Renewed and refreshed is how the City of London Corporation’s new planning and transportation chairman, Shravan Joshi, described his committee, shortly after being voted into the post in April. Sitting in the corporation’s Guildhall headquarters to discuss the challenges ahead for the capital’s Square Mile, can of Coca-Cola in hand and panoramic print of the City skyline behind him, Joshi certainly gives the right impression.
As the City adapts to post-pandemic working practices, Joshi will have a leading role in deciding what is and isn’t built. The future of the Square Mile is inextricably tied to its real estate.
“If you look at the franchise the City Corporation’s got, it’s always been around its geography,” Joshi says. “That’s the physicality of our franchise. And so the built environment within that is critical to our existence. The real estate side of it represents the confidence that the market puts in our geography. And where we see international flows of money coming in, where we see investor confidence continuing, that to me is really important when we look at what we want to do next.”
What Joshi and colleagues want to do next centres on a new sustainability drive. A guidance paper for developers on whole lifecycle carbon assessment for new schemes is set to be launched for consultation, and will influence the ongoing debate over refurbishment rather than redevelopment.
“It’s important that we carry the real estate market with us on that journey,” Joshi says. “That it’s not us making decisions in a bubble and that we’re actually engaging with stakeholders.”
Energy boost
Joshi has spent some 25 years in the energy industry, focused on trade finance and technology roles in Central Asia, South East Asia, Latin America, the US – “I’ve spent a lot of my time in airport lounges,” he says.
His introduction to the City of London Corporation came through his work with the energy industry’s livery company, the Worshipful Company of Fuellers. One of his mentors there was Douglas Barron, a member of the corporation’s common council, who encouraged him to run for a Bishopsgate by-election.
“Planning and transportation was something that got my interest because there is an energy dynamic to it, a utilities dynamic to it,” Joshi says. “Even on the trade finance side of energy, it’s always been about implementing real projects on the ground. I was one of the few people that, although I’m a suit, would turn up to the oilfield with a hard hat and go, ‘Right, that’s the project we’ve actually done.’ Realising that kind of stuff drew me to planning and transport because it’s all about realising strategy, realising policy. That building, that infrastructure, that road is something we’ve manifested.”
Stakeholder engagement is increasingly important, the chairman adds, and was a crucial topic in the most recent round of elections. “How do we carry the workers, the residents, the people that visit, the tourists – how do we engage with them to make sure we’re building a City that works for everyone? That’s a really difficult balancing act.”
On the residents side, he points to the growing number of consultations the corporation carries out in residential quarters in an attempt to “touch and feel and understand the issues that [residents] have and how that dynamic fits in a growing and evolving Square Mile”.
And on the real estate side, he adds, the corporation wants to be easily accessible to industry. “We work with people like the City Property Association, major developers, constructors and utilities companies, and we engage with them on what their strategies are and make sure they align with our policies as well.”
How do we carry the workers, the residents, the people that visit, the tourists – how do we engage with them to make sure we’re building a City that works for everyone? That’s a really difficult balancing act
A new balance
Council committee meetings changed hugely during the pandemic, pivoting to online streams made most famous by Jackie Weaver of Handforth Parish Council. Did that help democratise the planning process, allowing people who would not have turned up to a meeting in person to become more engaged?
“Absolutely,” Joshi says. “That democratisation of the planning meeting was really important – the fact that we could see on YouTube that you had X number of people watching and listening. That showed us that there’s a value in using technology to engage better with those harder-to-reach elements of our stakeholders.”
The rise of the Zoom meeting or YouTube stream is, of course, reshaping the very buildings Joshi and the committee debate each month, not only the ways in which they hold that debate.
“You’re starting to see people saying, ‘I could work from home a couple of days a week, but my upskilling, my interaction with my colleagues, my ability to progress my career is going to happen in the office,’” he says.
“That balance is something we’re going to start to see redress over the next few years. That presents challenges for us in terms of planning and transportation, because we have to provide the space for that kind of existence to evolve. And strategically, that’s where we want to go, to speak to businesses, speak to corporations and [ask]: how is your workplace going to look? Who’s coming in? When are they coming in? Why are they coming in? And how does that evolve into the future of the office space?”
The answers to those questions aren’t yet clear, but Joshi and his colleague are still eager to learn. “There’s a constant debate about this in pre-app stage,” Joshi says. “We talk to a lot of the developers around why space is being evolved the way it is. You’re looking at more collaborative space, you’re looking at more open space, you’re looking at the wellbeing and mental health of your people in the workplace more than perhaps has been done in the past. For us, it really is around the commercial need. But if employers are driving that demand, I think the real estate market will follow.”
Beat that, New York!
Joshi meets with EG a few days after the opening of the Elizabeth Line. For Joshi, who notes that he and colleagues “don’t want a car-driven recovery from the pandemic”, it’s a huge moment.
“60 miles an hour through the tunnels, 200m-long trains,” he says enthusiastically. “It is something that really demonstrates to me British engineering at its best. We look back at the Victorians when they built the railways in the first place. To me, this is the step change for the modern era. This is what a modern transit railway should look like, and as a public service I think it takes us way beyond anything that New York, Paris or anywhere else has to offer.”
The response for the corporation’s 2019 transport strategy was the largest ever response to one of its public consultations. The vast majority of journeys in the Square Mile are on foot, Joshi says, meaning the pedestrian has to be a priority.
“The transport strategy was long overdue,” he says. “It allows us to project forward to what we want transportation in the Square Mile to look like. It weaves into it our climate action goals. It really is around the visitor, the worker, the resident being able to choose what form of transport they want, but a sustainable form of transport, whether it’s bus, rail, Underground, cycling, walking or rental e-scooter – whatever it is, they’ve got that optionality.”
The types of locations those individuals are travelling to are changing too – the City is now boasting a better food and drink scene, the corporation has launched the Culture Mile, and it has further plans to make it more effective as a mixed-use ‘Destination City’. But while Canary Wharf Group chief executive Shobi Khan bristles when the Docklands estate is referred to as a predominantly office area, Joshi is in no hurry to throw away the Square Mile’s legacy.
“That label of being the central financial district is what got us to where we are today,” he says. “I think it’s a really important part of the work we do that we are attractive to financial and professional services – [they’re] certainly not a group that we want to ignore in future planning.
“But I think one of the things that really has emerged in recent years is that diversity of industry within the Square Mile is important, not just for us as the corporation looking to stakeholders. It’s important that business engages with technology, engages with cultural industries, engages with creative industries and brings them all into one place.”
Certainty and clarity
As Joshi prepares to oversee the City’s seemingly never-ending stream of new planning applications, he knows that the refurbishment versus redevelopment debate will define real estate strategies in the capital in the near term.
“That’s a really, really important debate, and I want to give certainty and clarity to developers and the real estate sector so that they know the benchmarks they have to hit,” he says. “They need to be able to know what decisions they have to make from a position of reliability and consistency on our side as the planning committee.”
He highlights British Land’s 100 Liverpool Street, EC2, as a scheme that typifies what can be achieved here when asked to choose a project he voted on that will stick in his mind.
“It’s a great example of how you can choose as a developer to come up with a redevelopment but make the conscious choice of refurbishment and do it in a way that’s really sympathetic with the area,” he says.
“You’ve got a really complex array of companies that have moved into that office. It’s not just your financial sector, law firms and insurers. You’ve actually got technology companies and gaming developers. As tenants, when they’re making decisions, they’re looking at what their employees want, and an employee wanting to go into an office space that’s been refurbished in a responsible way really stands out.”
Joshi’s goal for his time in the planning and transportation chair is to help develop a more transparent planning process that encourages that kind of thinking. “Early engagement with members is really important,” he says. “If we as the political leadership have sight of projects early, we can engage with stakeholders early, engage with residents early. I think all of that builds into a better project.”
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