This October, Futurecity became the first Cultural Placemaking Content Partner of MIPIM UK Summit. We curated content across panels that covered topics like commercial property investment trends, development challenges and opportunities between Oxford and Cambridge, and development trends post-Brexit (read more here).

Futurecity Founder Mark Davy moderated the talk on “Brexit Resilience: Examining the Strengths of Higher Education, Creativity and Innovation in the UK“. In the beginning of the talk, he outlined a set of 12 observations of changes in the business sector of the past 3 years, during which Futurecity worked on major development projects in the UK, Middle East, USA and Australia.

  1. The rise of the ‘City of Culture’, Creative Districts and smaller ‘downtown’ areas of creativity.
  2. The influence of the Creative and Knowledge economy in getting UK cities and towns to use the arts to differentiate them from their competition, e.g. the ‘London Borough of Culture’.
  3. The interest by Property Developers in ‘mixed economy’ developments including Retail, Commercial, Residential, Education, Cultural and Leisure.
  4. The effect on behaviours of the Rental and PRS market in pushing developers to take a more imaginative and long-term view to managing an estate.
  5. Creating Places with an authentic identity, factoring in more meaningful Community Involvement and ideas for Co-Design and Co-Production.
  6. The failure of the High Street and Retail sector to adapt to the experiential and digital economy.
  7. The move by modern businesses like Google in realising their brand power when choosing locations, e.g. Google to Kings Cross, Apple to Battersea Power Station.
  8. The rise in importance of Culture Brands, major galleries, museums, theatres, film, gaming and animation studios.
  9. Rise in the interest of business partnerships between ‘Culture Brands’ and Developers, e.g. English National Ballet moving to London City Island.
  10. Investment by Developers in their own ‘content’, through a range of creative deals and JV’s with cultural operators like Quintain’s partnership with BoxPark in Wembley Park and Printworks at Canada Water.
  11. The impact of a Gen Z Transient-Urban-Population: using rented accommodation, short-term contracts, working from different locations and expecting more for their limited funds.
  12. Investment moving from the centre of London to Edge-City, described as Super Urban sites in Enfield Southall, Romford, Tottenham, etc.
More News