If we’re to build good places, architects and developers need to learn to trust each other

I am a property developer. Often that’s not the most sensible thing to admit, particularly if you’re out after dark in a city where affordable housing is in short supply. I think we have brought it on ourselves. Much of the property development industry is dull, greedy, self-absorbed and utterly disconnected from those it is supposed to serve. We have forgotten what we are there for in the first place – to build places for people. Places for us to live in, work in, play in, get better from being sick in, educate our children in and ultimately end our days in. We need to think again.

At the start of my career I worked for Anita Roddick at The Body Shop. The first line of her autobiography, Body and Soul, is surprising: “I hate the beauty business.”  What she meant was she hated the way the mainstream did it. She thought it should be different. She wanted to talk honestly to women in a language that didn’t make them feel bad about themselves and she chose a way of doing business that supported small suppliers in developing countries and respected the world’s natural resources. It worked. She built a hugely successful company that inspired millions of customers. Happy people, she knew, have deep pockets. And she knew there was no shame in that. Good business.

I think there are lessons here for our industry. I work in property not in order to be able to put one brick on top of another with bits of glass and steel in between, but to create a successful business that makes a difference. I’m far more interested in thinking about improving the lives of the people who will live, work and play in the places I help to build, and how that will make my schemes more valuable. And I want one constant companion on that mission – an architect.

I want us, together, to be agents of social and economic change first; developers and architects second

I’m constantly amazed at how little, in the mainstream, developers and architects understand each other. I have met many architects who think that developers are simply Philistines who value-engineer the quality out of everything they touch and I have worked with many developers who think that architecture is just another service that costs too much. This is a crazy situation in a business where mutual understanding between two central players is more crucial than it has ever been. On my mission, I want an architect to be my partner, soulmate, collaborator, enabler and inspiration. I want us, together, to be agents of social and economic change first, developers and architects second.

Where it really matters, our towns and cities are not in a good place. Our public finances are in the toilet and they aren’t coming out any time soon. We have town centres in terrible distress, industrial development has juddered to a complete halt and housebuilding is a trickle of what it needs to be. So what’s to do? I believe that we private-sector developers and architects have to work together to find the answers. To create beautiful schemes that regenerate dead places, deliver opportunity for social and economic sustainability and provide new public services and infrastructure. Because no one else is going to do it. We have to be clever. We have to leverage the very best joined-up thinking we can to deliver high-value schemes, probably on public land, that are mixed in use, provide public facilities from the profits of private speculative development and create the great private and social housing that we need. Great design and clever property development will make these schemes possible. And that isn’t going to happen unless developers and architects get round a table, properly understand each other and work together to produce something special.

For me, it’s about where that conversation starts. For the first few meetings on a new project, I don’t want to talk to our architect about buildings – that comes later. I want to talk about people and economics and jobs and social problems and children and shopping and eating and sleeping. Because architecture and property development is only about one thing. People. End users. How are they going to live, work and play in the buildings we design together? How are we going to make the kind of places that create jobs, and a sense of social cohesion? If we start by asking those questions of each other then, and only then, are we going to start to find the right answers. Together.