Switching the city lights back on

As we now hopefully emerge from this dark time, the question for developers and urban planners is how much our lifestyles have changed. Have they been transformed forever? Were such changes inevitable and already underway? Did the pandemic simply push us further along this road? Will there be a return to the old normal – or is the new normal here to stay? These questions are of fundamental importance for cities and developers, and we have already seen huge shifts already – away from commuting to the office every day in favour of working from home, while business trips and events have been replaced by video-conferences, a booming e-commerce market has put a huge dent in traditional retail, and there has been a surge in house prices in certain locations. When all of this is taken into consideration, the question can be reduced to: how should cities now be planned and zoned – and what part should developers be playing in this?

“If we really look for things the pandemic has changed, of course we can find some,” says Marcin Juszczyk, a member of the management board of Warsaw-based developer Capital Park. “But the main thing was that it was a huge life- experiment. We had to adapt very quickly, to video-conferencing and remote education, and the technology for this had to be developed and improved. We were forced to think about how all this was going to impact our lives – and the real estate business across all its segments has been no exception to this,” he adds.

This point is echoed by Marcin Kocerba, an associate in Cushman & Wakefield’s capital markets department in Warsaw: “Certainly, the Covid pandemic has made us reconsider many areas of our lives, including living in a city. We have increasingly started to ask ourselves questions like: what exactly are the key benefits of living in a city? And, what are the disadvantages of city-life we are ready to accept? I’m rather in the camp of those who think the pandemic has speeded up some trends rather than created them, such as working-from-home, video-conferences, on-line shopping and employee-centric office design,” he insists.

Ideas whose time has come

For office developers and owners, the lockdowns must have been a particular shock to the system, as virtually overnight offices emptied, to be replaced by a previously much less common mode of working – from home. As people got used to this and in many cases found it was possible and even preferable, the problem for the office market since the lifting of the restrictions has been how to attract employees back to their former workplaces. Empty offices in CBDs and office districts also have undesirable knock-on effects for the operators of services in such parts of town, which previously catered to mainly office employees. This kind of issue has brought into sharper focus certain ideas that have been around for some time but have been slow to be adopted. One such concept is the 15-minute city, which has been popularised by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. The term was actually first coined by French-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno, who cited as an inspiration American-Canadian theorist and activist Jane Jacobs and her seminal 1961 book ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’.

“Her idea was to create a safe, 24/7 city,” argues Ondřej Chybík, a founding partner of Prague-based Chybík & Kristof Architects and Urban Designers. “She was against the segregation of functions. This was a revolutionary idea in the 1960s and we didn’t listen her and still had many years of monofunctional development to come. Now we are coming to realise that CBDs are unsustainable if built this way – because if the function dies, the district dies. Jacobs argued these points 50 years ago – and now Covid has proven her right. We have seen that if the function is overwhelmingly office, the restaurants in such buildings close down if the offices are empty,” he adds.

Indeed, such patterns of monofunctional development are very evident in Warsaw, where entire districts such as Ursynów have been developed as residential dormitories, while others, such as the formerly industrial Służewiec sub-district of Mokotów, were zoned for office development.

Mixing things up

“In June 2020, back in the middle of the pandemic,” recalls Marcin Juszczyk of Capital Park, “we were looking at the rather monofunctional Służewiec office district to see if there was something to buy there, but we noticed that all the buildings and all their restaurants were empty.” He contrasts that particular situation with his company’s Royal Wilanów development, which was “very lively at the time. Our restaurants and beautiful green areas were full of people. We gave our F&B operators more outside space, providing them with tents, for example. People had been stuck at home for so long during the first lockdown that they were desperate to go out and meet people – and because Royal Wilanów is so close to residential development, they could just walk here,” he says. The office and mixed-use project is situated in Warsaw’s Wilanów district, famous for its palace and park, and on the edge of what was formerly known as ‘Miasteczko Wilanów’, a new, mainly residential sub-district. “Wilanów is a good example of a place where you have everything within walking distance of home. In the past, the prevailing urban design concept was monofunctional. One of the first projects our founders bought, back in 2003, was actually in Służewiec – Antares. We used to have our office there but decided to move out as we felt our people needed an alternative. Then we were given a proposal to buy a plot in Wilanów, which is roughly halfway between Warsaw city centre and Konstancin, where a lot of company CEOs live. We knew that this project had to be mixed-use and introduce new functions and public areas to what was then a mere dormitory district. People thought we were crazy to build offices in one phase on such a scale in what wasn’t an established office district. But then they began to see the advantages – how close it was to where people actually lived. We ourselves moved here in 2015,” explains Marcin Juszczyk.

Wilanów, however, is very much a suburb of Warsaw. Given the increase in home-working and the greater reluctance to commute, where does this leave city centres? Are they going to become ghost towns filled with empty office blocks, as people choose a suburban lifestyle instead? Architect Ondřej Chybík, for one, disagrees: “It isn’t more suburbanisation that we need, but more diversification of the city. Building on the outskirts often takes place on land that should stay as fields. This only leads to an environmental and ecological mess. The more a city sprawls outwards, the fewer fields we have for crops and the more we encroach upon areas of natural importance and beauty.”

What, then, is the solution? How can we reinvent CBDs and city centres to bring people back to them? “It’s now more than ever about the experience – no matter whether we are talking about work or shopping,” insists Marcin Kocerba of Cushman & Wakefield. He goes on: “If we have to commute two hours every day to spend eight hours surrounded by a mediocre office design where we hardly to have a chance collaborate with our teammates, we will decide to work from home whenever possible. On the other hand, if the commuting is quick and easy, our offices will be able to support creativity as well as other amenities (e.g. grocery shops, dry cleaning services, restaurants, etc.), allowing us to save our after-work time. Then working in the office will become a more viable and advantageous option.”

Car-free and more care-free

The commute to work has certainly become an issue, as people realise how just much time they expend just getting to and from work, with the added frustration of often ending up stuck in traffic jams during these rush hour journeys. And a grid-locked, petrol-fume polluted city is also not going to encourage people to come back. “If the question for city centres is how to attract people back to the office, then the length of the commute is going to be a big factor in this. People do not fear being in the office per se, as much as they fear commuting in crowded forms of transport,” admits Marcin Juszczyk. “Car-free zones have become something of a big topic,” claims Ondřej Chybík, who suggests that a possible solution is actually on its way: “Autonomous, electric driver-free cars could be commonplace in as little as ten years’ time. They could work like Uber – we would use an app to order them, they turn up. We could hire them for the weekend. This more selective use of cars should help to reduce traffic congestion. The mayor of Buenos Aires once said that a developed city is not one where the poor drive cars, but where the rich use public transport. In Prague many of my colleagues already do this, because travelling by car is actually much slower,” he points out.

Office design is another factor that needs to be addressed in the post-pandemic reality, but in Marcin Juszczyk’s opinion it was already an issue before Covid reared its head. “Everyone has needed more flexibility for some time already, so this is not a need that has been created by the pandemic. Even before it, it was increasingly a case of ‘focused work today, video-conference tomorrow, the next day a video podcast’. Focused work, for instance, could be done better at home or in focus rooms. Office design is going to have to change to meet this need for flexibility – there will be less people in the office, but maybe they will need more space when they are there. The average was 6 sqm per person, but with social distancing requirements more is going to be needed,” he explains.

The end of the mono age

One of the key recurring points made by the experts, however, is the need for added functions, to turn the monofunctional into the multifunctional. “This trend could already be seen in New York City post 9/11. The district that has been re-built there has become much more residential. More people now live in that part of the city than before and there is a wider range of functions,” points out Marcin Juszczyk of Capital Park. “City centres will remain as work hubs, because in the end people need to collaborate. But offices will have to be adapted to the new reality to become more sustainable. A lot of class B office stock is likely to be converted for other functions. Such downtown districts will become less office-centric and more mixed-use with more functions. They won’t become ghost towns. But people will want to live near where they work and won’t want to commute so much,” he adds.

“There is a group of investors in Poland that is already trying to address the new challenges and opportunities related to the post-pandemic environment in their projects. Capital Park’s Norblin Factory is a good example of a real-time adjustment to new reality, as at some point the developer decided to limit its exposure to traditional retail and enlarge the F&B and leisure area,” believes Marcin Kocerba of Cushman & Wakefield.

According to Ondřej Chybík, there needs to be a dialogue between cities, developers and architects about the way we go forward from here. “An architect is no longer someone who figures out what shape the windows should be. We are not artists anymore, but the profession that explains what urbanity actually is, that considers the quality of life in a city. Our role isn’t to be a devil’s advocate, but to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors,” As he concludes: “If we’d listened to Jane Jacobs, there would be greater diversification of functions in city centres, they would be safer and more sustainable – and would make more money. What’s more natural than to be able to walk down the street, bump into neighbours and form new friendships – or using cars all the time? We as architects know what people want and the real estate market needs to be more open to us.”