Why loneliness is both an individual thing and a shared result of the cities we create

Dr Jennifer Kent

Dr Jennifer Kent is a Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Jennifer’s research interests are at the intersections between urban planning, transport and human health. She specialises in combining quantitative and qualitative data with understandings from policy science to trace the practical, cultural and political barriers to healthy cities.

If you’re feeling lonely, you’re not alone. Loneliness is an increasingly common experience, and it can have severe consequences. People who feel lonely are at higher risk of serious health issues, including heart disease, immune deficiency and depression.

Traditionally, loneliness has been viewed as an individual problem requiring individual solutions, such as psychological therapy or medication. Yet loneliness is caused by feeling disconnected from society. It therefore makes sense that treatments for loneliness should focus on the things that help us make these broader connections.

The places where we live, work and play, for example, can promote meaningful social interactions and help us build a sense of connection. Careful planning and management of these places can create population-wide improvements in loneliness.

Our research team is investigating how the way we design and plan our cities impacts loneliness. We have just published a systematic review of research from around the world. Overall, we found many aspects of the built environment affect loneliness.

However, no single design attribute can protect everyone against loneliness. Places can provide opportunities for social interactions, or present barriers to them. Yet every individual responds differently to these opportunities and barriers.

What did the review look at?

Our review involved screening over 7,000 published studies covering fields such as psychology, public health and urban planning. We included 57 studies that directly examined the relationship between loneliness and the built environment. These studies covered wide-ranging aspects from neighbourhood design, housing conditions and public spaces to transport infrastructure and natural spaces.

The research shows built environments can present people with options to do the things we know help reduce loneliness. Examples include chatting to the people in your street or neighbourhood or attending a community event.

However, the link between the built environment and loneliness is complex. Our review found possibilities for social interaction depend on both structural and individual factors. In other words, individual outcomes depend on what the design of a space enables a person to do as well as on whether, and how, that person takes advantage of that design.

Specifically, we identified some key aspects of the built environment that can help people make connections. These include housing design, transport systems and the distribution and design of open and natural spaces.

So what sort of situations are we talking about?

Living in small apartments, for example can increase loneliness. For some people, this is because the smaller space reduces their ability to have people over for dinner. Others who live in poorly maintained housing report similar experiences.

More universally, living in areas with good access to community centres and natural spaces helps people make social connections. These spaces allow for both planned and unexpected social interactions.

Living in environments with good access to destinations and transport options also protects against loneliness. In particular, it benefits individuals who are able to use active transport (walking and cycling) and high-quality public transport.

This finding should make sense to anyone who walks or takes the bus. We are then more likely to interact in some way with those around us than when locked away in the privacy of a car.

Similarly, built environments designed to be safe — from crime, traffic and pollution — also enable people to explore their neighbourhoods easily on foot. Once again, that gives them more opportunities for social interactions that can, potentially, reduce loneliness.

Environments where people are able to express themselves were also found to protect against loneliness. For example, residents of housing they could personalise and “make home” reported feeling less lonely. So too did those who felt able to “fit in”, or identify with the people living close by.

Other important factors are less obvious

These factors are fairly well defined, but we also found less tangible conditions could be significant. For example, studies consistently showed the importance of socio-economic status. The interplay between economic inequalities and the built environment can deny many the right to live a life without loneliness.

For example, housing tenure can be important because people who rent are less able to personalise their homes. People with lower incomes can’t always afford to live close to friends or in a neighbourhood where they feel accepted. Lower-income areas are also notoriously under-serviced with reliable public transport, well-maintained natural spaces and well-designed public spaces.

Our review reveals several aspects of the built environment that can enhance social interactions and minimise loneliness. Our key finding, though, is that there is no single built environment that is universally “good” or “bad” for loneliness.

Yes, we can plan and build our cities to help us meet our innate need for social connection. But context matters, and different individuals will interpret built environments differently.

5 big questions real estate is asking in 2023

Following years of standstill in the wake of a global pandemic, industry players question ‘what’s next?’

JLL are property financiers with a diverse range of clientele. With sustainability at the core of their ethos, JLL are working toward creating a world-leading sustainable property development firm.

The past few years have been bumpy, with one event after the other challenging the economy, businesses, and the way we work.

This year looks set to be another year of transformation, with questions looming around corporate climate goals and hybrid work, to whether inflation will abate and the tech industry will grow.

At the start of the year, uncertainty remains high. Below, we weigh in on some of the biggest questions JLL experts say will drive decisions among investors and companies in 2023.

How will the balance between home and office evolve?

Hybrid work has become non-negotiable for many employees, and companies must incorporate and support effective work, whether in the office or at home.

Recent JLL research shows that younger generations and hyper-hybrid employees, who work more than three days a week remotely, tend to be least loyal and have left their jobs or plan to leave at a much higher rate.

“Employers are facing complex challenges, but they also have a unique opportunity, as the office takes on a new role and becomes the new central hub in the hybrid work ecosystem,” says Flore Pradere, JLL Global Work Dynamics Research Director.

With the office emerging as a place of collaboration, Pradere says in 2023, the evolution of hybrid work will see the office play a more significant role in helping alleviate the isolation employees face working from home.

“Balancing the need to provide flexible working arrangements – an imperative – against the need to offer a working environment that meets the complex demands of employees requires solutions aligned with the aspirations and priorities of a more demanding workforce,” Pradere says.

What’s next for the economy and investment?

Record-high inflation and rising interest rates have created an uncertain investment environment, with the potential for further economic deterioration possible as the year unfolds.

But it’s worth pointing out that any slowdown will likely be short and shallow. There is emerging evidence that inflation has peaked in the U.S. and potentially across Europe. Ebbing inflation also has tempered expectations for central bank rate tightening, suggesting that reference rates will not rise as high or fast as recently expected.

A challenge for commercial real estate is uncertainty over the adjustment’s size, speed, and duration. However, there’s still a significant amount of capital on the sidelines, and property owners and investors will take this as an opportunity, according to JLL’s 2023 economic outlook.

Questions remain in 2023 surrounding logistics and supply chain disruptions with the flow-through effects on commodity and energy prices.

Will companies really decarbonize their real estate?

Talk without action around climate-related initiatives and goals is no longer acceptable. The message was received loud and clear at COP27, where United Nations figures revealed that built environment emissions were at an all-time high.

This year, key players — consumers to shareholders — will be looking for action and systematic change from the real estate industry. For many companies, though, formulating a clear action plan, and collecting and analyzing data, proved to be pain points.

Guy Grainger, JLL Global Head of Sustainability Services and ESG, says moving forward, companies will need to implement solutions to decarbonize their operations, emphasizing a need to retrofit existing buildings and invest in renewable energy. For instance, shareholders and lawmakers are holding companies accountable by requiring them to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and the climate risk their businesses face.

Reaching net zero targets can be daunting for companies of all sizes, but it is achievable, Grainger says. Created with the World Economic Forum, he points to JLL’s Green Building Principles as a roadmap for companies to use.

Where will the tech industry expand?

During the pandemic’s peak, the tech industry saw astronomical growth. However, in 2022 there were signs of slowing, and by the fourth quarter, headlines focused on layoffs rather than massive growth.

But it’s not precisely all grim news. The startup scene in many U.S. markets shows promise, according to JLL’s Tech Office Trends Outlook.

Industry experts see growth in tech clusters, such as in San Francisco, New England, and New York. With valuations coming down, investors are also placing bets on early-stage companies and focusing on exits in four to five years instead of the following year.

“Emerging innovator” markets are also gaining additional momentum as work becomes further distributed along geographic and cost lines. For example, in Bengaluru, nearly 1.3 million square meters of net occupancy growth on the back of inward tech investment and expansion since the beginning of 2020 has coincided with a 6.8% increase in rents. Similarly, Hyderabad has experienced a rental uplift of nearly 8% over the same time frame.

Looking forward, JLL’s tech outlook points to innovation around A.I., blockchain, cleantech, and cloud solution, saying the markets are poised to expand despite economic headwinds.

“A.I., cleantech, and blockchain specifically are in their nascent stages with considerable opportunity to grow beyond their current market size, indicating investors to look past the current market turbulence and consider the long-term opportunity available in these industry verticals,” says Alexander Quinn, JLL Research Director.

Can real estate give back to the community?

The impact of ESG on the real estate industry is moving beyond sustainability. Awareness is growing that the built environment can have a significant social impact through efforts that rehabilitate public spaces, add required infrastructure like care centers, or help attain environmental goals with green buildings.

Some successful examples can be found in smart cities such as Dubai, which has used tech innovation to impact transportation, tourism, energy, housing, and security, and Singapore, which uses street lampposts to monitor changes related to environmental conditions.

Julia Georgules, JLL head of Americas research and strategy, says real estate can be highly transformative on a community, even in minor ways. For example, she points to public art installments and greenspaces or parks as tokens developers can leave behind after working on a project. Georgules even points to some Boston developers who are incorporating childcare into a new project.

“The impact that development can have on a community is immense, and with a spotlight on ESG, these investors and builders must think about a broad range of social impact, from affordable housing to providing jobs to a diverse population,” Georgules says. “It’s a must now.”

What is Regenerative Architecture? Limits of Sustainable Design, System Thinking Approach and the Future

Ankitha Gattupalli is an architect and writer engaged in the intersection between spaces, ecologies and communities. She is an architect at ReDO and a writer at ArchDaily.

This article was originally posted on the Arch Daily website.

A heavily cited fact within the architecture industry is that the built environment accounts for 40% of global carbon emissions. The concerning statistic puts immense responsibility on construction professionals. The idea of sustainability in architecture urgently emerged as a way of bandaging environmental damage. A wide range of sustainability practices aims no higher than making buildings “less bad”, serving as inadequate measures for current and future architecture. The problem with sustainable architecture is that it stops with ‘sustaining’.

In order to maintain the current state of the environment, the architecture community has been working towards greener means of production. Conventionally, a green building employs active or passive features as a tool for reduction and conservation. Most sustainable designs view buildings as a vessel of their own rather than integrated parts of their ecosystem. With the planet’s current needs, this approach is not enough. It is not enough to sustain the natural environment, but also restore its processes.

What is Regenerative Architecture?

In biology, regeneration refers to the ability to renew, restore or grow tissues in organisms and ecosystems in accordance with natural fluctuations. When applied to building design, this can look like structures that mimic restorative aspects found in nature. Regenerative architecture is the practice of engaging the natural world as the medium for and generator of architecture. Living systems on the site become the building blocks of the structure built in harmony with the overall ecosystem.

Regenerative architecture demands a forward-thinking approach. In contrast to sustainably designed buildings, regenerative buildings are designed and operated to reverse ecological damage and have a net-positive impact on the natural environment. Shifting from a sustainability lens to a regenerative one means that architects should question how we can design structures that not only use limited resources but also restore them. Regeneration also seeks to facilitate a more resilient environment that can resist natural challenges.

Regenerative vs. Sustainable Design

Sustainable and regenerative design may seem like different approaches - sustainability limits resource use, while regeneration replenishes them. Sustainability, however, is a subset of a larger regenerative model. Both methods overlap and incorporate similar practices, each emphasizing different green goals. Just as ‘reduce’, ‘reuse’ and ‘recycle’ can’t operate in isolation, sustainability practices lend a hand towards regenerative goals by forming the first step towards replenishing resources - limiting their consumption.

One way both practices differ is in their scale of interventions. Regenerative design demands architecture be seen as an extension of the place, the site, the flora and fauna, and the ecosystem. Buildings are treated as part of a larger system, helping to produce and share resources like clean water, energy, and food. For example, Splitterwerk and ARUP’s SolarLeaf bio-reactive façade generates renewable energy from algal biomass and solar heat. The energy generated can be used by the building, stored for future use, or provided to the utility grid. 

Systems Thinking in Architecture 

When designing a regenerative environment, it is important to adopt a systems approach to thinking. All relevant and contributing entities must be considered, measuring their networks of impact on the overall ecosystem. The design must account for how a building relates to the microclimate, or how the soil can support local flora. The designed system must allow for mutually supportive relationships between entities, making sure that there is equal give and take. Each relationship builds on the other to create a strong, thriving human-nature ecosystem.

“Sustainability is all about systems and making sure we’re thinking about the entire picture so we can address a problem from all angles”, writes Nabil Nasr, the Director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability. Rather than employing sustainable design elements as a method of greenwashing, architects must develop a deeper understanding of eco-architecture through a systems approach. Architects must move away from being mere object creators and be involved in the design of broader systems for our future. Systems thinking allows architects to recognize how the built world exists within social, environmental, and business networks, which are changing at a rate that traditional architecture must rush to support.

The Need for Regenerative Design 

The regenerative design process is fundamentally rooted in a system thinking approach. Interventions may include biomimicry to imitate nature, air-cleansing building skins, water-purifying structures, or carbon-capturing architecture. Shifting thoughts from sustainable to regenerative architecture will account for a better strategy to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency that plagues society today. The regenerative architecture will allow the construction industry to “do good” rather than merely “less bad”.

Gattupalli, A - What is Regenerative Architecture? Limits of Sustainable Design, System Thinking Approach and the Future, Arch Daily, accessed 6 Dec 2022

https://www.archdaily.com/993206/what-is-regenerative-architecture-limits-of-sustainable-design-system-thinking-approach-and-the-future

Navigating the Great Office Exodus

This article was written by Sarah Marinos, a researcher at the University of Melbourne.

Working from home went from zero to 100 during COVID-19, but how have Australians coped with the shift away from the traditional workplace? The annual HILDA survey has some answers

Working from home went from zero to 100 during COVID-19, but how have Australians coped with the shift away from the traditional workplace? The annual HILDA survey has some answers

Pre-pandemic, if you worked mostly from home, you were in a small minority of Australians (about six per cent) and you were most likely self-employed.

Fast forward to 2020 and 35 per cent of people spent some of their working week at home, and 21 per cent spent most of their working hours in a home office, spare bedroom or at the kitchen table.

The latest annual Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey reveals COVID-19 has triggered a seismic shift in how and where Australians work.

“Prior to the pandemic people were discussing working from home as the new big deal in the workplace. In fact, only a minority of firms were encouraging working from home … then the pandemic came along and changed everything,” says Professor Mark Wooden, Director of the HILDA Survey project team at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.

The rise and rise of job insecurity

Professor Wooden says the HILDA figures around working from home could also well be an under-estimate with the Household Impacts of COVID-19 survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimating that by December 2020, 27.4 per cent of Australians worked “mostly from home”

From a “Nice to Have’ to a ‘Must Have’

The HILDA Survey follows the lives of more than 17,000 Australians each year, over the course of their lifetime, collecting information on many aspects of life in Australia, including household and family relationships, income and employment, and health and education.

Associate Professor Christhina Candido, Director of the Sustainable and Healthy Environments Lab in the Melbourne School of Design, says whereas working from home was once a “nice to have” option, now it is a “must have” for employers wanting to attract and retain workers.

“The appetite for flexible working arrangements already existed, particularly for the millennial workforce. But there was an attitude from management that you couldn’t get promoted if you were working from “under the doona,” says Associate Professor Candido.

“Flexible working arrangements were available before COVID but at small scale uptake – there was a wrong assumption (and still is to some extent) that you climbed out of bed and worked in your pyjamas.

Employers can’t keep this narrow-minded approach anymore after the large-scale uptake of new ways of working.”

A COVID-19 State of Mind

At the time of the HILDA Survey in 2020, the Australian Capital Territory (at 33 per cent) and Victoria (at 33 per cent) – which was in the middle of a lengthy lockdown – had the highest number of people working from home.

In 2019, these figures sat at 2.4 per cent for ACT and Victoria. Numbers rose markedly in all states except Tasmania in 2020.

Industry-Wide Impacts

Only the agriculture, forestry and fishing industry bucked the working-from-home trend.

The financial and insurance services sector saw a 58 per cent rise in the number of employees working from home. Information media and telecommunications rose 40 per cent; professional, scientific and technical services rose 38 per cent; and public administration and safety saw 34 per cent more employees staying home.

Not surprisingly, industries where face-to-face contact is key had a very different experience.

The number of employees working from home in accommodation and food services rose by less than two per cent, in retail by five per cent, in health care and social assistance by eight per cent, in construction by five per cent, and in transport, postal and warehousing by four per cent.

Feeling Productive - Or Not

While workers saved time on their daily commute, did they feel more productive?

A third (33.3 per cent) felt productivity remained the same, 29 per cent felt it was a little worse and 13.4 per cent said their productivity was much worse.

Professor Wooden says this isn’t surprising as Australian workers had little time to prepare for the change to home working. Many didn’t have dedicated workspaces, while some may have shared a space with other family members or also had young children to supervise.

“Working from home is great if you have a large home, a separate office space and can remove yourself from noisy children. It might be a bonus for people living in McMansions who avoid the stress of the daily commute,” says Professor Wooden.

“When it is forced, it can penalise people from less advantaged backgrounds. Working from home isn’t equal for everybody.”

Associate Professor Candido says the productivity question is complex and she adds the stress of lockdowns, poor mental health, seeing work as a distraction and refuge from the pandemic or perhaps working too hard for too long may all have impacted productivity.

Do I Really Need to Go into the Office?

HILDA also found hybrid working arrangements may not be the silver bullet that allows organisations and employees to straddle the old and newer style of working.

But giving people a choice about where they work and a purpose for being in the workplace is important.

Associate Professor Candido says brainstorming, decision-making, future thinking and collaborative activities are purposeful opportunities for people to meet at work.

“We still want to be around colleagues, but simply telling employees to do three days in the office and two days at home is not enough. Showing up to an empty office or going to work simply to spend a day on Zoom calls is pointless,” she says.

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

HILDA found working from home brought no significant increase in job satisfaction, at least when averaged across all workers, despite the potential for greater autonomy and flexibility as well as less time stuck in traffic or on public transport.

Professor Wooden explains this surprisingly small increase by the fact that working from home was forced on people whose home environment may have made work challenging.

“In the longer term, I suspect people who don’t find working from home satisfying will return to the workplace and those who want to stay at home will find their employers more accepting of that,” he says.

Victoria’s Ghost-Town CBD

This prediction appears to be accurate, particularly in Victoria. In September 2022, the Victorian Government lifted work from home recommendations put in place to help reduce the transmission of COVID-19.

Two months later, in November 2022, occupancy data from the Property Council of Australia revealed that buildings in Melbourne’s city centre were still less than half full during the working week.

In Perth and Adelaide, CBD offices are 78 per cent and 76 per cent full, while Brisbane’s CBD buildings sit at 64 per cent capacity.

Winners & Losers

The shift to working from home comes with a mixed bag of benefits and disadvantages.

The potential loss of social connectedness – an important part of maintaining good mental health – is an issue, as is ‘proximity bias’. This bias is the notion that employers are more likely to favour employees who are sat in front of them over more invisible remote workers.

“If working from home remains voluntary, some people will go to work to get ahead and others will miss out and there is the potential for all sorts of new inequalities to arise,” says Professor Wooden.

“Will working from home stick? At this point, we don’t know, but I doubt the number of workers in our CBDs will ever return to the levels they once were.”

Associate Professor Candido believes working from home – working from anywhere – is here to stay.

“The successful industries and businesses are changing the conversation. They are saying ‘let’s tap into this pool of talent that couldn’t work for my organisation before because of our workplace arrangements’.

“They are shifting the conversation from the time and place of work and are instead thinking about what needs to be achieved,” she says.

“These are unchartered waters and there is no doubt that the changes prompted by the pandemic are the most significant event in the workplace since the adoption of mobile technology. The pandemic unshackled us and that is both challenging and exciting.”

This article was originally published on the Pursuit. Read it here…

Queensland’s high-tech plan to make the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games smarter and greener

Davina Jackson M.Arch (UNSW) PhD by Pubs (Kent) is a Sydney-based writer of books, exhibitions, sites and papers on architecture, design, geographical and urban technology themes. A former editor of Architecture Australia and a founder of the smart light city festivals in Sydney and Singapore, she is a visiting scholar with the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture and was the lead editor of the first comprehensive manifesto of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (aka Digital Earth) project.

Davina Jackson

With Brisbane to host the 2032 Olympic Games, Queensland is accelerating “smart” and “green” infrastructure projects right across the coast from Coolangatta to Coolum.

So what practical steps is the state government taking to bring Brisbane closer to being a smart city while managing rapid growth? And what differences can city residents realistically expect to see for themselves?

Exploiting a quarter century of technological progress

Vastly more ambitious than the South Bank building boom, which preceded Brisbane’s World Expo 88 in the pre-internet era, Queensland’s current infrastructure programs are exploiting the last quarter-century of technological progress.

Think sensor-triggered street lights, automated air conditioning and watering of parks and green facades. Envision robots for cleaning and construction, satmaps, swipe cards and QR codes. Data technology will be embedded in 32 existing and planned Olympic venues, the future athletes’ village at Northshore Hamilton (near Breakfast Creek) and the international media centres.

Technology will also underpin a substantial city centre at Maroochydore. Here, a mid-rise precinct will be powered via a solar farm at nearby Valdora, and will include fibre-optic telecommunications cables. In what may be a first for Australia, a new system will sluice garbage from chutes through underground vacuum pipes.

A ‘New Norm’ Olympics

All Games facilities must align with a set of 118 reforms the International Olympic Committee (IOC) calls its “New Norm” guidelines.

These were introduced in 2018 to improve energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness and long-term value from the huge development expenditure required of host governments. There had been concerns about integrity and wastefulness in the IOC’s old-school supervision of Games bidding and delivery processes.

Brisbane’s Games win is accelerating and expanding some major public mobility programs offering “turn up and go” transport routes for the 4.4 million people expected to live in South-East Queensland by 2031.

Aerial taxis without pilots

The most provocative proposal – still speculative – is to introduce aerial taxis to fly passengers without pilots, but remotely supervised, between future “vertiports”.

A prototype eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft is in Brisbane while its American manufacturer, Wisk Aero, seeks approval from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to operate commercially before the 2032 Games.

Wisk (backed by Boeing) has completed more than 1,600 test flights with six generations of aircraft. The Brisbane model has 12 lift fans on two 15-metre wings and is powered by a battery in the tail.

Delegates at a recent Smart Cities Council transport workshop I attended noted the potential of autonomous aerial vehicles to change patterns of housing development beyond road and rail links. Even so, Queensland is rapidly expanding its terrestrial network.

Land transport projects

Brisbane’s Cross River Rail line is being extended northwards through a new twin tunnel under Brisbane River and four new underground stations at Boggo Road, Woolloongabba, Albert Street and Roma Street.

This project uses smart tunnel-boring machines to carve through the tuff (a type of volcanic rock, pronounced toof) that formed Brisbane’s geology more than 200 million years ago.

As well as supporting the new health, science and education precinct near Boggo Road, this rail extension will connect the city’s southern suburbs with the existing line north from Bowen Hills.

And work continues on extending the Brisbane-to-Gold Coast light railway (also known as the G:Link).

This extension will provide eight new stations along a 6.7km track from Broadbeach to Burleigh Heads. The G:Link service uses German Bombardier Flexity carriages that are bi-directional and air-conditioned, with low-level floors matching station platforms and storage for wheelchairs, bikes, prams and surfboards. These are electric-powered via 750V overhead cables.

Superfast bus charging

More innovative is the Brisbane Metro project, which is being tested to potentially supply 60 electric buses (or “trackless trams”) to supplement the city’s existing fleet. These would be battery-powered by a combination of 600kW, six-minute, superfast “flash chargers” at end-of-line stations and 50kW, overnight, slow chargers at depots.

Each bus can be recharged up to 85 times faster than an electric car at home – but the flash system degrades batteries more than slow charging overnight.

Healthy footbridges

Although two of Brisbane’s four proposed “green bridges” for pedestrians and cyclists were paused to prioritise flood recovery, new crossings from the city to Kangaroo Point and Newstead to Albion are expected to open in 2024.

The Kangaroo Point green bridge will include a restaurant overlooking the botanic gardens. Newstead bridge will join the 1.2km-long Lores Bonney Riverwalk.

These are examples of a new phenomenon in public transport planning – to not merely move people between destinations but also boost their health and enjoyment outdoors.

As Corey Gray, global CEO of the Smart Cities Council, told me at the Smart Cities Council conference:

Smart cities are not ultimately about data and technology, but improving human systems.

This article was originally published on the Conversation. Read it here…

Why hotel investors are opting for upgrades over new builds

JLL are property financiers with a diverse range of clientele. With sustainability at the core of their ethos, JLL are working toward creating a world-leading sustainable property development firm. In this article, JLL explore how the trend of “quiet quitting” can be stopped before it starts.

Facing higher costs, hotel Investors are finding ways to boost values as tourism surges

Hotel investors are moving away from new developments in light of expensive construction loans and skyrocketing costs for materials and labor.

Instead, they’re buying hotels with an eye toward upgrading. Around 80% of hotel investors in a recent JLL survey said they’re targeting value-add investment opportunities in the sector.

“Many investors are now preferring to buy existing assets needing refurbishment, repositioning, or rebranding, with the return prospects often much more appealing,” says Xander Nijnens, Managing Director, Advisory & Asset Management, JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group.

The strategies are largely down to inflationary pressures, with construction costs rising and with few development loans available. Development costs have risen by 10% to 30%, according to investors surveyed by JLL, while lending on new builds has become tighter.

In February, Australian hospitality fund manager Pro-Invest acquired the Primus Hotel Sydney and reopened it as luxury boutique hotel Kimpton Sydney following a refurbishment, offering innovative culinary experiences and new lifestyle programming.

“These deals are much easier to underwrite and are quicker to market, compared to building a new development from scratch which easily takes between 24 and 36 months,” says Nijnens.

Adding value to an existing asset

The rising costs of building materials isn’t just hitting hotels. Soaring inflation, the rising cost of debt, and higher wages have been causing delays to construction across real estate markets, according to JLL’s 3Q22 Capital Tracker.

Likewise for hotels, the high costs, which have escalated beyond pre-pandemic levels, are jeopardizing the feasibility of new developments, Nijnens says.

This has prompted investors to steer toward value-add investment strategies, which require a keen eye and a diverse skillset to identify and execute.

“Doing a value-add refit is, in many ways, more complicated than building a new site with new specifications,” says Nijnens. “An older asset is often more challenging because you have to figure out the state of the existing asset, where to prioritize, whether it can be more sustainable, and consider what guests are looking for.”

Common value-add enhancements for hotel assets include rebranding, expanding the room count or repositioning, which may involve introducing a lifestyle-oriented concept with higher non-room turnovers, and converting underutilized spaces into rooms or food and beverage (F&B) concepts.

These asset enhancements have to consider the evolving guest trends, such as the average length of stay, the type of clientele, or the blurring of lines between business and leisure travel, and how it will impact the overall design of the hotel, according to Nijnens.

Timing and tourism

The push for value-add investment in the hotels space comes amid a recovery in global tourism.

Maldives leads the way with a 128% recovery in revenue generated per available room (RevPAR) year-to-date relative to 2019 levels, with Southeast Asia and Australia following a similar trend, according to JLL data. In the U.S. and Europe, markets like Miami and Paris have seen RevPAR grow 125% and 113% respectively in the same period.

“Our projection of $10.7 billion in total hotel investment in Asia Pacific for 2022 remains unchanged, backed by improving sentiment on the long-term fundamentals of the industry in this region in the coming years,” says Nihat Ercan, Head of Investment Sales, Asia Pacific, JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group.

Hotel investment in Asia Pacific is expected to reach $11.5 billion in 2023, with Japan, China, Australia, and South Korea leading the charge, JLL data shows.

Within the value-add space, in particular, private equity investors are among the most active players, according to Nijnens. “They’re being pushed out of many high-ticket deals due to the higher cost of debt but they’re keen to deploy the capital they’ve raised in the hotel sector,” says Nijnens.

“We expect to see more private equity investors adopt a three- to five-year view and work with us to implement changes that enhance the value of their assets.”

This new ‘risky’ playground is a work of art – and a place for kids to escape their mollycoddling parents

Sanné Mestrom is a Senior Lecturer, at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She is an Australian experimental and conceptual artist who works mainly in the mediums of installation and sculpture. Mestrom has a research-based practice and incorporates notions of "play" into social aspects of urban design.

Imagine this: a heap of colourful plastic buckets stacked on top of each other to form a climbable bridge, monolithic bluestone boulders holding up a contorted slide, a pile of concrete demolition debris moonlighting as a resting spot.

At every point, children can be seen swinging their bodies from warped, dented monkey bars and balancing along rope-webs strung between stones.

Would you let your kids come here and play?

This new playground in Melbourne’s Southbank is the work of artist Mike Hewson. The project can be confusing for the public. Is it a playground? A sculpture? Or an unfinished piece of infrastructure?

Hewson’s playable public art parks in Sydney and Melbourne are known to be “risky” – but risk means different things to different people. And it’s exactly the risks his art takes that makes it so valuable.

The risk of no risk

Urban play has long been synonymous with the cultural life of art and the city. In the decades of Europe’s baby boom, new playground concepts emerged with a focus on “free play” (distinct from earlier playgrounds resembling open-air gymnasiums), as one of children’s fundamental needs.

“Tufsen”, Egon Möller-Nielsen’s unusual sculpture was the first unscripted free play sculpture of its kind, created in 1949, bringing together abstract art and play in a public space.

This new approach generated a boom in playground sculptures.

In the early 1980s, we saw a significant shift in response to questions of risk, hazards and children’s safety, which resulted in fears and threats of litigation.

As play-safety standards were introduced in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, innovation in the arena of a playable public realm slowed. As soon as the standards began to be referenced in liability cases, playspace designers began to follow them.

Designs outside the specifications were avoided and playgrounds were standardised into the “boring” versions that still dominate most of our play spaces, where the potential movement of children is scripted: up, across and down.

Over the past 30 years, interpretations of these safety standards continue to regularly confuse the meanings of “risk” and “hazard”. A risk is something the child is aware of, forcing them to identify, analyse and overcome the challenge; a hazard puts one in danger because a condition for injury exists the user cannot perceive.

Conflating these meanings has resulted in a cultural attitude toward play that is highly risk-averse.

This risk-aversion is in contrast to the mounting research on the benefits of risk for children.

Risk-aversion can have long-term health implications on adolescence and into adulthood, potentially impacting the development of anxiety, depression, obesity and diabetes.

In fact, researchers Jonathan Haidt and Pamela Paresky suggest contemporary society “mollycoddles” children. The risk-of-no-risk is a question of resilience – not only physical but also, perhaps more importantly, psychological resilience.

Psychological resilience is the capacity for adaptation in the face of tragedy, trauma, adversity, threats or significant stress. Put simply, resilience is the ability to “bounce back” from challenging experiences.

Based on this premise, Hewson’s “risky” sculptural play environments can bolster, fortify and increase psychological resilience among children.

In contrast to the conventional playground where movement is predetermined, Hewson’s projects offer children the opportunity to explore unfamiliar, unscripted, innovative and playable sculptural worlds.

When given the chance, even very young children show clear abilities to negotiate unfamiliar spaces, manage risks and determine their own limitations.

Playable sculpture

Hewson’s sculptural playgrounds don’t just offer the opportunity for children to take risks. Their very construction appears to be risky: all playable parts appear to be improvised, cobbled together with cardboard and chicken wire, balanced just-so or teetering on the verge of collapse.

And yet nothing is quite as it appears. With Hewson’s background in engineering, each playable element has been meticulously designed, structurally engineered and thoughtfully integrated into the urban realm.

This illusion of danger gives the works a sense of the uncanny, appealing to art-lovers and children alike.

In the art world, Hewson’s works are important for their bold and cheeky irreverence of the traditions of public art.

By making these sculptures playable – and seemingly defective – they tip the hierarchy of “art” upside down.

Australia has a long-standing reputation of presenting “plonk art” in public spaces. Plonk art is a pejorative slang term for the large Modernist artworks intended for government plazas, corporate atriums and open parks designed to be looked at but not touched.

Hewson takes sculpture off its pedestal and integrates it directly into the public domain, while also engaging local communities in the creative development stages of his projects.

For this experimentation, he receives some backlash from certain sections of the community – but his convictions keep him pushing forward.

His works advance the role of public art in creating a more culturally rich, intergenerational public domain while also challenging conventions of the ubiquitous de-risked playground.

So what do you think? Is it time we integrate more playable art opportunities into the public realm?

This article was originally published on the Conversation. Read it here…

A Big Build or a Big Bet?

Janet Stanley is a Principal Research Fellow - Urban Social Resilience at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, visiting Professor at the University of Hiroshima, Japan, and a Director of Stanley & Co., consultants in sustainable policy. Prior to this, Janet was Chief Research Officer at Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University.

Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop aims to help the city become more equitable – but better integration of land use and transport could deliver more benefits for less money

By Associate Professor Janet Stanley, University of Melbourne, and Professor John Stanley, University of Sydney

Melbourne’s current long-term strategic land use plan, defined in Plan Melbourne 2017-2050, is grounded on two core ideas.

These are that Melbourne becomes a polycentric city based on a series of activity clusters, mainly in the middle suburbs (called National Employment and Innovation Clusters – or NEICs) and Melbourne would be organised into a collection of 20-minute neighbourhoods.

The NEICs are intended to promote productivity growth through agglomeration and to develop a more equitable city – particularly by increasing employment opportunities closer to the city’s outer urban growth corridors.

The idea of improving public transport access to middle urban activity clusters has appeal, as a way of supporting their growth potential.

And the Victorian Government’s Suburban Rail Loop (SRL), part of its Big Build program, is intended to play this role.But this solution is arguably too big for purpose.

Highly developed global cities that have circumferential rail services – that is, trains travelling around an urban area rather than radially to its centre – typically have densities much higher than Melbourne and their circular rail loops are quite short.

Most are also located in the higher-density inner parts of those cities where demand is strongest, whereas circumferential public transport further out typically requires transfers between services.

In 2022, Melbourne’s built-up land area has a population density of 1,746 persons per square kilometre and the SRL has a proposed length of 90 kilometres, from Cheltenham to Werribee.

Compare this to London, which data tells us has a population density of 6,504 persons per square kilometre – the city’s Circle Line is 27 kilometres long. Tokyo-Yokohama has a density of 4,584 people per square kilometre, with its Yamanote Line at 34.5 kilometres, and Berlin has 2,934 persons per square kilometre and the 37.5km long Ringbahn.

In short, Melbourne’s SRL is around three times the length of these circle lines, in a city with a much lower population density and a lower patronage potential.

The economics are against the SRL working.

The August 2021 SRL Business and Investment Case for the Cheltenham to Melbourne Airport segment of the SRL (SRL East plus SRL North) showed a positive result, with projected a benefit-cost ratio between 1.0 and 1.7.

However, there are two serious problems with this result.

First, the benefit-cost analysis was undertaken with a low discount rate (four per cent) to convert future benefits and costs over the project’s lifetime into present-day values (this is needed to derive benefit-cost ratios). The usual Australian discount rate for evaluating major infrastructure projects – seven per cent – would have delivered much lower returns for the SRL.

A good argument can be made for using a four per cent discount rate for a project with a long life span, like the SRL, but this is not the usual public policy approach in Australia (unlike in the UK).

The choice of this discount rate should be subject to wide debate, including consideration of implications for the evaluation of alternative investment opportunities whose impacts accrue over shorter time frames.

Second, as well documented in the media, the expected cost of the project has increased substantially. The cost was estimated at around $AU50 billion for the full project at the initial announcement in 2018, rising to $AU35-57 billion for SRL East plus North in the Business and Investment Case.

The figure now stands at $AU125 billion again for SRL East plus North, as estimated by the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office.

This would take the capital cost for the full SRL to around $AU200 billion, or about four times the initial estimate made only a few years ago.

Unfortunately, the expected benefits do not grow anywhere near as quickly as this rate of cost inflation. If evaluated today with a more usual discount rate, the SRL would struggle to generate even 50 Australian cents of benefit per dollar of capital cost.

This should be a cause for concern.

Medium capacity transit (MCT) solutions, as proposed by the Rail Futures Institute, are likely to be a more cost-effective and flexible solution to meeting the circumferential public transport accessibility needs of Melbourne’s middle urban clusters in a faster timeframe.

This kind of cluster development could then be further enhanced by direct investment in cluster competitive strengths – like supporting further growth of their universities and hospitals or medical research facilities – together with investing in place-making.

These investments plus MCT would be a more integrated way of promoting polycentric growth in Melbourne than relying so much on the SRL.

The savings from not pursuing the costly development of the SRL could also be used to promote a much faster roll-out of the distinctive and very innovative Plan Melbourne idea of 20-minute neighbourhoods; this concept has been taken up by many European cities as well as others in Asia, Canada, South America and recently, Singapore.

A 20-minute neighbourhood offers most services that most people need most of the time, including shops, schools, health services, parks and recreation.

This form of land use reduces urban sprawl through higher-density housing, builds community and fosters social capital, improves accessibility and offers a greener environment.

As a result, the likely outcomes are improved health and wellbeing, increased social inclusion and increased economic productivity, along with a reduced need to travel, which also helps to reduce transport emissions.

The Victorian Government is trialling 20-minute neighbourhoods in Melbourne. However, these trials have overlooked the public transport component, instead relying on walking and cycling.

An 800-metre catchment, as used in the trials, and said to be an acceptable walking distance, is unlikely to offer access to many service needs. This dependence on active transport doesn’t offer equality in opportunity for all people, potentially leaving out many older people, those moving or carrying heavier loads, people with an impairment and people with multi-tasking requirements – like work, child-care and school drop-offs, shopping and the list goes on.

A larger neighbourhood is required to offer essential services, supported by a frequent neighbourhood local public transport service.

Improving circumferential public transport access to serve Melbourne’s middle urban clusters is an important requirement for delivering the city’s intended land use development. But the Suburban Rail Loop is an expensive solution to this challenge.

It comes at the cost of other important infrastructure and service improvements that are likely to be effective in reducing inequality and facilitating growth with lower emissions.

Medium Capacity Transit options plus direct investment in cluster development is a more cost-effective way forward, complemented by a greatly accelerated rollout of 20-minute neighbourhoods across middle and outer urban Melbourne, at increased densities.

This would give Melbourne big benefits without such a big bet.

This article was originally published on the Pursuit. Read it here…

Why has the RBA raised interest rates for a record 7th straight month? High inflation – and worse is on the way

Peter Martin is Business and Economy Editor of The Conversation and a Visiting Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Peter has worked as Economics Correspondent for the ABC and as Economics Editor of The Age. In 2016 Peter was made a Distinguished Alumni of Flinders University; in 2019 He was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM).

Pushing up interest rates isn’t something the Reserve Bank does lightly.

But what’s worrying the Reserve Bank – and why it increased interest rates for a record seventh consecutive month on Melbourne Cup Tuesday – is that inflation seems to become completely detached from the bank’s target band.

That target band of 2-3% was introduced in the early 1990s, at a time when that’s where inflation was. With one brief exception during the introduction of the goods and services tax, at the start of the 2000s, inflation has never since been far away from the band – until now.

The jump in inflation from 6.1% to 7.3%, revealed last Wednesday, made it clear that, even after six consecutive interest rate hikes, inflation was further away from the Bank’s target band than it had ever been.

When the Reserve Bank began hiking its so-called cash rate during the May election campaign, the National Australia Bank’s standard variable mortgage rate was 3.45%. It’s now 5.95% and about to go to 6.2%.

For a borrower with a $500,000 mortgage, the increase in payments amounts to $800 per month. For a borrower on a fixed-rate loan of 2% that’s about to expire, the burden will be even greater.

So the Reserve Bank wants to be sure the jump in inflation to 7.3% is real.

How the cost of buying a home skews inflation

The first thing to say is that 7.3% is almost the real thing, but not quite.

The Bureau of Statistics collects information on millions of prices per week, at times by going into stores in eight cities and noting down what’s on price tags, at times by direct feeds from supermarkets, petrol stations and electricity suppliers, and at times by “scraping” prices quoted on the web for home deliveries.

The bureau categorises the things it prices as either essential or non-essential (its words are “non-discretionary” and “discretionary”).

It’s found that the prices of essential items (those we generally have to buy) climbed by more than 7.3% in the year to September – by an extraordinary 8.4% – whereas the prices of things we generally don’t need climbed 5.5%.For obvious reasons, food is among the bureau’s list of essential or “non-discretionary” items. Food prices continue to be pushed up by floods and labour shortages.

But what many people don’t realise is that also among that list of supposedly “non-discertionary” items is one type of purchase people don’t make often – and which some of Australians will never make.

And that single item – “new dwelling purchase by owner-occupiers” – makes up more of the consumer price index than anything else.

Buying a home is so expensive compared to the other things we buy (such as bread and milk) that it accounts for almost 9% of the consumer price index.

Worse still, being classified as essential, it makes up almost 15% of the “essentials” index, even though for most of us in any given year buying a home is optional.

In most years, this anomaly doesn’t matter much. The price of a new home (what’s priced is only the construction of the home, not the land) climbs pretty much in line with everything else.

But building material shortages, COVID-induced labour shortages, and an explosion in demand for building fed by the government’s HomeBuilder grant have pushed up the price of new dwellings by an astonishing 20.7% in the past year. That’s enough to add an awful lot to the reported rate of inflation.

The real cost of living is probably up 6%

A rough calculation suggests Australia’s inflation rate would be 6%, instead of 7.3%, if the price of new homes didn’t have such an outsized influence.

We will know more by mid-Wednesday. The bureau actually produces separate living cost indexes a week after the consumer price index that substitute mortgage payments for the cost of home-building.

Lately these indexes have been pointing to increases one to two percentage points below the official rate of inflation.

Accurately measuring rent rises

Another peculiarity is that the rent increases recorded in the consumer price index are so far below those we keep hearing about.

The bureau says in the year to September, average capital city rents climbed just 2.8%, compared to the figures of 10%, and in some suburbs, 20%, quoted by real estate analysts.

In part, this is because the bureau only reports capital city rents. But more importantly it is because it does its job better than real estate analysts.

It collects data on not only the rents that are advertised (these are climbing strongly), but also on the hundreds of thousands of rents paid by continuing renters, which either aren’t climbing at all or aren’t climbing as strongly.

The bureau compares the two by describing a bathtub of water.

The water in the tub represents all rents being paid by households, while the water entering the tub from the tap represents new rental agreements. The consumer price index is measuring the overall temperature of the bathtub whereas an advertised rents series measures the temperature of the water flowing into the tub.

Worse news ahead

Perhaps surprisingly, the bureau finds the average retail price of electricity only climbed 3.2% in the year to September, and the price of gas by only 16.6%, much less than the 56% and 44% mentioned in last week’s federal budget.

But the budget numbers were predictions of what’ll happen over the next two years unless the government provides relief. The bureau was telling us what has happened.

Which is why the Reserve Bank is worried. While gas and electricity prices will subside eventually, inflation is likely to climb even higher before it falls – the bank says to around 8%.

The way back to the target band of 2-3% is anything but clear. That means for homebuyers, there’s no relief in sight just yet.

This article was originally published on the Conversation.

Where is the Workforce?

Rohan Christie is a Founding Director of Kingfisher Recruitment, an organisation shaping futures in the built environment since 2005. Kingfisher strives to bring insight, expertise, and a high level of care to the recruitment process in line with its defined purpose and values. Kingfisher live and breath the built environment, recruiting for all that we market, finance, design, develop, build, operate, manage, and maintain to live, work and play.

2022 has solved the question of “When will we see the end of Covid?” Other questions have been posed such as:

• “Where is my luggage?”

• “How did the RBA get their prediction of interest rate rises so wrong?”

• and for those in Melbourne, “Is Ross Lyon really the right choice for St Kilda?”

 Another question being posed is “Where is the workforce right now?”

Unemployment in Australia at present is at 3.5%, which translates into there being more jobs than people that can fill those jobs. The fight for talent right now is very real, with organisations trying to fill key roles to facilitate business growth struggling to find the people they need.

One of the figures tracked by the Australian Bureau of Statistics is Job Mobility, which tracks people who have lost or left their job.  Between 2015 and February 2020, there were approximately 70,000 people every month who moved jobs wanting change or a better opportunity. As of August 2022, this number had jumped to 360,000 people in the quarter, or 120,000 per month. So the lack of people is not because of people unwilling to move into a better role.

The answer may therefore lie in migration. Because of Covid and international border restrictions, more people left Australia than arrived. Migrants historically have been younger than the Australian population average, meaning they offset challenges associated with Australia’s ageing population. The Centre for Population recently published a report titled “Australian labour force participation: historical trends and future prospects” highlighting that “Migrants also possess skills and qualifications that contribute to our economy. The sharp fall in overseas migration, and the role this plays in slowing population growth, is expected to have broad and long‐lasting impacts on the Australian population and economy.”

There is also an impact of how people view their working life, as highlighted in an Australian Government Treasury report published in April 2021, reviewing Australian Labour Force Participation: Historical Trends and Future Prospects. Their conclusion was there has been a significant shift from full-time to part-time workforce participation over several decades within the workforce. This means that individuals who used to have a job for life, are now moving to several part time roles, which makes finding full time employees more difficult.

Finally, there is now a global war being waged for younger talent required to fill the jobs required to keep an economy moving forward. Attending the recent UDIA Conference in Sydney and listening to a presentation on the global workforce, Australia was ranked the 3rd most desirable country for talent mobility in 2020. With our hard border closures, the impact on talented young people coming to Australia was immediate and there is now much higher global competition for this talent.

So what does this mean? For a start, to keep our businesses moving forward, we need to treat recruitment as a skill, not as a transactional event. Putting mechanisms in place to find great people now takes a lot of work and is an investment everyone needs to make. When great people are in demand they will take a more passive role in seeking new opportunities, expecting to be sought out, rather than them applying to roles. We also need to make sure that the great people we have want to stay, by building teams aligned to an organisation’s purpose and values. Remuneration is a consideration, but most people change roles for reasons other than money.

Finally, until we get more people into Australia, the fight for great talent will continue to be difficult and a game you must win to get ahead.

Your home, office or uni affects your mood and how you think. How do we know? We looked into people’s brains

Isabella Bower, Peter Enticott & Richard Tucker are architectural psychologists and researchers at Deakin University. Their research focuses on how thebuilt environment exposure modulates brain and body activity, which may affect underlying cognitive, perceptual, and emotional processes.

Think of a time when you felt vulnerable. Perhaps you were in a hospital corridor, or an exam hall, about to be tested. Now, focus on the building you were in. What if, without you knowing, the design of that space was affecting you?

We study environmental psychology, a growing field of research investigating the relationship between humans and the external world. This includes natural, and human-made environments, such as buildings.

Researchers could just ask people what they feel when inside a building – how pleasant or unpleasant they feel, the intensity of that feeling, and how in control they feel.

But we use neuroscience to see how the brain is stimulated when inside a building. The idea is for people to one day use that information to design better buildings – classrooms that help us concentrate, or hospital waiting rooms that reduce our anxiety.

Why study buildings this way?

We spend at least 80% of our lives inside buildings. So it is critical we understand whether the buildings we occupy are affecting our brain and body.

Buildings – hospitals, schools, offices, homes – are often complex. They can have various contents (fixtures, fittings and objects), levels of comfort (such as the light, sound, and air quality). Other people occupy the space.

There are also a range of design characteristics we can notice inside a building. These include colour (wall paint, chair colour), texture (carpet tiles, timber gym floor), geometry (curved walls or straight, angular ones), and scale (proportions of height and width of a room).

What did we do?

We wanted to see what effect changing some of these characteristics had on the brain and body.

So we asked participants to sit in the middle of a virtual-reality (VR) room for 20 minutes.

We designed the room with a door (to show height) and chair (to show depth), keeping it empty of other cues that might influence people. We modelled the room using dimensions set by the local building code.

Other studies have compared complex environments, which are more realistic to everyday life. But we chose to use a simple VR room so we could understand the impact of changing one characteristic at a time.

To measure brain activity, we used a technique called electroencephalography. This is where we placed electrodes on the scalp to measure electrical activity as brain cells (neurons) send messages to each other.

We also monitored the body by measuring heart rate, breathing and sweat response. This could reveal if someone could detect a change to the environment, without being consciously aware of that change.

Lastly, we asked participants to report their emotions to understand if this matched their brain and body responses.

What did we find?

We published a series of studies looking at the impact of room size and colour.

Making the room bigger resulted in brain activity usually linked to attention and cognitive performance. This is the type of brain activity we would see if you were doing a crossword, your homework or focusing on a tricky report you were writing for work.

A blue room resulted in brain activity associated with emotional processing. This is the pattern we’d typically see if you were looking at something that you felt positive about, such as a smiling face, or a scenic sunset.

Changing the size and colour of a room also changed brain network communication. This is when different parts of the brain “talk” to one another. This could be communication between parts of the brain involved in seeing and attention, the type of communication needed when viewing a complex scene, such as scanning a crowded room to spot a friend.

The rooms also changed the participants’ autonomic response (their patterns of breathing, heart activity and sweating).

Despite these brain and body responses, we found no change in what participants told us about their emotions in each of these different conditions.

This suggests the need to shift from just asking people about their emotions to capturing effects they may not be consciously perceive or comprehend.

What does this mean for designing buildings?

This work tells us that characteristics of buildings have an impact on our brains and our bodies.

Our next steps include testing whether a larger room affects brain processes we use in everyday life. These include working memory (which we’d use to remember our shopping list) and emotion recognition (how we recognise what different facial expressions mean).

This will enable us to understand if we can design spaces to optimise our cognitive performance.

We also want to understand the implications on a wider population, including people who may be experiencing poor mental health, or diagnosed with an underlying condition where the environment may have a larger impact on their response.

This will help us to understand if we can change our built environment for better health and performance.

Why is this important?

Architects have long claimed buildings affect our emotion. But there has been a lack of brain-based evidence to back this.

We hope our work can help shape building planning and design, to support the brain processes and emotions we might require under different circumstances.

This article was originally published on the Conversation. Find it here…

Saudi Arabia set to host Asian Winter Games at Neom "in the heart of the desert"

Tom Ravenscroft is the editor of Dezeen. Tom holds Master’s in architectural history from both Edinburgh and The Bartlett, where his writing focused on the architecture of data centres. Tom has worked for several publications in architecture and construction, including the Architects' Journal and Construction Manager.

Saudi Arabia has announced that it has won the right to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games at its Trojena resort, which is being designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, UNStudio, Aedas, LAVA and Bureau Proberts as part of the Neom development.

The 2029 Asian Winter Games will be hosted at a 60-square-kilometre skiing and outdoor activity resort that is set to be completed in 2026 as part of Neom, a renewable energy-powered region under development in Saudi Arabia.

"Trojena will have a suitable infrastructure to create the winter atmosphere in the heart of the desert, to make this Winter Games an unprecedented global event," explained Neom chief executive Nadhmi al-Nasr.

The resort is being developed as part of Neom

The resort, which will "offer year-round outdoor skiing" is being built around 50 kilometres from the Gulf of Aqaba coast in a mountainous area that has elevations ranging from 1,500 metres to 2,600 metres.

It will be the first location in the country where outdoor skiing will be possible.

Named Trojena, the development is being designed by a team of architects from all over the world including UK studio Zaha Hadid Architects, Dutch practice UNStudio, international studio Aedas, German practice LAVA and Australian studio Bureau Proberts.

The masterplan was designed by LAVA, which has also designed a tunnel-shaped development described as a "futuristic folded-vertical village" by Neom.

Alongside the village will be a man-made freshwater lake designed by Bureau Proberts, while Zaha Hadid Architects "came up with other elements of the design", said Neom.

It will include a "futuristic folded-vertical village"

Aedas is designing the ski village itself, while UNStudio will create a series of ski-slope villas.

In total, the development will contain more than 3,600 hotel rooms and 2,200 homes.

The resort includes a large, man-made lake

The resort is one of 10 regions being developed as part of Saudi Arabia's Neom region. It will be connected to The Line mega city, which is being built as another major component of the Neom development.

Unveiled earlier this year, The Line will be a 500-metre-tall, mirror-clad skyscraper that is being designed to house nine million people.
After it was unveiled numerous urban design experts expressed skepticism about the Line's utopian vision and its sustainability claims.

However, in an exclusive interview with Dezeen Neom executive director for urban planning Tarek Qaddumi said that The Line megacity will "revolutionise our current way of life".

The images are courtesy of Neom.

This article was originally published on Dezeen. Read it here.

Record Crane Numbers In Sydney And Gold Coast

Domenic Schiafone is Rider Levett Bucknall’s Oceania Director of Research and Development. Domenic has over 12 years of experience in the quantity surveying sector, including 4 years where he was based in the Middle East (Dubai & Abu Dhabi).

According to last week’s release of the Q3 2022 RLB Crane Index®, crane numbers across the country rose sharply in the past six months; 300 new cranes were added on developments sites, and 245 were removed.

With the additional 55 cranes, there is now a total of 868 cranes in operation nationally, a new high in the RLB Crane Index® since its inception in 2012.

This edition of the Index includes the introduction of two new sectors within the non-residential market; cranes on aged care and data centre / industrial developments have been given their own sector to reflect the growing importance and numbers of these projects.

Inclement weather, material and labour shortages still an issue

Domenic Schiafone, Rider Levett Bucknall’s Oceania Director of Research and Development said, “Whilst this strong number shows the continuing resilience of our industry, projects are also being delayed due to increases in inclement weather events, shortages of materials, and lack of skilled labour.”

He added, “If cranes providing logistical assistance to multi storey developments remain on site longer than anticipated due to weather events and supply chain disruptions, the cost of preliminaries increase, causing overall costs to rise.”

The strong growth in crane numbers for Q3 2022 appears to correlate with the strong national activity numbers. Upon investigation, the churn rate of cranes around Australia has fallen significantly over the past 18 months. From Q1 2019 until Q1 2021, the churn rate hovered around the 50% mark. Since Q1 2021 the churn rate has dropped nationally to reach 28% in Q3 2022.

Introducing the RLB Crane Index® churn rate

New in this edition, the RLB Crane Index® churn rate is calculated as the number of cranes removed in a period, divided by the closing number of cranes, and expressed as a percentage.

A lower crane churn rate percentage is an indicator that cranes are remaining on sites longer. Canberra has the highest churn rate for this edition at 70%, whereas Sydney recorded a 27% churn rate. This changing churn rate factor is aligned with recent media reports that projects are delayed due to increases in inclement weather events, shortages of materials, and lack of skilled labour.

Looking around the country, Sydney continues to be the main driver of the crane count. Of the 868 cranes sighted across Australia, 380 were in Sydney, 206 were in Melbourne, 82 were in Brisbane, 51 were in Perth, 55 on the Gold Coast, 23 in Canberra, 17 in Adelaide, 16 in the Sunshine Coast, 15 in Wollongong, 12 in Newcastle, 10 in the Central Coast and two cranes in both Hobart and Darwin.

Strong crane growth in all sectors except commercial and recreation

According to the latest ABS data, construction work done for the 2022 financial year was up by 1.1% (or $2.4B) across Australia compared to 2021 results. Total residential work done was down 0.1% (or $1B) non-residential activity was up by 2.3% (or $1.1B). Engineering activity was up by 1.6% (or $1.4B).

Growth in approval values was seen in the 2022 financial year, with total building approvals rising by 4.2%, or $5B in real terms. Residential approvals lifted 2.6% and non-residential 6.3%. Recent July 2022 approval numbers are trending downwards, which may impact future crane numbers.

Strong national crane growth has been seen in almost all sectors except commercial and recreation, which both fell. The residential index rose to its highest level since Q1 2019, and the non-residential index continued its upward trajectory to reach its highest value in the past 21 editions of the index.

New sectors included in non-residential crane count

The non-residential index has again increased to a record level, rising to 290 points from 268 in Q1 2022. This 7.4% increase represents an additional 25 cranes. Included within the non-residential sectors for the first time are the new sectors of aged care and data centre / industrial. There are 14 cranes on aged care developments across the country and 21 on data centre / industrial developments. In previous editions these new sectors were counted within the residential and mother/mixed use sectors. Crane numbers for Q1 2022 have been retrospectively adjusted for these new sectors for comparison purposes.

Domenic continued, “Australia’s crane capital, Sydney, increased crane numbers by another 32 to total 380 cranes. This represents 44% of all cranes across the country. The Gold Coast and Melbourne recorded double figure lifts in crane numbers of 14 and 12 respectively. Both Canberra and Perth recorded crane reductions of eight and four respectively.

Sydney records its highest ever result

Sydney’s Q3 2022 RLB Crane Index® recorded its highest ever result in the 21st edition. The index rose from 215 points to 235, a 9% increase. The increase represents a net increase of 32 cranes across Sydney. During the past six months there have been 93 cranes removed and 125 new additions resulting in a total of 380 cranes, up from 348 previously.

In this edition, Sydney recorded significant crane number increases in the residential, civic and data centres/industrial sectors. Small increases were recorded in the aged care, civil, education and mixed-use sectors, while the health, hotel and retail sectors remained static. There was a small drop in recreation projects.

The residential sector jumped this count to record 79 additions and the removal of 63, bringing the total count to 259 cranes across Sydney. Residential cranes make up almost 70% of all cranes across Sydney.

Most Melbourne cranes centred around CBD

According to the RLB Crane Index®, there were 79 cranes added to projects across Melbourne and 65 were removed. This brings the current crane number to 206, up from 192 cranes recorded in Q1 2022.

Melbourne’s inner-city remains the most prevalent region for cranes with 46% of all Melbourne’s cranes. This number is close to the last edition, but the trend is still that larger scale projects are moving out to the suburbs. Traditionally, we have seen around 60% of all Melbourne’s cranes centred around the CBD and surrounding inner city suburbs.

Overall, the rise in cranes occurred in the residential sector (+5), data centres/industrial (+4), retail (+4), commercial (+3), health (+2), recreation (+2) and civic (+1). Falls were seen in the mixed-use sector (-5), aged care (-1) and within education projects (-1). The hotel sector remained constant.

The residential sector is still the dominant sector in the Melbourne region, accounting for almost 50% of all cranes for this edition.

Residential dominates on Gold Coast

On the Gold Coast, a total of 21 cranes was added and nine cranes were removed, bringing the coast’s total to 52. The residential sector continues to dominate the region, accounting for more than 95% of all cranes on the Gold Coast. The other sectors with active cranes include aged care (1), commercial (1) and mixed use (1).

The residential sector saw 20 new cranes placed on sites and eight removed, bringing the sector’s total to 48 cranes. This is an increase of 12 cranes from the Q1 2022 edition of the index.

This article was originally published on RLB’s website. Read it here…

‘We haven’t built it, and they’ve come’: the e-change pressures on Australia’s lifestyle towns

Julian Waters-Lynch is a lecturer in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Organisational Design at the School of Management at RMIT University. Co-author Andrew Glover is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Sustainable Urban Precincts Project (SUPP) at RMIT University, where their co-author Tania Lewis is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and a Professor in the School of Media and Communication. The authors explore the struggles associated with the regional shift seen over the past two years.

Michael and Karen moved from Melbourne to Castlemaine, about 130km northwest of Victoria’s capital, in mid-2020 – using, like tens of thousands of Australians, the shift to remote work to make a larger lifestyle change.

They sold the small two-room inner-urban apartment they had bought in 2018 and bought a large three-bedroom home on a 1,200 square metre block in the historic goldfields town (population about 10,000).

“There’s an orchard, an amazing garden for growing veggies, and a good shed out the back,” enthuses Michael. “I have a room now for full-time remote work and a third bedroom for the baby, which is on its way.” He plans to convert the shed into a studio for Karen, an artist.

But not everything was easy. “The internet connection has been dropping in and out, repeatedly and for large durations,” Michael says. “I’ve had to use my phone’s 3G hotspot as a backup.”

We’ve tracked the experience of Michael and Karen along with 20 other households in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland to better understand how the influx of “e-changers” to “lifestyle towns” is affecting infrastructure and social cohesion.

This demographic shift has long been predicted – facilitated by technology and the population stresses in major cities. But the pandemic accelerated the trend.

Slow internet speeds are just the tip of the infrastructure pressures being placed on hundreds of towns within a few hours’ drive of cities – the sweet spot for e-changers looking to combine city jobs with country town lifestyles. Others include health and education services, water security and, most urgently, housing availability and affordability.

Helen Haines, the independent federal member for the rural Victorian electorate of Indi, has put it like this:

For a long time, when we talked about regional development, we said ‘build it and they will come’. Well we haven’t built it and they’ve come.

It’s a challenge that will require cooperation between federal, state and local policy makers to resolve.

Rise of the e-changers

In 2016 demographer Bernard Salt described living in a country town while keeping a city-based job as the ultimate Australian lifestyle choice:

“Move to a lifestyle town, telecommute using broadband, and come into the city perhaps once a week for face-to-face meetings. Sounds pretty damn good to many Australians.”

He estimated about one in six Australians were interested in doing this. The major obstacle: having a job they could do from home. But based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data, he predicted the proportion of the workforce able to work from home would double from 4% in 2016 to 8% by 2026.

COVID-19 has dramatically changed that trajectory, with up to 40% of the workforce working from home during the pandemic’s peak.

This, along with favourable interest rates, enabled tens of thousands to make the shift. Between July 2020 and June 2021 the population of regional Australia grew by about 70,900, while capital cities declined by 26,000 – the first time in 40 years that regional population growth outpaced the cities.

Most of this shift occurred in NSW and Victoria. Sydney’s population fell about 5,200, while the rest of the state increased by 26,800. Melbourne’s population declined by about 60,500, with the rest of the state picking up 15,700.

Indicative of the e-change trend was the decline in the median age of those migrating away from the cities (from 38 to 34 in South Australia, from 37 to 33 in NSW, and smaller changes elsewhere).

Looking at lifestyle hotspots

Our research mostly focused on e-changers moving to “hotspots” – towns within a few hours’ commute of a capital city. But we also included some towns further afield, such as Broken Hill in far-west New South Wales and Rockhampton in central Queensland.

We were interested in their experiences with remote work, given Australia’s fixed broadband speeds already lag behind most industrialised countries, ranking 65 of 182 countries on a current global index. Regional towns generally fare even worse.

Two households in our study did report better speeds but nine said slowness and bad connection limited their ability to use it for work. One recounted spending weeks chasing their service provider before it was discovered the copper wiring to their home had eroded. These problems are unlikely to get better in any area affected by heavy rainfall and flooding events.

Gentrification hurting low-income residents

A more fundamental issue for lifestyle towns is what growing populations mean for the attributes attracting e-changers in the first place.

In the Hunter Valley, Southern Highland and Shoalhaven regions of NSW, and in the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast areas in Queensland, house prices rose more than 35% in the 12 months to January 2022.

This has contributed to an unprecedented rental crisis, displacing those on lower incomes and making it harder for local businesses to fill job vacancies.

A discussion paper published by the Regional Australia Institute in May 2022 noted that while regional Australia’s population grew by an average of 76,500 people a year in the decade to 2020, the number of homes approved for construction declined in five of those ten years. It argues that market forces alone are insufficient to address the problem.

Population influxes also risk altering the appealing character of lifestyle towns. The population surge in Torquay on Victoria’s Surf Coast, for example, has seen the once sleepy coastal town come to resemble an outer suburb of Geelong.

Investment urgently needed

Michael and Karen may not stay in Castlemaine. But they don’t plan to move back to Melbourne. They are considering Tasmania. They like working remotely, having more space and time for their young family, being closer to nature and the sense of community a country town offers.

All the evidence suggests hundreds of thousands more will follow their path, with hybrid and remote work here to stay.

Good planning and policy is needed to ensure this historic demographic shift does not overwhelm these towns. To maintain their livability and ability to accommodate remote work, they require urgent investment in telecommunications and transport infrastructure, health and education services and – most of all – housing.

This article was originally published on the Conversation. Find it here…

What firms are doing to address quiet quitting

Companies are looking to collaboration and wellness initiatives to reengage employees

JLL are property financiers with a diverse range of clientele. With sustainability at the core of their ethos, JLL are working toward creating a world-leading sustainable property development firm. In this article, JLL explore how the trend of “quiet quitting” can be stopped before it starts.

Employees are being accused of doing the bare minimum to get by, a trend dubbed quiet quitting that has bubbled up in the wake of huge disruptions to the how and where people work.

The viral phenomenon, popularized by TikTok creator Zaid Khan, claims that while people are still performing their assigned tasks at work, they are rarely going above and beyond for reasons such as to avoid burnout or to prioritize their mental wellbeing.

It represents a stark shift away from the so-called hustle culture that previously embodied success at work. To be sure, the phrase is broad, and evidence is largely anecdotal.

But since the pandemic, employees have become increasingly disengaged.

One-third of employees feel disenchanted by the changes in the transformation of work, while nearly a quarter of employees would consider leaving their jobs if they no longer feel recognized by the company, according to JLL’s Workforce Preferences Barometer.

“The feeling of disenchantment and the lack of recognition can be attributed to the increase in workload and the feeling of isolation when working from home even now,” says Martin Hinge, Head of Project and Development Services, Asia Pacific, JLL.

The new trend piles pressure on companies to solve problems that arose from the pandemic, which upended traditional work routines and altered employees’ expectations of the office.

Redesigning the office

Many companies are counting on a return to the office to reverse the quiet quitting trend. For that to happen, however, changes that make the office more conducive — such as the choice of workspaces, office acoustics, and a stronger focus on wellness initiatives — are seen as key.

The quiet quitting phenomenon comes at a time when companies have been actively stepping up efforts to enhance the workplace experience through office activation, technology, and design.

That’s because some disconnect can come from the office itself. According to JLL’s Hybrid Work Decoded report, there is now a significant gap between the expectations of hybrid workers and the workplace experience currently delivered to them.

In response, up to 56% of organizations are already planning to refit or redesign their office space in the next 12 months, according to senior HR professionals surveyed by JLL.

Listening to employees

“There’s no easy fix with office design because every office, every company, and every country are markedly different,” says Hinge. “Research-based design is needed to understand what employees want to do in the office and what they expect from the office.”

Redesigning goes beyond “putting up a potted plant or painting the wall blue”, he says, so listening to employees’ preferences and knowing which aspect of the office to tackle is paramount.

“Companies have to focus on what enables the experience that employees get when they come through the door till the time they leave,” says Hinge. “You have to understand what they like doing, seeing, and hearing so you can keep them coming back again.”

For instance, one of the most under-delivered aspects of the office experience according to employees is the quality of acoustics, JLL data shows. The lack of sound privacy and excessive noise levels, especially in open areas and hot-desking workstations, are affecting the workplace experience for some.

“Employees have gotten used to working at home where they can control the environment in a dedicated space, much like having their own office,” says Hinge.

This transition back to the office will take some getting used to, also partly because the role of the office is changing.

“What we see is that the [office] space is used in a very different way,” says Christian Ulbrich, JLL Global CEO and President, during a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. “We had, before the pandemic, a lot of ‘me’ space, and now we have a lot of ‘we’ space because the main priority is to collaborate.”

Having an adequate selection of workspaces, including outdoor spaces, creative spaces, networking spaces, and learning spaces, is therefore essential to accommodate different employee needs.

Wellness in the workplace

Beyond office design, wellbeing initiatives are also a key area where employees want to feel more supported by their employers, according to those surveyed by JLL.

“This goes to show that office design is only complementary, but it isn’t the sole factor that addresses quiet quitting,” says Hinge.

Possible solutions to address the lack of wellbeing initiatives include offering free mental health assessments or incorporating therapeutic spaces and biophilia to support the wellness experience in the office, Hinge says.

With the quiet quitting phenomenon gaining steam, every move contributes to the reversal of the trend, so focusing on how the office experience influences employee behavior is the priority.

“Organizations have to address this from a behavioral point of view. It’s all about human behavior, human interaction, and how employees feel,” says Hinge.

“In this sense, office design is more of an enabler alongside office activation and technology, all which are equally essential in elevating the workplace experience, bringing employees back to the office, and ultimately reversing quiet quitting.”

This article was originally published on JLL’s website. Read it here…

Look where Australia’s ‘1 million empty homes’ are and why they’re vacant – they’re not a simple solution to housing need

Emma Baker, Andrew Beer & Marcus Blake are housing researchers in South Australia and ACT. The respective authors have keen interests in public policy regarding remediations to homelessness in Australia; this week’s article sheds light on how bodies of polity qualify housing, and why so many ‘homes’ in the nation are left abandoned.

The recent release of 2021 Census data revealed a shocking “one million homes were unoccupied”.

This statistic sent housing commentators, government agencies and policymakers into a spin. At a time of significant housing shortages, this extra million homes would surely make a big difference. They could provide housing for some homeless, ease the rental affordability crisis, and get first-home owners into their first home.

There has been a great deal of speculation about how this has happened. Has it been caused by overseas millionaires buying up housing and leaving it as an empty investment? Is it Airbnb taking up homes that could be used for families? Or are cashed-up Gen-Xers double-consuming by living in one house while renovating another?

So, why were 1,043,776 dwellings empty on census night?

In fact, we’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on. First, it’s not a new phenomenon. When we compare 2021 with previous censuses, a slightly smaller percentage of our private dwelling stock was classified as unoccupied – just under 10%, compared with nearly 11% at the previous census in 2016.

Since the release of the data, many journalists have pointed to this startling number of empty homes, portraying them as abandoned or left empty. There is almost certainly a much more ordinary and less startling story to tell. We suspect there are three main explanations.

A big part of the story is how the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) determines whether a dwelling is occupied or not. In short, it does its best by using a variety of methods, but, for the majority of dwellings, occupancy “is determined by the returned census form”. If a form was not returned, and the ABS had no further information, the dwelling was often deemed to be unoccupied.

This is important to our interpretation of the empty homes story. At any one time, lots of things are going on in the housing market, and most of it is a long way from abandoned or empty.

For example, 647,000 dwellings were sold in 2021. This means many thousands of dwellings were unoccupied on census night because they were up for sale or awaiting transfer.

The second and perhaps most important contributor to the empty homes story is holiday homes. Estimates vary, but we know 2 million Australians own one or more properties other than their own home. It’s estimated up to 346,581 of these properties may be listed on just one rental platform, Airbnb.

It’s part of the census design to pick a night of the year when the most Australians are at home. If you think back to Tuesday, August 10 2021, it was a Tuesday night in mid-winter, so many of Australia’s holiday homes would have been empty – and counted as unoccupied.

Where are these unoccupied dwellings located?

If we map the distribution of unoccupied dwellings across Australia, two things stand out.

Firstly, unoccupied dwellings tend to be concentrated in sea-change and inner-city holiday spots, such as Victor Harbor in South Australia (as the map below shows) , Lorne in Victoria and Batemans Bay in New South Wales. This reinforces the holiday homes explanation.

It’s also striking how few unoccupied homes are in our major cities. Sydney is a great example. The map below shows a very uniform absence of unused housing across the whole metropolitan area.

So should we worry about the ‘million unoccupied homes’?

Yes and no. An unknown proportion in that million are not empty, just assumed to be vacant because a census form wasn’t returned. We should regard this as a systematic error in the counting process. No doubt the ABS will be aiming to reduce this in future censuses.

Some of that million are genuinely vacant due to the way the housing market works. This includes, for example, the sales process and the need for vacant possession.

Yet, even if there are substantially fewer than a million vacant dwellings, the reality is that there are too many ways homes in Australia can be left unoccupied for weeks, months, years – and it’s costing all of us. Those who are homeless are paying the highest price. But the rest of us feel the pain through higher rents, increased rates to pay for infrastructure constructed for housing that isn’t occupied, and greater difficulties in getting into the housing market.

We need to find ways to ensure houses are full of people, not left empty as owners wait for investment opportunities to mature, or for absentee owners to go on holiday. We know there are solutions out there. Removing caps on council rates and treating short-term rentals as commercial properties essential to the tourism industry are just two ways we can get better occupancy of our stock. We just need to find the will to implement them.

This article was originally published on the Conversation. Access it here…

Planning a renovation or new build? Here’s the outlook for skyrocketing steel and timber prices

Flavio Macau is Chapter WA President and Board Member of the Australasian Supply Chain Institute (ASCI) in addition to being the Associate editor of the RBGN academic journal. Flavio is a renowned international specialist regarding topics such as supply chain shortages and disruptions, global logistics trends, and the future of manufacturing.

It’s a tough time to build or renovate a house in Australia. Prices are up, well above inflation. Finding materials and getting them on time is a challenge. Builders are grappling with too much work and stress (with some folding as costs rise too fast). Customers are being confronted with eye-watering price quotes.

And as any would-be home builder or renovator knows, the price of timber or steel is crucial.

So what exactly is happening here, and what’s the outlook?

Timber: huge demand, not enough supply

According a 2021 Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) report:

average annual hardwood log availability is forecast to be 1 million cubic metres (9%) lower over 2020-24 than 2015-19 […] softwood sawlog availability is projected to be 10% lower in the period of 2020-24 than was projected in 2015.

The same report shows minimal new plantations were established in recent years.

In the 2019-20 bushfires, 130,000 hectares of plantation forest were burned. Recent floods didn’t help.

Native forest harvesting is also falling; it will be banned in Western Australia by 2024. Victoria will phase out the industry by 2030.

A timber shortage was expected as early as 2020 but the start of the COVID pandemic – when the housing market momentarily froze – brought some respite, with house construction and timber prices initially going down.

Then came HomeBuilder, which encouraged consumers to proceed with purchases or renovations to reignite the house construction market.

The number of dwelling units commenced shot up by more than 60%, from about 41,000 by September 2019 to 67,000 by June 2021.

The stock of dwellings under construction went from about 180,000 in 2020 to more than 240,000 today.

If you are building many more houses, you need more construction materials. A mild deficit projected for 2020 has now turned into a black hole.

With less timber available, industry sees a deficit of at least 250,000 wooden house frames in the next 15 years. Scarcity is the new normal.

The result is a growth in domestic prices as timber processors struggle to meet contract obligations.

Logs cannot be manufactured. They grow, and this takes about 20 years. The only way to go through current shortages is by importing or replacing timber.

Importing timber isn’t cheap. Australia has very low costs to grow and harvest, less than half of major global exporters. Adding to that, international shipping rates have surged in the past two years.

These act as barriers to imports, which fell considerably in the past decade.

Steel: supply chain woes and war on Ukraine

Steel is the typical replacement for timber. But builders and renovators will not find good news there either. Steel prices also skyrocketed by more than 42% in the year ending March 2022, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Troubled supply chains have reduced supply at a time of unexpectedly high demand, and investment has been scarce in recent years.

When a recovery was on the horizon, war hit shipments of key stock from Ukraine and Russia.

With few players left, home builders in Australia assert they’re at the mercy of a de facto monopoly by BlueScope Steel in the light gauge steel framing market.

Earlier this year, BlueScope customers had to contend with a 38% price increase on steel fabrication products.

A 2021 federal government decision to impose dumping duties of up to 20.9% on steel imports from Korea and Vietnam did not exactly help bring prices down.

In February 2022, BlueScope posted its largest half-year profit ever.

According to its chief executive, Mark Vassella, current trends are here to stay. The company intends to make the most of current market conditions and expand its capacity, with plans to reignite a blast furnace deactivated in 2011.

What happens next?

The price outlook is grim.

Master Builders Queensland chief executive Paul Bidwell reckons material price rises may not yet have peaked.

There is no indication timber prices will go down again, as they did in 2020. As for steel, 2013 was the last time there was a significant price reduction.

The Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS/HIA) recorded in June this year an increase of about 40% in prices for reinforced steel, structural timber and steel beams.

Thanks to the housing construction boom, building projects now face delays, which further drives up construction costs.

Several builders have gone broke. Those under a fixed-price contract who factored low material prices into their quotes are now facing the hard truth of working for little or no profit, or even at a loss.

Will construction prices come down? One can only hope – but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

This article was originally published on the Conversation. Read it here…

7-star housing is a step towards zero carbon – but there’s much more to do, starting with existing homes

Gill Armstrong, Alan Pears, Margot Delafoulhouze and Trivess Moore are architectural technologists and urban planners who focus on climate adaptation infrastructure. These researchers are qualified in retrofitting technologies which aim to decarbonise the construction industry, with the target of net-zero in mind.

Energy-efficiency standards for new homes in Australia are being upgraded for the first time in a decade. New homes will be required to improve minimum performance from 6 stars to 7 stars under the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS). Federal, state and territory building ministers agreed on the change last Friday.

The rating will also use a whole-of-home energy “budget”. This will allow homes to meet the new standard in different ways. The standard will come into force in May 2023, and all new homes will have to comply by October 2023.

On Monday, the NSW government also announced large commercial developments, as well as big state projects, will have to submit a “net-zero statement” to gain planning approval. The statement must show their buildings are either all-electric or can fully convert to renewable energy by 2035. In addition, new homes and renovations will have to reach a 7-star rating under the state’s Building Sustainability Index (BASIX). The current minimum is 5.5 stars.

These upgrades represent a step in the right direction, but much more remains to be done to future-proof Australian homes. Buildings account for about 20% of the nation’s emissions. Further upgrades to the National Construction Code (NCC) are needed before 2030 to achieve Australia’s climate targets.

We’re still short of zero-carbon buildings

Across Australia, more than 5.5 million houses are predicted to be built between 2023 and 2050. The upgraded construction code means they will perform better in climate extremes and emit less carbon.

So this long-overdue change is good news for households and the planet. It means new houses will use an average of 24.5% less energy to keep warm and cool. And new condensation provisions will help to control mould growth, a health problem for tightly sealed homes with poor ventilation.

The International Energy Agency recommends advanced economies such as Australia have a “zero-carbon-ready building code” in place by the end of the 2020s. This would ensure all new buildings in the 2030s will be zero or near-zero carbon.

Governments around the world have already moved in this direction, including the European Union and California. Australia is still well behind international best practice in design and construction.

Best-in-class energy efficiency, full electrification and renewable energy supply will be crucial to fully decarbonise the building sector. Further updates to the National Construction Code in 2025 and 2028 will need to ensure Australia implements a “zero-carbon-ready” building code by 2030. Only then can Australia deliver on its legislated climate targets and protect Australians from a warming climate and higher energy prices.

Cost arguments against further upgrades don’t stack up

Australia can’t wait another decade to upgrade building standards again. Arguments against higher standards tend to focus on the ticket price of new houses, but most homes are bought with mortgage loans and monthly repayments.

Higher standards would reduce energy consumption to near zero, providing a buffer against energy price spikes and increases. Low or negative energy bills (as a result of payments for exporting electricity) will largely offset the initial cost of building better-performing homes. Households will also be less vulnerable to wider climatic events such as heatwaves.

A cornerstone of the policy-making process is cost-benefit analysis undertaken by government. The analysis behind the NCC update failed to fully grasp the economic, social and environmental benefits of higher standards.

Cost-benefit guidelines, which are set by the Office of Best Practice Regulation, should be reviewed. Any analysis must properly reflect costs and benefits over the lifetime of a home, including the impacts of reduced energy and health bills on mortgage repayments. Ensuring further changes to the NCC accurately represent the full benefits will be critical to avoid another decade of stalled action.

Banks have already started to recognise the value of sustainable housing. Their lowest mortgage rates are for new green homes.

What about all the existing homes?

While ensuring all new buildings are built to zero-carbon standards after 2030 will be important, improving the quality and performance of the majority of Australia’s 10.9 million homes is equally if not more important. Existing building stocks are inadequate – most housing was built before energy performance standards existed.

A major wave of retrofitting is needed to upgrade these homes. Deeper upgrades can be done during renovations to deliver improved performance, safe indoor temperatures and lower energy use and bills.

Existing Australian homes for the most part rate below 2 stars in energy performance. Their occupants experience extremes of temperature during summer and in winter in areas such as Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Tasmania.

Extreme hot and cold are harmful to human health. The impacts are greatest for people on low incomes and/or who rent.

We have many examples of how to cost-effectively retrofit housing. These changes can have significant impacts on household bills and health.

Retrofitting will be more resource-efficient than demolishing and rebuilding. It will also retain the architectural and heritage value of our cities and suburbs.

However, a number of measures will be required to retrofit housing on the scale needed. These include financial incentives from banks, government subsidies, minimum requirements at point of sale, minimum rental standards, education of landlords, etc.

Net-zero code and retrofitting should be top of the agenda

Australian building ministers are due to meet again early next year. They must quickly turn their attention to ensuring the 2025 and 2028 upgrades pave the way to a zero-carbon-ready building code by 2030.

Governments should also work towards a national retrofit wave strategy that aims for a step change in the energy performance of existing homes. Essential elements of the strategy include the introduction of mandatory disclosure of home energy performance and the full electrification of Australian homes.

Without such changes, Australian housing and households risk being locked into poor-quality, under-performing and costly housing for decades.

This article was originally published on the Conversation. Access it here…

Selling off the plan has always been dictated heavily by the market

Having spent the last 8 years in off the plan sales, Nihal has earnt a reputation as a genuine, caring salesman who goes over and above to ensure the best possible outcomes for his Developers and Clients. After joining Three Sixty Property Group in 2019, Nihal has built great relationships with Developers such as Citiplan, Platinum and PACE and has worked on medium to high end exclusive projects like The Park Residences Caulfield North, Park Lane Elsternwick and Hampton Quarter.

Selling off-the-plan (OTP) has always been heavily reliant on the established home and apartment market. Since the beginning of 2022, we have witnessed a combination of unprecedented events that has required us to re-assess our market and adapt to this everchanging real estate environment.  

An indication of the impact on our market, REA Group reported a 40% drop in enquiries for new residential projects since May 2021.  

When the residential market is strong and established housing stock is commanding high prices, downsizers tend to drive the demand for OTP product. With real estate agents knocking on household doors promoting the local market strength, comfortable vendors are tempted to explore the possibilities of selling; this subsequently increases the volume of enquiries into our display suites.  

Data from the 2021 Census of Population and Housing shows that Millennials (25-39 years old) are now on par with Baby Boomers (55-74 years old) in terms of demographic size, representing the largest generational group in the nation. 

Baby Boomers and Millennials each have over 5.4 million people, with only 5,662 more Baby Boomers than Millennials counted on 10 August 2021. Over the last ten years, Millennials have increased from 20.4 per cent of the population in 2011 to 21.5 per cent in 2021. In the same time, Baby Boomers have decreased from 25.4 per cent in 2011 to 21.5 per cent in 2021.  In the 1966 Census, Baby Boomers accounted for 38.5% of the population. 

As the increasing population of Millennials scale the workforce and move into the next phase of their lives, they will become the primary purchasers of Baby Boomer homes.  

As a population, Boomers typically have strong travel aspirations, free time and financial capacity; this makes the concept of ‘lock up and leave’ residences very appealing. Additionally, Boomers are more likely to have outright purchasing ability 

in comparison to their Millennial counterparts. Despite economic volatility (which is exacerbated by rate-rise anxiety), Boomers are still booking in to visit our display suites. Their key concerns articulated to us is depreciating home values relative to 2021 prices.  However, considering that the increase in values over the last few years is significant even with softening prices (we are still one of the world’s least affordable housing markets), we can still expect to see Boomers seeking opportunities to buy OTP. 

Downsizers have consistently been the most significant buyer cohort for OTP apartments that I sell in Melbourne’s south-eastern ring. They have lived in their homes for anywhere between 20-60 years and are motivated to move for a multitude of factors; security, changing needs, low maintenance, location - and their most significant asset providing them substantial equity (often with little or no mortgage). This is a strong motivator to purchase an apartment which might cost just 50-60% of the price of their existing home, leaving the rest to their SMSF or their families. Interestingly, many grandparents I meet support their kids with babysitting their grandchildren and often need 3 bedrooms for sleepovers. 

I believe we are witnessing the most challenging OTP market since the Stamp Duty concession changes of 2017; this policy required investors to pay full stamp duty for off-the-plan purchases, while owner occupiers still receiving the heavily discounted concession. However we have learned to adapt to the changing market and this has resulted in a collaborative process that actively engages our clients at several stages of the sale (and now design) process. This can only happen when we work with quality developers, who fully understand their market and are respectful of their purchasers.  Also, have a strong developer/builder relationship is crucial.  

After eight years of selling OTP, I know that a downsizer client really knows what they want, and don’t want. Therefore we work with our experienced developers to facilitate a bespoke engagement process. We provide our clients the ability to customise their apartments, ensuring that it meets their exact requirements; this is important as our clients view their purchase as their forever-home.  

Interestingly, often the most difficult part of the OTP process is educating Baby Boomers on how to embrace new technology and smart homes.  

The biggest difference between established and OTP selling is that existing dwellings provide a material experience.  Buyers are able to see, feel and walk through the space and envisage themselves living there. With OTP sales it is important to provide a visual narrative, which is crucial to illustrating creative potential and to assist our clients determine the perfect final product.  

Most buyers have a strong sense of what they want, which makes the co-design process appealing. Involving buyers in meetings with architects, consultants, and interior designers assists them become emotionally invested in bringing the final product to life. We also find that having a longer settlement period, typically between one to two years, provides buyers with more time to scale down, without feeling rushed to leave their home which has provided much sentimental value over their time living there. 

 With so much noise and negative reporting in the media, it is more important than ever to be proactive in both educating and listening to buyers. At the same time, we know that buyers have greater access to information and will research all aspects of the project. They will vet everyone from the salesperson to the developer,  so for our sector it must be a trust-driven process.   

As construction costs and interest rates rise we are seeing projects being shelved. This will ultimately see supply diminish and demand for boutique developments increase. Baby boomers will still want (or have to) to scale down, as the stairs in their homes give their knees grief and large homes and gardens require constant care and maintenance.  

We can only stay true to course and trust in the RBA’s foresight and the quality of the builders and developers we work with - so that we can be optimistic about the rest of 2022.  

Tall timber buildings are exciting, but to shrink construction’s carbon footprint we need to focus on the less sexy ‘middle’

Lisa Ottenhaus conducted a PhD in the seismic performance of connections in tall timber buildings. Lisa is currently researching adaptable timber buildings designed for disassembly and reuse at end of life; concurrently Lisa is a Steering Committee member of the CTBUH's 'The Future Potential of Steel-Timber Hybrid Structures' research project, and leads the adaptability theme of Working Group 1 of the COST Action 'Holistic Design of Taller Timber Buildings'.

Developer Thrive Construct recently announced the world’s tallest steel-timber hotel to be built at Victoria Square, Adelaide. Australia has caught onto the trend of building taller in timber, with other plans for three buildings 180-220 metres high submitted in Perth and Sydney. These would more than double the current world record for a timber building.

Tall timber buildings, made entirely of mass timber (layers of wood bonded together) or steel-timber and timber-concrete hybrid construction, are gaining popularity worldwide. Every couple of months a yet taller timber building seems to pop up somewhere. My colleagues and I joke that we have stopped trying to keep up.

Timber is a sustainable, renewable material that stores carbon while in use, and the appeal of using it in skyscrapers is clear. But I worry that focusing only on the tall means we overlook the “middle”: apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and shopping centres. Buildings like these are dominated by concrete, steel and brick, all of which are carbon- or energy-intensive materials.

The “middle” is not sexy, and probably won’t make the news, but it’s where timber construction can have a significant sustainability impact.

A 2017 study found Australia’s construction sector is responsible for 18% of the country’s carbon footprint. Current emissions are expected to double by 2050 if we don’t change the way we build.

Change is challenging. Developers and designers favour familiar construction materials and methods where cost estimates are straightforward. Timber requires a change of thinking and early contractor involvement to be cost-competitive.

But if we truly want to do something about our nation’s carbon footprint, the whole construction industry urgently needs to shift, with Australian government support, towards renewable, low-carbon construction materials and methods. This means to build with timber if we can, use steel and concrete if we must.

Timber technology is transforming construction

The Australian timber industry has embraced mass timber such as glue-laminated timber (glulam or GLT) for beams and columns, and cross-laminated timber (CLT) for panels. Mass timber is more homogeneous than sawn timber, resulting in higher strength, and allowing us to build taller than ever before. Australia’s third CLT plant is set to open in 2023 in South Australia.

Globally, timber has reached new heights over the past 15 years. Noteworthy projects include the University of British Columbia’s Brock Commons student accommodation, 53 metres high and made of mass timber and concrete. The tallest timber building until recently was the 85-metre-high Mjøstårnet in Norway, made entirely of CLT and glulam. It lost its title to Ascent, an 86-metre, 25-storey, timber-concrete tower in the United States.

In comparison, Australia’s tallest buildings to date reach a mere ten storeys. Australia’s “first” was Lendlease’s Forté Melbourne, a CLT apartment building finished in 2013. Aurecon’s 25 King Street in Brisbane was Australia’s first open-plan office building, 52 metres high and made entirely of mass timber.

Another interesting “tall-ish” timber building is Monterey Kangaroo Point luxury apartments in Brisbane. The developers Gardner Vaughan opted for a relatively lightweight solution of CLT and a single concrete core, as the building stands above the Clem Jones Tunnel.

Australia is determined to go tall in timber. The University of Queensland’s Future Timber Hub is studying how to build taller timber buildings, including extensive research on fire safety. Better understanding of fire behaviour has driven a change in legislation, lifting height limits on timber buildings, and boosted developers’ confidence to plan much taller buildings.

Building tall in timber is an art, technically challenging, and exciting for engineers and architects alike. I know this since I researched the seismic design of connections in tall timber buildings for my PhD. I am still involved in tall timber research with the Council for Tall Building and Urban Habitat, and European research on the Holistic Design of Taller Timber Buildings.

And what’s not to love about timber? It practically grows itself, stores carbon in durable wood products, can be cascaded into other timber products, and used as fertiliser for sustainable forests at the end of its life.

But building taller and taller timber buildings alone isn’t the answer to the climate crisis.

In 2011, Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA) reported on the opportunities and constraints of timber construction. Its report identified multi-residential, educational and office buildings as having the biggest potential for building with timber.

Almost all of these buildings are still being constructed out of concrete and brick. Despite efforts to make both materials “greener”, their production currently consumes vast amounts of non-renewable resources and emits a lot of carbon.

So what’s stopping us?

FWPA’s report identified the biggest problem as a lack of timber construction expertise. This is not surprising, since Australian universities offer hardly any timber courses.

The University of Tasmania offers a graduate certificate in timber design for professional engineers. The University of Queensland is the only other Australian university offering a dedicated timber design course to structural engineering undergrads.

In response to the construction industry’s lack of timber knowledge, WoodSolutions, the educational branch of FWPA, has been running an entire mid-rise advisory program. It allows those exploring mid-rise timber solutions to get free information and advice from a group of experts.

Advancing structural timber engineering education is only one piece of the puzzle. We also need a shift of mentality to move past the idea that timber can only be used in detached single-family homes. In fact, we need to move away from such homes altogether. The federal HomeBuilder grant scheme led to a nation-wide timber shortage and added to urban sprawl.

Instead, we need to embrace well-built, mid-rise apartment buildings made from engineered timber. This material can safely use lower-grade wood and take the pressure off timber supplies.

And why stop there? We have the tools and the knowledge to build high-performance timber buildings. Proper design and detailing can slash energy bills.

Tall timber buildings are exciting, and we shouldn’t stop dreaming tall, but we need to focus on the missing middle to make construction sustainable.

This article was originally published on the Conversation.