The Global Cities Indicators Facility (GCIF) at the University of Toronto has for a long time worked with many cities around the world to collect and share data on city-level information that would be valuable for city management. Their global conference held this past May in Toronto brought together several hundred representatives of city governments, architects, planners and academics to explore what is being discovered. As a senior fellow of the Global Cities Institute I was invited to speak at the conference.

Created in 2008, the GCIF provides a set of city indicators prioritized by cities, with a globally standardized methodology that allows for comparability of city performance and knowledge sharing. Beginning with nine pilot cities, the GCIF has now developed into a global network of over 255 cities across 81 countries. Building on these core indicators, this work has evolved into a new ISO Standard (ISO 37120) and the concurrent creation of the World Council on City Data.

The big news about the data that the university is collecting is that it is now able to do so under the imprimatur of an ISO standard. It means that the data are being gathered under clear standards for comparability. The ISO standard provides an enormous boost to the value of such data and will increase the level of interest (and investment) in such data by those seeking to support cities with ‘smart’ urban infrastructure. We can expect to see a huge uplift in intelligent analyses of these kinds of data that will provide a kind of ‘meta’ overview of urban performance. See for example the establishment of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in New York, a public-private research center that “observes, analyzes, and models cities to optimize outcomes, prototype new solutions, formalize new tools and processes, and develop new expertise/experts in ‘Urban Informatics’.

I am interested in how this development of a ‘smart city’ movement and the enrichment and availability of data to understand urban performance relates to our own perspectives on work, workplaces, and the city. It suggests that our analyses of workplace data should now be related to wider perspectives on where and how work is happening on an urban scale in new kinds of working environments – some of them public or semi-public, some of them embedded in all sorts of different kinds of environments (residential, social, retail, educational etc.). Many of these new workplaces are mixed-use environments, with work taking places alongside many other kinds of functions and uses. So what are some of the avenues to explore further?

• We know that most office workplaces are grossly under-occupied (average active occupancy is around 43%).
• We know that staff in many organizations are already working in a variety of non-office based places and spaces in cities.
• We don’t have the tools to measure and analyze how this wider network of workplaces is being occupied and used and how it should be designed and provided for in the future.

The smart city movement and the availability of rich datasets from global cities means there is a huge opportunity to explore urban-scale working patterns. I am looking forward to researching and defining new kinds of performance goals for these emerging kinds of networked urban buildings and places.

Andrew Laing (andrew.laing@archtam.com) leads ArchTam’s global Strategy Plus practice.

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I was invited to speak at the International Facilities Management Association workplace strategy summit held near Reading, UK in June. This was hosted by Professor Alexi Marmot from University College London and was a followup to a previous summit held at Cornell University in 2012. The attendees were an interesting mix of workplace strategists from around the world (including several previous DEGWers), academics (such as Frank Becker and Wim Pullen), a few architects, as well as a smattering of corporate and government end users. The format was a mix of presentations and panel discussions as well as roundtable exercises. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The scale was relatively small (around 100 people), which meant that the in-between conversations were often as valuable as the formal discussions.

The big theme seemed to be ‘where is workplace strategy going’? There were several propositions:

• Workplace is becoming consumerized: workplace as a service (WaaS) will replace workplace as designed space. We need to define the requirements for user experience rather than simply enumerate conventional programs of space.
• Workplace is an aspect of Human Resources and as such needs to be considered alongside other organizational rewards, costs, and benefits and in relation to organizational goals for employee behaviors.
• Workplace strategy must consider and ideally measure how the workplace is contributing to health and well-being. Examples would be minimizing the risks of sedentary work styles, and accommodating the different needs of multi-generations.
• Workplace is no longer merely the office but the wider world of co-working and third places. Our methods of briefing and programming need to be re-imagined to take this much more diverse and distributed network of spaces and places into account.
• Workplace strategy is in a sense becoming part of urban strategy: technology has enabled work to happen in less conventional workplace environments, blurring living, working and learning spaces in urban places. We need new approaches for briefing these multi-use and multi-scale environments.
• New responsibilities and managerial concerns arise as workplaces cross the boundaries of private and public spaces and become more like curated experiences or settings for different kinds of events and performances.
• New forms of ownership and procurement of space are emerging in the ‘sharing economy’ that will challenge the old supply chain of developers, landlords, and designers.

Andrew Laing (andrew.laing@archtam.com) leads ArchTam’s global Strategy Plus practice.

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But more than the synergy between the technology businesses and the growth sectors of the economy, what was interesting to me also was the fact that the technology products being developed are applications to improve how we live and work in dense urban environments. And the technology workplace, as such, has become a harbinger of wider trends and innovations in how we design, use, and procure space. Whether in the form of new types of coworking spaces, or in the “meet-up culture,” or in terms of how technology is enabling space to be procured in new ways, the tech industry points to big changes in how we think about the future workplace.

Ironically, the tech industry in New York points to how important the networked physical fabric of environments for working and living in the city are, even in an increasingly virtualized world. Two big shifts are highlighted, which have general implications: the shift towards more collaborative and urban “workscapes” that are more heterogeneous, mixed-use and multi-scaled; and the shift to the collaborative consumption of workspace and workspace-as-service, provided in ways that are more responsive to short-term changing user demands.

Read “Work and Workplaces in the Digital City,” a paper I wrote for Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) and presented at a conference hosted by CURE November 1, 2013 called “Building the Digital City.” Let me know your thoughts.

Andrew Laing is global practice leader, Strategy Plus, ArchTam, and a senior fellow at the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) at Columbia University. 

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