AT chats to… Indy Johar from Architecture 00 about the need for a total structural transformation of society.

Indy Johar warns BCO Conference that we are facing a total transformation of society. 

What made you decide to address BCO Conference?
Despina! (BCO President Despina Katiskakis). Obviously there’s an intellectual heritage in terms of DEGW and John Worthington and the way that heritage has been driving transformations. Also, I would argue that the future of our work economy is going to have to be revolutionised.

And do you think BCO is in a position to lead that charge?
I don’t think any of us are in a position to lead that charge. It’s all interconnected, so for me it’s about how, collectively, we redefine value for future generations and how we create new forms of liability. There’s a radical, honest conversation that needs to be had. If you take that classic phrase, ‘value engineering’ who are you creating value for? And what does that mean long term? We have to face the fact that we currently value engineer for a particular definition of value and for the short term. It’s not just about accounting. It’s about synthesising value, and this is where architects and engineers have to play a critical role. It’s not just about decarbonising buildings, it’s about designing systemic value in an elegant way.

How do you see the role of the public sector?
We fall into these binaries of public and private sector. We no longer live in a world of polarities. We are living in a world with a multitude of sovereignties and when you start to talk about real value, over 100 years or more, it’s less about government and more about where real value lies in orchestrating across those sovereignties. So it’s less about government and more about who organises and synthesises those ecosystems.

The notion of the common good is increasingly becoming part of the conversation across both the private and the public sector. We are seeing a massive shift to the common good. More and more, we are seeing high value offices prioritise not just the desk space, but shared facilities and the common environment. How do you value and price that? We see the value of common good in urban developments around the world. A park might add £10-20,000 to the value of the surrounding houses. We did some analysis on the impact of the High Line in New York. We scraped the data and looked at how it impacted value. It cost £184m dollars to build, and generated £3.48 billion in land value uplift. It’s the best real estate deal ever. But the High Line still struggles because they weren’t able to realise that value. The balance sheet has got to be organised in a different way.

Take a tree canopy in a city. The aggregate benefit of the tree canopy also has material impact on flood risk and heat island effects. It’s hugely valuable, but who owns the infrastructure of a tree canopy through a city? Where does the liability lie? It reduces road temperatures by 12.5 degrees which, in turn, reduces maintenance costs over time. However, road maintenance budgets don’t have future liability on their budget sheets to actually account for this, so preventative investment is very difficult. We need to allow for value to be shown transparently. However, doing this is quite an involved process. A tree planted by a Local Authority has a 50% chance of survival; a tree planted by a community has a 90% chance of survival. The value of care is significant.

What’s the future of BCO?
The first thing is that the future of BCO is almost certainly NOT as BCO (British Council for Offices) but as British Council for Workplace. The second thing is actually recognising that offices are only part of our work infrastructure and that there is a whole balance of other assets. Housing standards need to be reworked for partial home working, we need to address public realm and transport. And the face-to-face economy of work needs to be reimagined and integrated into our universities and other structures of learning. The next generation of organisations are going to be learning-orientated organisations that are driving innovation. So we’re starting to see a completely different type of organisational culture. We are going to see a fundamental shift in the nature of our economy. We face a structural transformation of our society. This is the equivalent of rebuilding Britain after World War II.

Indy Johar is the Co-founder of Architecture 00.