all the social and transport infrastructure of a modern world-leading City in Nine Elms (Zone 1) in London.
We have specialist expertise in the major use classes that make up mixed use regeneration, namely retail, commercial, residential, leisure and infrastructure. We have delivered major programmes across these real estate uses in both public and private sector environments, which means we are able to plan and execute large scale mixed use developments with insight, experience and confidence.
