According to the World Economic Forum 2020 Global Risk Report¹ , the biggest long-term global risk is climate change and its effects, such as extreme weather, biodiversity loss and natural disasters. When the report was published earlier this year, however, the risk from infectious disease was considered relatively minor. While this assessment now seems out-of-step given the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic, climate change is still a timely and important global challenge. Similar to our approach to planning for a safer way of life following coronavirus, addressing the looming crisis of climate change requires a significant long-term shift across industries and behaviors. In fact, many of these shifts can help with both issues, including promoting low-carbon active travel, greenspaces and more local living.

Science-based targets (SBTs) provide companies with a key roadmap to tackle climate change by specifying how much and how quickly they need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. SBTs are greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets that are ambitious enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Based on climate science, they are the best way a company can know it is doing what is necessary to tackle climate change over the long term. SBTs must be regularly updated in line with the latest research, and the most comprehensive way any company can do this is by going through the process laid out by the Science Based Target initiative (SBTi). The SBTi is a collaboration between a variety of organizations that defines best practices, provides tools and independently assesses targets, among other things. As someone responsible for ArchTam’s sustainability internally, it gives me confidence to be tied to such a robust framework in the long term.

ArchTam is the first U.S.-based company in the engineering and construction sector to set officially validated SBTs through the SBTi. The year-long process followed the early achievement of our previous targets and required significant expertise and input from our operational teams and our global SBT Technical Working Group, all of whom work on GHG emission reduction for clients. At the end of the process we received official validation for two targets:

• 20 percent reduction in operational GHG emissions (fleet vehicles and office energy) by 2025, compared with 2018
• 10 percent reduction in supply chain GHG emissions by 2025, compared with 2018

At ArchTam, we believe it is important to demonstrate our own efforts to tackle climate change as we advise clients looking to create their own innovative sustainable solutions. Having SBTs is only the first stage of the route map and there is still much further to go. This includes our plans to meet our targets including making sure our vehicles are running properly and exploring greener alternatives, right-sizing and increasing efficiency in our real estate portfolio, as well as working closely with our significant suppliers. The key for me is that SBTs are a useful motivator for action and a vital start to our journey which can help us answer that fundamental question: “How do I do the right thing?”

You can learn more about our sustainability efforts and get support with your sustainability goals by visiting www.www.archtam.com/about-aecom/sustainability/.

¹The Global Risks Report 2020, World Economic Forum. Available at: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risk_Report_2020.pdf

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With many of us working from home to adhere to shelter-in-place guidelines and processing the events of the past two weeks that have been heartbreaking to witness, our employees may be feeling disconnected or experience increased levels of stress. It’s important to acknowledge that people are dedicating time and energy to process current events on top of maintaining a household that is suddenly together all the time. These sudden changes can negatively impact our physical and emotional health. Through our global employee network of more than 250 Well-Being Ambassadors and Well-Being Champions, we’re sharing tools and resources to strengthen our connection to employees and their families — from informational webinars about having difficult conversations during a time of unrest, to virtual bootcamp fitness classes, ideas for 30 days of self-care and more.

Building a culture of well-being has been a labor of love. For more than a decade, we’ve supported employee well-being through the Wellness at ArchTam program in the U.S. In 2018, we expanded our well-being program globally and kicked off “Global Well-Being Week” which focused on helping employees understand the importance of well-being for their personal and professional success and its alignment with our one of our core values: safeguard. As part of this effort, we introduced the five pillars of well-being (physical, emotional, financial, social and the planet) and launched WellBeingatArchTam.com, which gives employees easy access to resources, tools and action plans to help them prioritize well-being in all areas of their lives.

It’s been exciting to watch the program evolve. In 2019, we expanded to a “Global Well-Being Month” in June and saw a 200 percent increase in the number of countries hosting well-being events and activities, with more than 140,000 touchpoints (e.g. resources accessed, page views, event participation, downloads, posts and more). A surge of employees reported that they felt their well-being was supported by their managers. We’ve gone from a week to a month and now we are building on our culture even further with a year-round program.

Our efforts over the years have earned us a number of honors, including a 2019 Best Employers award for Excellence in Health & Well-Being by the National Business Group on Health, international and U.S. Silver Stevie Awards and an APEX Award of Excellence. As a leader at ArchTam, I’m proud of the work we’ve put into advancing this program, and that our focus on well-being is recognized — but we’re ecstatic to see our employees and their families make it a success and embrace our culture of holistic well-being around the world.

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But perhaps more important, greenery helps relieve anxiety disorders (stress) and depression, common afflictions associated with our harried urban lives. As one study puts it, “Support for this possibility comes from epidemiological studies which find that individuals living in the greenest urban areas tend to have better mental health than those in the least green areas.”¹

The social cost of anxiety and depression is significant. One report states that “Workplace stress costs U.S. employers an estimated $200 billion per year in absenteeism, lower productivity, staff turnover, workers’ compensation, medical insurance and other stress-related expenses”.² And a study by the American Psychological Association indicates that ¾ of the nation’s medical bill is associated with chronic illnesses, a malady that is driven by stress.³

From the perspective of pubic health there is every reason to invest in a greener urban landscape—especially when such greenery can also perform vital infrastructural functions related to, say, stormwater management and energy conservation.

But there is more to the health benefits of greenery than the relief of anxiety and depression. Little discussed in academia or professional associations, and hardly ever proposed in practice, is the spiritual dimension of the landscape. And yet access to natural areas is proven to elicit transcendent reactions that can postively affect our well-being. It has been well documented, for example, that hospital patients who can see greenery from their windows recover more quickly than those who don’t.⁴  There is latent healing potential in the design of any landscape, a matter that is confirmed by the biophylic effects of healing gardens.

As suggested by a weed growing out of a sewer inlet (above), nature’s quest for life and regeneration is as opportunistic as it is boundless. Nature is simply life-affirming—relentlessly so. How can the human spirit not be lifted by such power when our health is on the line? But why wait until a health crisis arises? The places in which we live and work should constitute fitness-inducing, stress-mitigating and life-affirming environments to start with. Like a green view from a nation-sized window, our collective wellbeing depends on it.

Cities, like pristine natural areas, are structured entities. At the scale of the region there are networks of open space that satisfy large-scale needs, such as flood protection, transportation and resource-based recreation. At the community scale there are streets, plazas and parks that provide for active mobility, organized play and social exchange. And at the dwelling scale, such as Friedensrech Hundertwasser’s apartment house in Viena (top), there are dense developments that, like a garden, afford personal and intimate access to foliage, flowers and birdsong (that it is also art will be the subject of a different blog!).

Within such a tiered schema urban greenery must be integrated systematically, not as afterthought but as forethought toward the creation of a healthy environment. To this pursuit the role of Landscape Architecture is not peripheral but central: It is the agency by which cities can become health havens—for the body, for the mind and for the spirit, from the scale of the region to that of discrete buildings and places. Why not regard cities as landscape, communities as park, and buildings as garden? ⁵

Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa leads ArchTam’s landscape architecture practice in the Americas.

NOTES:

1. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es403688w
2. http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/99su/stress.html
3. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/03/stress.aspx
4. http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/November-2011/Frontiers-of-Design-Science-Biophilia/
5. For a discussion on these three scales of design see “Reconsidering Ian MHarg: the Future of Urban Ecology, Chapter 9; Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa, Planners Press, 2014.

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The social, environmental, health and urban benefits of cycling have been well researched internationally. However, our built environment is having a hard time adapting, delivering and maximising these benefits that have been outlined academically. The recovery work in Christchurch created a unique opportunity where, as designers, we could rethink how a city can function and fast-track some of these adaptations.

People often ask me “why is cycling important for a contemporary city?”

I think urban cycling or utilitarian cycling, when designed right, can bring the most cost-effective benefits to a community among transport infrastructure options, and complement a city’s existing transport system. For example, cycleways are physically cheaper to build and maintain, they require less space, and they have higher capacity than roads for cars. While the cost, space and capacity arguments for cycling are great when compared to traditional roading, that is not why I’m motivated to work in the cycling space.

I’m motivated by the ideas of connect, control and happiness. They are the distillation of decades of my riding for fitness, commute, errands and most importantly, for fun. These three ideas guided me through my post-graduate studies, years of professional work, and they stay true to this day.

Connect refers to connections with your environment and the social aspect of human behaviour. Riding a bicycle in the city creates an environment where you are immersed within your surroundings through all your senses. You see the faces of people walking or riding bicycles, you feel the wind on your face and the potholes on the road, and you interact with the person next to you on your daily commute.

Riding a bicycle gave me a sense of control of my life. The feeling of me physically controlling my destiny through a bicycle is a psychologically satisfying emotion that is difficult to experience in our unpredictable world. Also, there is something special about the simplistic mechanics required to achieve this feeling – just go for bike ride!

Happiness is an underrated aspect of cycling. The smile of a kid who just learnt how to ride a bicycle says a thousand words; it is one of the purest expressions of “happiness”. Our increased responsibilities once grown-up mean that this sense of pure enjoyment is harder to come by. An academic colleague who is doing a PHD on happiness and cycling said that, “there is a mentality that commuting has to be miserable, and I’m doing it wrong if I’m having fun while doing it.” He went on to identify that the medical field argues that the inclusion of physical exercise within transit is one of the main reasons why the cycling transit environment is enjoyable. The writer Darrin Nordahl even published a book Making Transit Fun! in 2012 exploring some of these ideas.

My three motivations all contain an element of looking after our mental health, which I think is important when discussing riding bicycles. Medical research has shown that for the first time in history, the current generation is able to make ourselves feel unwell despite good physical health. This can be the result of the lack of social and physical interaction with other human beings as a result of our digitally connected world.

It’s relatively easy to provide physical cycling infrastructure. But how can we create better social capital through cycling in order to capitalise on the great benefits that are presented in academia?

One way to start triggering these benefits is through bike-share, where the community is given easy access to bicycles throughout Christchurch. ArchTam was the first corporate backer for the Christchurch BikeShare program. I would like to thank the senior leadership in New Zealand for sharing the vision I have for the Christchurch community, and I hope our role continues to go beyond simply providing infrastructure, and contributes to the social wellbeing of the community around us.

Now, how about a bike ride?

Jack Jiang (jack.jiang@archtam.com) is an architecturally trained urban designer who specialises in cycling infrastructure. Beside his internationally recognised research work and daily architectural work, he works with the ArchTam Transport team on active transport projects to bring a holistic approach to cycle network design. Outside of work, Jack initiated the community projects Lazy Sunday Cycle Christchurch and worked with the local council to deliver Back on Bikes Adult Cycle Safety Training.

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When psychologist Martin Seligman introduced the term “learned helplessness”, he proved the principle: if you experience that you cannot change what happens to yourself, you are paralyzed, leading to a downward spiral, no success stories, no motivation, no success. This was a substantial insight into the psychotherapy of depression. However, during his further studies as a psychologist and researcher, Seligman realised that not all individuals react to adverse circumstances in the same way – some tend to give up sooner, whereas others seem to have resources that prevent them from getting frustrated. In the meantime, a movement called “Positive Psychology” evolved, focusing on exactly these resources. Instead of looking for ways to cure mental illness, Positive Psychologists began to focus on ways to improve the quality of life.

We can transfer the core idea of Positive Psychology to the workplace. There is a simple recipe. Barbara Fredrickson, a distinguished expert in the field of positive emotions, suggests that optimistic thinking can lead to “flourishment”. This might sound a little esoteric, but it is a valuable concept in everyday life, describing a state of entire life satisfaction, comprising “feeling good” and “doing good”. Fredrickson posits that this state is enabled by the Positivity Ratio of 3:1 – that, on average, people who experience three times more positive than negative emotions are healthier, more optimistic, have happier marriages, better relationships and are more creative (try testing your own positivity ratio here!).

Bringing this theory into the workplace, a study found out that in successful meetings, the number of positive interactions clearly exceeds the number of negative interactions. Negative emotions are often experienced as more intense than positive emotions but luckily, for most individuals, the number of positive emotions experienced throughout their usual day exceeds the number of negative ones. And if the ratio is 3:1 or higher, we “flourish” (depressive individuals usually have a ratio of 1:1 or lower). This lead to an “upward spiral”, with motivation for new activities growing with positive experiences, and better motivation creating more positive experiences.

In summary, the recipe for fostering positivity and thus productivity in the workplace is: make sure we all have three times as many positive emotions as negative emotions.

How can we do this? Consider trying out the following ideas:

• Start a meeting by reporting reasons to celebrate and success stories. This allows participants to start off in a positive state of mind. It could help more difficult and tricky issues to be solved throughout the meeting. Research has also shown that individuals can enhance their awareness for positive events by keeping note of at least one good thing that has happened every day – this could be translated into a meeting by making sure to recap any positive outcomes as the meeting finishes.
• Allow “flow” by activity-based working. Doing something you’re really good at and confident in, but with a sense of challenge, can be an extremely positive experience. When these conditions are met, researchers discovered a state of timelessness and sense of total mastery, known as “flow”. Leaders can help enable this in the workplace by assigning the right tasks to the right people, but another important factor is the environment: a space can be ideal for one task (concentrated working in a quiet library), but detrimental to another (the same library to conduct a creative and exciting meeting). If it is possible to choose a suitable space for an activity, it is easier to experience “flow”, which has been shown to be a great enabler for creativity in the workplace.
• Surprise your colleagues. The tiniest positive experiences have been proven to significantly enhance our mood and change the way we approach things. Think about how you might cheer up others at work. A joke on the noticeboard? An unplanned break to have cake? Some flowers?

There are thousands of ways to bring more positivity into the workplace. What else can you think of?

Jennifer Gunkel is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Munich.

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We opened our doors to 60 international conference delegates, including a wide range of landscape architects, students, policy makers, clients, and those from other disciplines and allied areas of practice. We also welcomed a glass box full of bees! Morning tea consisted of fresh and organic locally-sourced food, fresh bread and – thanks to local collective ‘Bee One Third’ – honey from hives placed on a rooftop across the street from our office.

We are passionate about urban food and particularly the compelling co-benefits not only for food security, but also for health and well-being, community participation and future economic diversity.

The title of the event was chosen carefully. The infrastructure reference captures the value of understanding a bigger picture and connected systems. ‘Small bites’ represent the many small-scale changes and evolutionary steps already being taken all over the place – to make clear the collaborative nature of urban food. ‘Big places’ remind us of the potential, and of the transformative potential of big picture thinking. We were interested in scale and particularly the scale-ability of collaborative urban food production.

The first thing that struck us as we prepared for the event was the huge value in drawing together different ArchTam activity related to food. For the first time we assembled a passionate international group of people working around the edges of these themes to foster a dialogue, understand synergies and imagine potential. This process yielded the framework for the first half of the session.

We set the scene with some big picture headlines. These all provide compelling motivation to address some very real and pressing challenges.

We then gave a concise overview of a number of ArchTam projects, conference papers, activities and emerging initiatives. These included an understanding of the significant value (economically and socially) of small-scale urban food production, the emerging policy context through Gold Coast Local Food Feasibility and Redlands Rural Futures strategies and physical input into urban food production in Brooklyn, New York and Christchurch, New Zealand. To bring this back to a local context, Brisbane City Council provided a snapshot of community gardens within the city.

We explored concepts of the near-future, such as the Urban Food Jungle, the integrated potential flowing from a strategic infrastructure approach to climate adaptation (Townsville example) and the power of statistics relating to land area, productive potential, water consumption and employment creation (Jeddah Plan Food Strategy). We demonstrated the simple steps required to turn existing places into productive urban places.

The second session began with morning tea and was an informal and energetic honey-fuelled discussion about ideas, innovations, priorities and opinions related to ‘what next’? We captured the different views and have committed to producing a paper to explore the role of the profession in defining a step change in urban food production, in what will be a tangible step towards creating a transformative moment.

The collaboration has yielded great potential. We now need to hold ourselves to account for taking the next steps. The carrot? That has to be the truly compelling and tangible benefits to be harvested from big picture edible infrastructure within our towns and cities.

My simple conclusion from this is that urban food production just requires intentional steps, but these need to influence the process at different stages, through a determined approach. Most of our cities adopt a strategic, finely-tuned and well-funded approach to transport infrastructure. We largely take for granted the benefits and value of good transportation. Our provocative question for our audience: using the example of transport, why don’t we create a ministry of urban food infrastructure as the next step towards harvesting the benefits of local food production?

Alastair Leighton (alastair.leighton@archtam.com) is an associate director with ArchTam’s Design + Planning practice in Queensland.

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There are various reasons for the current interest in these areas: the increasing number of people losing work days to mental illness, demographic change, and the lack of exercise for people with desk jobs, to name a few. The discussion is all over the place – every week there are new articles and surveys published. Independent of location, there is one thing that people strongly agree on: the issue of wellbeing must be addressed in order to stay competitive and survive the war for talent.

Considering the possible effects of this, one could easily imagine workplace environments starting to look like wellness clinics – oases of relaxation and calmness. But the truth is, aside from all the talking, not much has happened so far in general. There are a few ideas that have been implemented, but we saw many of them fail in reaching their goal to change employees’ behavior in the long run (for example: free gym contracts, which tend, especially when flexible working is not an option, to be taken up mainly by people who were already using the gym anyway). Where is the big game changer everybody is waiting for?

In recent projects, my team and I have been asked several times by employees’ and workers’ councils about the possibilities to increase health and wellbeing in modern workplace environments. From these discussions, the idea arose of working more closely with the client’s health management department – adding someone responsible for health issues to the project team at an early stage in the project. This practice has already become standard with experts from the IT and HR departments. This action would provide a great chance to implement health and wellbeing measures early on in the change process.

As we know from experience, change in the workplace has a huge impact on the users – whenever we change the environment we also change the way people work. To guide them through the process, we conduct various change management activities with the employees, change agents and leadership, potentially including interviews, focus groups, surveys, workshops and trainings. We focus on the company’s culture and we work with people on the way they think, feel and behave in regard to change – to make the concept work long-term. A change management process this wide-reaching could be something most health/wellbeing implementations are missing. And that is where we see the potential.

To share these ideas with clients and friends we conducted a Think & Drink event in our Munich office in August. Getting the discussion started was guest speaker Wolfgang Pauck, CEO of Healthcare One, who talked about the implementation of their Health Lounge: a combination of measures for social interaction, relaxation and exercise as part of a workplace environment. I really like the idea of the lounge, and whilst I don’t think it will, on its own, solve all the issues at hand, I can easily imagine it as part of future office concepts. It makes health and wellbeing more accessible to people who are not very “sporty” (which is probably the majority of us!) and also represents a very visible, hands-on step by an organisation to prioritise health and wellbeing. Our guests at the event were fascinated with the idea, and how it would be implemented, even more so with the lounge itself – some even tested out the “plate one” unit then and there!

Mr. Pauck’s experience of the implementation of the Health Lounge echoed themes we know well – that the most important factors for a long-lasting change of the employee’s behaviour are to generate enthusiasm at the beginning and to personally involve people in the process over time.

What is your opinion? Do we need workplaces to work harder to foster health and wellbeing? And what can we do to make things last?

Matthias Kollmer (Matthias.kollmer@archtam.com) is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Munich.

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The reality of going to most conferences is that you listen for 80 percent of the time to things that you are already aware of (which might be interesting, but aren’t necessarily teaching you anything), 10 percent of the time feeling really bored and/or irritated by someone who just has it wrong, and the remaining 10 percent of the time feeling properly inspired and excited.

And so it might have been at the 7th International Urban Design Conference earlier this month in Adelaide. Something that felt different during these two days of talks, however, was a confluence of both new material and consistent themes. This gave me a stronger sense of progress (or at least the recognised need for change) than I’ve felt in the urban planning/design arena in Australia over at least the last few years.

It’s not that the material was always mind-bogglingly new or innovative. It was more that the thematic consistency – supported by some genuinely engaging use of real data and hard facts – gave a strong impression of something that can’t be ignored forever.

So what were these engaging themes, looming challenges and progressive ideas? Here are a few.

Our health as humans is being more defined and influenced by urban planning and design than by the health system. As we pour inordinate quantities of money into hospitals, cures, treatments and drugs, we completely ignore this fact. Scary, yes, but also exciting in that we have at hand a largely untouched set of opportunities to improve health through environmental design. We just have to enact them.

We keep planning for the past, and it’s doing us no favours. Humans have an awful trait that pervades almost everything we do – when seeking to understand what the future holds, we tend to look at the immediate past and then extrapolate it out. So if house prices have risen rapidly for the last ten years, we assume they will continue to rise rapidly for the next ten. If cars have been the dominant mode of transport for the last 30 years, we assume they will remain so for the next 30. One speaker described our assumption that net migration would continue to grow rapidly in the future as deeply flawed. If jobs in the resources sector evaporate further, and university education costs a lot more, the motivators for migration to Australia are likely to shrink dramatically. The tendency to look backwards for insights into the future is remarkably dumb, but we do it all the time. There is hope, however; smart people can do increasingly amazing things with data to understand more accurately what is likely to happen in the future. Given we can also define the future by our actions now, leadership and long-term thinking can go a long way.

Our aging population means more than the need for more nursing homes. It’s also going to leave our workforce severely depleted. An extraordinary proportion of our workforce is 40 years or older, and isn’t being replaced fast enough. This will have impacts across the economy, and not least in how we manage and develop our urban environment. We spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about where to house ‘young families’, but the real challenge may come in where the growing population of empty nesters, single older people and the elderly will live.

The funding for the infrastructure we need won’t all come from the same sources it has in the past (government). The capacity and commitment of both federal and state government to fund key infrastructure items, particularly those that don’t make for a high-profile ‘announceable’, is diminished. But the need for critical infrastructure to support the ongoing evolution and progress of our cities is not. As ArchTam’s Joe Langley presented, there are mechanisms that allow the tangible private sector value created by new public infrastructure (such as higher land values) to be captured and used to fund that infrastructure.

So while the above points paint a picture of drastic changes, ‘wicked problems’ and generational shifts, the conference also highlighted some pretty exciting evolutions in practice. From genuine community-led planning (yes, consultation that actually influences outcomes!), sustainability and health planning working in partnership, planning practice that allows discretion to produce values-driven outcomes rather than checklist planning, and demographers actually being listened to, there’s a lot of good stuff going on.

The location of the conference in Adelaide, too, is a good sign. Adelaide has continued to blossom despite some long-held prejudices and misconceptions. The CBD has a spring in its step – new cafes, shops, bars and restaurants are supported by strategic public realm interventions. The Adelaide Oval redevelopment has injected new life north of the city and the award-winning South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute building on North Terrace promises to be the lynchpin of a newly enlivened health and knowledge precinct.

The 80-10-10 rule of conferences might continue to be the norm, but the 7th International Urban Design Conference in Adelaide demonstrated that there’s a lot to be excited about in urban design and the built environment in general. But ideas are one thing – putting them into practice to make every project as good as it can be is real the challenge that we all need to get to work on.

Peter Steele is a senior consultant, sustainability and climate change, based in ArchTam’s Melbourne office, and presented ‘Precinct Planning for Sustainability: The Armstrong Creek Experience’ at this month’s International Urban Design Conference.

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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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There is clear evidence that developers, planners, engineers and designers have contributed to the global health and obesity crisis since the inception of the mass-produced affordable automobile. Seemingly inexplicable decisions were made during the 1950s in cities such as Sydney, to tear up extensive light rail systems to enhance the design of roads for speed and efficiency of automobile movement.

A recent Urban Land Institute Publication, “10 Principles for Building Healthy Places,” states that “one of the strongest health/land use correlations is between obesity and the automobile: one California study showed each additional hour spent in a car per day is associated with a 6 percent increase in body weight, whereas every kilometer (0.6 miles) walked each day is associated with a 5 percent decrease according to a study in British Columbia.”

A massive urban retrofitting process is currently underway worldwide to correct 60 years of neglect toward providing means for pedestrian and bicycle movement. Excellent examples of where this is occurring include ArchTam’s work at the World Trade Center in New York, public realm planning in Doha, Qatar, the River of Life urban regeneration in Kuala Lumpur, a connected pedestrian network at Ayala Triangle in Manila, and the Los Angeles “Bridge to Breakwater” public realm. These projects alone will provide more than 200 km of new paths and trails.

Port of Los Angeles. Copyright ArchTam photo by David Lloyd.

Common themes in all of these large-scale place-making projects include the generous provision of street furniture and trees, safe pedestrian crossings, and easily accessible transit, parks, playgrounds, bike paths and jogging trails.  While many other factors also impact global health, well-connected, safe pedestrian and bicycle movement systems are a starting point that planners and landscape architects can directly influence. It is time to make sure that human-powered movement is approached with the same care and priority that has been traditionally afforded to vehicular movement systems.

Jacinta McCann (jacinta.mccann@archtam.com) leads ArchTam’s global Design, Planning + Economics practice.

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