SPONSOR CASE STUDY: LIVERPOOL ONE
As a Gold Sponsor of PLACED Academy, Liverpool ONE is helping to open up opportunities for the next generation while bringing young people’s perspectives directly into live projects shaping the city. We spoke to Rob Deacon, Director Asset Management at Landsec (Liverpool ONE), about why investing in young people matters to the property industry, the value of hearing from future customers, and how ideas from a PLACED Academy workshop have helped inform plans for the future of Chavasse Park.
What initially drew you to partner with PLACED Academy as a Gold Sponsor, and how does supporting the Academy align with Liverpool ONE’s core values?
From my perspective, there are a few things, in terms of what Liverpool ONE is, its background, its development, and the community through the Liverpool ONE Foundation. It’s about opportunity, and it’s about engaging with young people, which is very important. Then obviously, as a property company, it’s about encouraging the next generation and opening doors for people to consider a career in property and in real estate. PLACED, being a Northwest-based organisation, obviously lends itself very well to that and to supporting local businesses as well.”
How does supporting the Academy align with Liverpool ONE’s values?
It very much aligns. It covers objectives like supporting local businesses, supporting young people in the city region, and encouraging the next generation into a career in property. Then, if you flip it around from a consumer perspective, it is about engaging with current and future customers and helping them shape the environment and strategies that we have across the board at Liverpool ONE, from a public realm, leasing, development, and asset perspective. Consulting with a wide variety of groups is important to help inform our future strategies and direction.”
From a commercial and civic perspective, why do you feel it is important for the industry to actively invest in the next generation of built environment professionals?
Without them, there is no future for the profession. As people leave the industry at one end, we need a diverse pipeline backfilling it at the other. Historically, the property industry has fought a stereotype of being an inaccessible "closed shop" where you need family connections to get a foot in the door.
We want to encourage people from any background to have a career in property, and it’s just raising awareness of what the opportunities are. It’s not really something in your primary or secondary education unless you specifically decide to go to a very targeted, specific course tailored to a surveying profession. Many young people aren’t exposed to it. Whatever we can do to talk about that and get people interested, they can then go away and explore that career pathway further.
Can you tell us a bit about the live project the young people worked on during your session?
Our latest session centred around Chavasse Park, which is an active, live project for us. We are currently looking to make significant investments in the park to increase footfall and dwell time. We tasked the students with a clear brief: How do we get people to use the park more, and use it for longer?
Coincidentally, we are submitting the phase one planning application this week for a brand-new playground in Chavasse Park. The ideas, discussions, and tangible outputs from our PLACED Academy workshop were shared directly with our wider team and heavily considered during the design process. It gave us access to an invaluable stakeholder category that we otherwise may not have been able to reach. The session was a very useful and important part of that overall process.
Did any ideas, perspectives, or fresh approaches from the students surprise your team or challenge the conventional way you think about the project?
The main thing is that it reinforced the localised nature of what we plan to deliver here, and that it needs to be Liverpool's park as much as it is Liverpool ONE's. There were lots of great ideas around how we "Liverpoolify", for want of a better word, what we do here. It shouldn't be generic; it should have personality, and it should reflect the sort of culture and ethos of the city effectively.
We sort of already knew that, but to see that come through so strongly on the day was probably the biggest takeaway and reinforced the direction that we were moving in. Some of the ideas and branding discuss that exact same theme. The framing we are going for as the headline for the playground is the 'Kingdom of the Liver Bird'. We didn't land quite on that exact name on the day, but the themes being discussed were the same.
How does your involvement with PLACED Academy help you demonstrate genuine social value and community engagement in the regions where you develop?
The report that PLACED provided was shared with our consultancy team at the outset to help direct and inform the brief and the designs effectively. We didn't just do the day, get the document, file it away, and carry on regardless; it has definitely played a part in the process that we've been on.
Liverpool ONE is the city centre, effectively, and it is more than just a shopping centre. When we work with young people and talk about Liverpool ONE, it’s something that people can have an opinion on and get excited about because they’ve all been here, they all use it, shop here, eat in the restaurants, and go to Chavasse Park. Hopefully, when some of the young people do visit Liverpool ONE and see that playground, they’ll have that rewarding moment of thinking, "I remember doing that project, looking at Chavasse Park, and you can see some of the elements come through.
If you were speaking to another built environment professional or company considering supporting PLACED Academy, what would you tell them is the single biggest return on investment?
For all the reasons around encouraging the next generation of professionals into the industry. If any other company has a specific project they’re working on or a strategy they’re looking to implement, having the engagement, the ideas, and the enthusiasm from younger people is a very important angle that otherwise may be missed. There’s no real reason not to do it.
From a personal perspective, attending the workshops and helping out injected fresh ideas and different perspectives into you that you can then interpret and use in your day-to-day thinking. The more ideas and perspectives that we as an industry can get, the better. For a long time, things have been done the same way, with decisions made by the same people, but property is a fast-evolving piece. What people want yesterday, today, and tomorrow is a different thing, so the more perspectives we can get, the better.