EDITOR’S COMMENT I love spring. It’s when we start to see things change, we see things blossom and metamorphose into something better.
It’s also the time of year when we at EG prepare to do something similar for the real estate sector.
This week we launch the EG Awards, our gift to you where we celebrate all the wonderful things that real estate is and does. This year all your favourite categories are back, including Deal of the Year, the advisory awards, Employer of the Year and our categories focused on social impact, sustainability and the rising stars of the sector.
I am also really excited to announce a new category, a category inspired by one of 2021’s EG Future Leaders. Suzan Uckmaklioglu made an entire audience lean in as she invited us into her experiences of growing up with a parent in need of physical assistance and how the built environment largely excluded her father from it, making entering and exiting buildings difficult, moving around streetscapes clunky and generally separating him from others. She reminded us that separate is not equal and that this business, the business of building environments, has the unique ability to create equal spaces, places that work for everyone. She reminded us that we should design with, not for. We should design to make things inclusive so we can all use the same entrances and exits. Designing for wheelchair users, for example, is not inclusive, she told us. It is excluding them. We can do better.
As part of the evolution of the Future Leaders programme (more on that shortly), we will be turning one idea or theme from each year’s talks into a project, event or award. This year it is Uckmaklioglu’s “with, not for” and the addition of an Inclusive Design Award at this November’s EG Awards. Click here to find out more about that and all our categories, and head to our awards website to enter and register your interest to attend what you already know is going to be the best night in real estate in 2022.
Future Leaders is back! This week we introduce you to our fourth cohort of leaders, a magnificent collection of seven individuals from across the built environment, each reflecting an under-represented segment of the sector.
This cohort will be focusing their Ted X-style presentations on transformation, making the must-attend event in June an even more essential addition to your diary. Not only do I promise you an evening where you’ll be insanely proud of and inspired by the talent we have in this industry, but you’ll learn invaluable lessons about how to make sure the sector thrives.
Those that join us at the Royal Institution on 9 June and really lean in will leave the evening knowing just what the industry needs to do if it is to sail through this transformative period we’re whizzing through and come out the other side changed into something better.
It’s an opportunity you’d be a fool to miss. Click here to meet the new cohort and mark 9 June in your diaries now.
It is moments like these when we start to hear real stories from the sector, the things you are proud of and put forward for submissions in our awards and I get to engage with a new set of future leaders and rising stars, that I get that extra little reminder of how far this sector has come already. We may have a long way yet to go until we’ve fully metamorphosed but, like spring, I see it coming. Do you?
EG’s Cities Live programme is back in real life. The EG team will be in Birmingham on 26 April with a gaggle of experts to investigate how the city can make the most of the upcoming Commonwealth Games. Click here to join us for networking and learning.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews
