I was fortunate enough to get married last year in New Orleans. As my father and I walked down the street one day, we came across a framed poster in a shop on which was a quote from novelist and literary critic Cyril Connolly: “The true indicator of a man’s character is the health of his wife.” Please excuse the slightly dated patriarchal tone, but let’s focus on the wisdom behind the words in how we should value our impacts as people in an industry creating places.
The real estate industry values itself in many ways. From capital values and covered footprint to AUM, we use multiple metrics to express a value. However, if we were to attribute Connolly’s quote to how we value ourselves in real estate, we’d be lost for a definite metric. I’d like to propose the one, and possibly only, important metric to follow – the health impact of our collective work.
Pandemic levels
It’s interesting to look at two converging narratives and see some irony. The first is that, with thanks to building research, new certification standards mean that we are producing the healthiest buildings in the industrialised era. The second is that our social health is reaching pandemic levels, as cumulative growth in the diagnoses of mental and metabolic disorders cripples public spending and personal lives.
The collective care costs for dementia reach upwards of £26bn per year. Ironically, a Deloitte 2017 study supporting the Stevenson/Farmer Review found that mental health-related presenteeism alone costs UK businesses up to £26bn every year.
What’s interesting is that they’re related. Presenteeism, for those who do not know, is defined as “employees who attend work while ill”. This illness is not only defined through colds, flu and other ailments, but increasingly so through mental illness. According to research by Canada Life Group Insurance, 22% of UK employees went to work when feeling mentally ill. This statistic allies to the general growth of diagnosed mood disorders such as anxiety and depression.
So we must ask ourselves, why? Why does this continue to grow, and why is it that in cities there is an increased risk and prevalence of these issues?
The simple answer is that, for all the work on the health of our buildings, we’ve not really understood the health of people in cities. People do not exist in our buildings alone – they inhabit complex urban systems. They enter the buildings we create in varying states, altered by their additional physiological and mental experiences. There is no gold star of a healthy building if people are engaging with a sick city.
A recent study conducted by the Financial Times brought to light some already acknowledged facts. The air pollution composition of the London Underground is up to nine times the maximum threshold for particulate matter. The average London roadside is more than twice the threshold. When our body engages with a stressor, it forces our systems to work to combat this and restore itself by producing a series of chemical reactions. When people are constantly exposed to these stressors, the chemical reactions are equally constant and we run the risk of developing side effects.
The overproduction of these chemicals weakens the system and means that existing ailments (clinical) or new psycho-social stressors (work/personal) can have a greater impact than before as a result of urban dwelling.
Taking the lead
Poor, uncontrolled and unaware urban development has led to health issues. I don’t blame the industry, but I do see the need for it to be a responsible leader in the real problems that are facing our cities.
We call ourselves placemakers, yet we fail to address the elephant in the room that is social health. A family does not value an £11 duck burger from a food market when their elderly parent suffers from dementia. A family does not value yoga studios when their children develop neurological disorders from exposure to air pollution. A family does not value affordable workspaces and corporate social responsibility drop-ins when food insecurity affects daily life.
Our social metric, and a new way to define ourselves with legacy, concerns our actions in how we reverse the Dickensian undertones developing in urban health. Addressing these issues is how we rise up to own our self-declarations of placemakers and shapers.
And this is where we can turn things around, because when a stressor is caused by the built environment, it can also be reversed. For all the wonder of AI in the real estate industry, we should actually be celebrating the life and biological sciences. For in these advancements we are starting to understand the biological and neurological relationships we have with environments, both urban and green.
Solutions start by being simple and achievable and can grow. From materiality in construction to supply chain reviews, the way we make and manage our places needs adapting to work more in harmony with what a healthy life looks like. Our legacy is not bricks and mortar – it’s the health of our neighbours and future children.
