Grow Places
Welcome to the Grow Places podcast where we explore the virtuous circle of people growth and place.
Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our Founder, Tom Larsson. These short conversations with industry leaders and community figures share insights on the built environment and open up about their purpose and what drives them on a personal level.
Thank you for listening. For more information please visit our website; www.growplaces.com and connect with us @WeGrowPlaces across all social channels.
We cover topics such as real estate, property development, place, urban design, architecture, social value, sustainability, community, technology, diversity, philanthropy, landscape design, public realm, cities, urban development, people, neighbourhoods, anthropology, sociology, geography, culture, circular economy, whole life carbon, affordability, business models, innovation, impact, futurism, mindset, leadership, mentorship, wellbeing.
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Grow Places
GP 13: A Systems Based Mindset: For Buildings and Places with David Saxby of Architecture 00
Prepare to have your perspective on sustainable architecture transformed as we alongside David Saxby of Architecture 00, unravel the complexities of creating cities that not only stand the test of time but do so responsibly. As we navigate the intricate dance of fostering growth while respecting our planet, you'll gain valuable insights into the delicate balance required to shape our urban landscapes. The weight of our environmental footprint challenges us to rethink our approach to construction. Are we ready to commit to the long haul, to invest in our built environment with the patience it demands? Join us on the Grow Places podcast to explore the potent blend of idealism and pragmatism driving the mission of 00.
Step into the world of a studio where collaboration and opportunity blossom from the rich soil of cultural diversity and artistic prowess. Our conversation with David Saxby peels back the curtain on how 00 threads the needle between their foundational ethos and the hard deadlines of client expectations. The quest for sustainable investment in our cities is more than a dream—it's a call to action, pressing us to consider the virtues of 'patient capital'. As we dissect the legacy of historical urban development and the potential of digital innovation, you'll be introduced to a vision of architecture that is not only adaptable and enduring but also kind to our Earth. Tune in for an episode that promises to fuel your passion for the built environment and inspire a new appreciation for the challenges we face collectively.
Hello and welcome to the People Grow Places podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth and place brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our founder, tom Larson.
Speaker 2:David hi, Thanks for joining me today. It's really great to have you on and I know we're going to have a great conversation today, arranging subject about what you're doing at 00, why 00,? What the whole thing kind of means for you a little bit as well, personally, so really grateful for that.
Speaker 1:So just to start off, maybe if you could introduce yourself and then sort of take us back a little bit to how you got to what you have really Okay.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Tom. Yeah, hi, David Satsby, clearly one of the well, we'd say, many founders of 00. It started back about 2004 through myself and Indie Joe. I'll be in university, but we wouldn't exclusively say we founded 00. We built 00 through very sort of open, collaborative, organic way and everybody who's joined us in some way sort of helps found it again and grows it and diversifies it. So, yeah, we're now a studio of about 20 people, but with a number of other sort of spin off ventures and sort of confusingly diverse activities. But we're based in London largely, although the network does span globally and we even have people working us on a day to day basis from as far off as New Zealand, as we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 3:But yes, we, I'd say we haven't we still haven't yet cracked it as such, and maybe that's not the purpose it's. We're constantly exploring what it means to be designing and trying to shape place in London to start with, but actually in the early 21st century.
Speaker 2:So what do you think that means then what?
Speaker 3:do you think it means to redesign and shape the places?
Speaker 2:in the early 21st century.
Speaker 3:I think it's a huge responsibility and I know we're going to sort of move on to try and understand and this is a bit like therapy myself understand why do we do what we do, but I think that's probably something we'll come back to. I think it's a huge social responsibility we do. We are a profession that affects others lives, maybe indirectly. I know I wouldn't take anything away from a doctor or nurse who's? Literally saving lives.
Speaker 3:but we believe that the built environment does actually afford people sort of opportunity. It gives them a platform to actually then make what they want to do, maybe harder or easier. And clearly we're also at a moment where environment is huge responsibility and I'll be honest say we're challenged by that. I don't think there are any easy answers. The easiest answer is maybe to stop building, but yeah, it's so.
Speaker 3:so doing what we do at this moment in time, I think is yeah, it's a huge responsibility, but someone's got to try, someone's got to actually think Well, how do we respond to these imperatives? And say, not necessarily we'll have the right answers, but I think trying to bring an integrity to how we try to answer it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree generally and as you say this slightly sort of gut reaction, sometimes thinking, okay, well, if we stop things would be better, when in reality we talk about growth on this platform and growth in all senses is this kind of sort of continually moving regenerative kind of process and cities as kind of organisms and obviously people as well, we are constantly growing and changing and you could one level class. You know everything we're going through societally is kind of growing pains in that sense. But you know we are a very cute moment.
Speaker 2:are we at the moment in history where probably for the first time, there is this kind of you know knowledge coupled with our actions like does a responsibility kind of sits in the middle of that now, as opposed to maybe previous generations where at least on mass that sort of notion of responsibility hasn't really been as high up the priority list.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I, you can't deny it, you can't claim ignorance and therefore, if you're going to act, you're going to have to act with a consciousness. And yeah, I think it's posing some real questions. My sort of my journey started with a well known practice, very well known practice who pioneered the kind of low energy approach to architecture and yeah, from from the sort of fuel crises of the 1970s, we thought that operational energy was actually sort of the key and a lot of great work was done how to design low energy buildings actually sort of.
Speaker 3:I sort of left that behind because actually I thought well, all the answers that were there it's about getting them deployed, getting them, and I think the industry has stepped up and actually through Stick and Carrot, we have made huge strides in delivering buildings that are lower energy, the building regulations, the sort of baseline actually have really set very high standards.
Speaker 3:But when we set up Zero Zero we already felt that the kind of the agenda had to be wider than that and say that not just sort of from energy to the environment, but also the social sort of side of what to mean to be sustainable was the word at the time and I like that.
Speaker 3:You already picked up on regenerative say. I think that's a nuance and a sophistication to the argument is no longer sort of the conservation and the reduced consumption. We've actually got to look that we are a sort of living organism individually, but sort of on mass, so we will consume, but what does that consumption look like? But now we sort of from low energy we're into, actually look at the whole environmental impact of building and the embodied energy and actually this is a real sort of on a weekly basis something we're wrestling with, because there's a vast amount of resources and energy required to build any building and at this critical moment in time do we really even have that energy to invest? We are very, very sustainable. Low energy building is likely to still have a sort of a return on that investment, a net zero carbon sort of horizon of probably 20 years, when the crisis is now, and if we haven't addressed it in those 20 years, well, it's all over, we will have massive destruction.
Speaker 1:So I do think there could be a moratorium on building.
Speaker 3:You just say well we've got to be really creative for the next 20 years before we have enough credit and we've addressed systemically sort of how we consume to afford to do it again. That's sort of one step, sort of beyond just the do nothing but yeah, I don't believe it is actually the answer.
Speaker 3:We've got to think of ways and be more creative and address the issue beyond just the built environment, because I know historically it's been a very large part of our impact on the global environment. Thankfully it's decreasing but at the same time other impacts globally are rapidly increasing you talk about beyond the built environment, and every time I think about zero zero.
Speaker 2:That's where my mind goes, and in a really, really positive way. You know the work that you were doing around being action led, as you say. You know whether it's leaving and established business to set up because you want to take action through to stuff that, broadly speaking, isn't necessarily architecture, it's thought leadership, it's systems change, it's, it's, it's policymaking. Yeah, so that beyond the environment bit, why? Why do you feel like that's important for you, or why do you feel like you've ended up in that space?
Speaker 3:well, I say this does take us right back and it's also it's good for for me in some ways to remind myself of why we did do what we did, why we do what we do.
Speaker 3:And it was exactly that to realize that if you just look at the building as a physical thing, you're not appreciating its impact. And its impact is systemic across supply chains and say operation, energy, but also those lives it either enables or frustrates. And say Indy, who was part of those very early conversations, now leads the dark matter labs, part of the zero zero family, which is sort of pushing sort of on policy, on economics, on on really those sort of enabling infrastructures. But that's the sort of the dark matter of the world we build, what actually sort of frames what you can or can't achieve with building. So I think we were back in 2004 already aware that you're not going to solve these problems through simply looking at the buildings. You've got to look at actually what, what the building is configuring in some ways, what, what, what it's driving. And our journey over nearly 20 years now has has come, not quite full circle because it's bifurcated in various ways, but maybe for three, four years ago, having done a range of explorations, a group of us within zero zero said, well, now is the time to return to buildings and with that can we design buildings that purposely are trying to kind of configure.
Speaker 3:We often use the word infrastructure, sometimes used word create platforms. This sort of more holistic kind of view of and say this leads on to that sort of action. A lot of our design is not meant to be complete. I'll turn to either sort of the heavy lifting that then creates the opportunity and that opportunity is for others. Action because we can't control the world, say we want to, but we recognize that people will be motivated to do what they do. How can we support that? How can we say give them or frame or create the?
Speaker 3:maybe the first step to them to go on and, whatever sort of field they're in, they can start to drill down and get reach further in some of these issues. It's kind of the last 20 years has sort of almost given us a framework to understand what the role of the building and the built environment is, and that's very useful because it also kind of helps us to understand what it's not and we won't worry about the things that that's not for us the role of the architecture, and I think through that lens it allows us to be more specific, more particular, more focused on what we are now trying to achieve with our buildings.
Speaker 2:I'm putting words in your mouth, but that kind of like incompleteness, kind of recognizing that incompleteness of buildings or projects or even places and allowing for something else to come along and kind of continue. That story is really really really interesting and and you're in everything you do you're talking about architecture, places that drive it through the lens of improving people's lives. So why do you for you personally, you know, aside from zero, zero, everything, what? Why do you feel like that kind of empathetic side? You know, that kind of appealing to enhance people's quality of life comes from for you?
Speaker 3:yeah I say I'm not sure we can ever claim that we will improve someone's lives through what we do. We can hope to, we can hope to create opportunities where maybe they can. But to back to your question sort of what is it not just in me but also, I think, in the the shared values of everyone in our studio? I think we recognize the world can be an incredibly unequal place and through all of our journeys we've probably been very fortunate and to be here where we are is probably a very privileged place to be and for me, maybe it's a way of actually sort of repensiling that if I've been afforded this privilege, this opportunity, what can I do with it?
Speaker 3:What do I? What would I find personally rewarding, having been given that opportunity?
Speaker 3:I think it is to sort of to pass it on and that probably comes around to the founding of Zero Zero. The culture of the studio it's very much about collectively we can achieve more than each of us striving individually. But it is a place for growth and actually if individuals grow and ultimately outgrow the studio, that's quite a success too. And I mentioned we've spun various ventures out and seeing those individuals and those ventures say the dark matter labs, there's open systems, labs from Alistair Parvin, there's Open Desk, the Furniture Company set up by Johnny Steiner and Nick Iridia Kono, it's great. We were a conduit, we nurtured, we helped support and build and they've gone on to great stuff.
Speaker 3:And if we're really deeply interested in sort of having a positive effect in the world, whether it's under that sort of tight umbrella of Zero Zero, which isn't very tight, or whether it's independently as these sort of spin-offs, it really doesn't matter. It's. It's not that we're trying to control it and somehow sort of personally profit, it's what maximizes that, that impact. So yeah, I know that for very long-winded all my answers are, but maybe that does give a bit of an insight we sort of there is a, I think, a really wonderful spirit in the studio of people say it's so selfless, it's incredibly hard working. It's not some sort of utopia, but I think people are can can be hard working and can be motivated because they believe that actually, yeah, that that's the way they can contribute absolutely and thank you for sharing that, because that's, as you say, kind of the deeper reasons why you're doing it and, as an outsider, that totally comes across.
Speaker 2:You know the way that Zero Zero has evolved, as you say, into this kind of, this kind of organism in a way that is kind of slightly bigger than the sum of the parts in a way, and it kind of reaches across the globe, doesn't it in terms of its reach and its network.
Speaker 2:So I do think that's kind of you, kind of you were delivering on those values and that mission in that sense. And if there's anyone out there kind of who want to kind of get a look under the bonnet, so you speak, you can kind of understand what kind of how does that?
Speaker 2:actually work in practice what the kind of practical steps to like a day in the studio about project, because you still you're still, although you're creating your own way of working, you're still operating in a bigger system of yeah, clients and briefs and projects, and so how are you kind of sort of knowing those two?
Speaker 3:ideals really. Yeah, you're right, we have to be sort of entirely dependable. From a client's point of view, yeah, thankfully we've managed to attract a sort of some extraordinary clients who there is an alignment of vision and a sort of trust in the integrity of each other's values that enable us to do things, but no, they still have deadlines, they still have budgets, they still have risks to manage and stakeholders to bring on board. So probably a benchmark or a sort of an absolute line is we have a commitment to deliver to a standard that that actually a client would expect of any other architect.
Speaker 3:Let's say they're coming to us about an architectural project but then sort of behind that in in the studio, you probably starts a long way behind that.
Speaker 3:We've grown the practice through largely meeting people of sort of who we recognize, share the values and compliment what we do and, probably most importantly, we recognize their opportunity to grow with us. And so we we brought people in from day one of diverse backgrounds and skill sets and educations and by having them in the room that's almost shaped our direction. I remember being asked fairly early on in zero zero, by a panel about where will you be in five years, and I said I don't know where we'd be. I know what we're interested in pursuing and where that takes us. Who knows? And I think to this day we, we don't have a, a fixed destination all one day we are going to design that particular building. We just think, well, whatever question someone poses us, we know how we we're going to answer it with the, the sum of the sort of views and personalities in the studio, which the same was there is a diversity.
Speaker 3:Actually, deep down, I think there's a very strong culture and sort of shared belief in this so then, on the day-to-day basis, yes, like every every other practice, opportunities arise.
Speaker 3:You see invitations and tenders, you, you look at them and decide, well, do we have something to add? Because sort of that's not just well, sort of do we think we can add something to this? It's looking at the other perspective. If we can't add something to it, we're going to waste our time doing the tender. We're not going to be selected by a certain client if what we do doesn't appeal, it doesn't address their brief it doesn't add value to what, what their ambitions are.
Speaker 3:So we, we sort of have opportunities, we pursue them. We're always up against high quality competition so. I say if there's five on a short list, you've probably got a one in five chance. Which of the five competition we do, we win. Or the invitation to attend us, or the interviews we get, we win. You don't control.
Speaker 3:So there's always a little bit of kind of yeah just serendipity in the projects we're actually working on, but through filtering them hopefully all of them and say we've been very lucky that today. I don't think there are many, if any, projects that we've had, contrary to your, where we can't find something to be passionate about. Once we've landed the project, then it's actually fitting the right people to it, and that's not just how many years experienced you have on this. Whose passions, whose sort of empathy is actually fit with this client and this brief and people do.
Speaker 3:Someone might be more interested in housing, someone might be more interested in something else, more infrastructural sort of in commercial that's converted, comments on it.
Speaker 3:And so we then try and, being a smallish studio, say, just before you came in we had a Monday morning sort of resources meeting we talk about what everyone's work on, who's got capacity in the short term, but also what's coming up in the medium term and how can we just sort of manipulate our resources so the right people can finally get to the right project at the right stage.
Speaker 3:So it's great because it's we're still small enough to for that to be fairly organic and for everybody in the studio more or less to know what everybody else's interests are and sort of recognize how to creating within the work we do secure the opportunities for them to grow. So it's probably very similar to how most practices do try and make sure people are working on things that actually sort of really keep them inspired and motivated, because I don't think for us, when we sort of interview people coming to do it, it really is about are we going to give you the opportunity to grow and learn? If not sort of after a couple of years, well, they'll choose somewhere else to go and grow and learn and that's a huge investment that you first put in that you don't want to lose so less.
Speaker 3:We sit there and think this person hopefully will be with us in an, in five years, not in one year or two years or sort of in ten years, or maybe they'll never leave. That's almost the challenge we get, and we've had very, very talented people come to to interview with us and hopefully they've gone on to do really extraordinary things. But we've just not felt that we would be able to continue to give them the opportunities that they need on the journey that they're going on. And yet we don't want to hold anyone hostage, don't anyone here under duress. We don't want anyone to actually get to a point where they're here and frustrated. So if it did come to that, say, there'd be a well, how can we kind of give them a send-off, how can we actually position them in the next part of their their journey?
Speaker 1:but the ideal situation is yes.
Speaker 3:You're sort of like hotel California you never leave zero, zero no, that's great.
Speaker 2:As you say, your, your culture, your values are so strong, unique, that that does. You know, there's a, there's a sort of sense of attraction, isn't there this? You will probably find that people really want to work in, you know, because they agree, buy into the to the whole culture, and that's great.
Speaker 3:It's trying to have some interesting challenges at the moment because, going back to those wider values in the profession, we know the narrowness of the profession, so actually sort of really trying to encourage diversity, we ourselves sort of was. Mostly what we do is based on culture and a little sort of slogan we have is culture trunks contract. You can prescribe in writing what you'd like to happen, but if you don't build the culture it's gonna fail. If you find yourself going to pick up and put some on contract, I think that's a sign of failure. But actually we need some, actually some mechanisms that we don't just sort of somehow well, in our own, our own culture, self-satisfied, we are challenged.
Speaker 3:So we do sort of set up various policies in the studio to try and frame what we believe, and one about inclusiveness and diversity.
Speaker 3:We can't just sort of develop a practice that is about personal, simply sort of self-selecting, like-minded people.
Speaker 3:So actually we, whilst we can meet someone we think they would be an ideal candidate to work with us I do we have a responsibility to really get out there and meet these people in all the places you could possibly find them, rather than just the ones that gravitate towards us. Or when we do recruit, we do actually car for net wide and try and actually say there is an opportunity for anybody, and it becomes quite a big exercise. Yeah, we could quite easily have 100 plus CV sent in and then there is a quite a rigid process now for how they are sort of sorted through. Each camp that is looked at by a number of individuals to try and start that openness, and so it creates quite a lot of work. But again, to have integrity in what we're doing, okay, that's the price you pay and hopefully by the time we get to the end of that sitting process, it's not only that, almost objectively, we've also actually managed to reconcile it with this discreet cultural or values-based aspect of what the studio runs on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's really really good to know, I hadn't actually appreciated that.
Speaker 2:As you say, a way of challenging yourselves to around diversity is exactly that, isn't it? It's trying to not self-select, so there's types of people that come in. It's much, much broader than that, so I hadn't quite appreciated that.
Speaker 3:But that's great, yeah, and we've wrested on it and thankfully we collectively in the studio write our policies, and so as long as we are self-critical about it, we can recognise the unintended consequences rather than blindly follow something.
Speaker 3:But yeah again that's another one of the challenges of the profession at this moment in time and yeah, it's straightly having this conversation it is motivating to think that yet we've got to get out there and do this stuff. You could be slightly overwhelmed by the number of challenges we could say that the profession is facing, but okay, you can either get rather depressed or okay, let's try and it's only trying.
Speaker 1:We don't have the answers, but as long as there's people, like us, and there are.
Speaker 3:There's lots of others actually. As long as we will keep trying, hopefully some of us will succeed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure you will, and I'm used to the quality.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll see. We've recruited you to try Exactly.
Speaker 2:So on that, maybe this segues into maybe a last question that I had to ask you before we do one from a previous guest. And it is about what I do, so it's about development and that whole world of being a property developer being a client being a neighbour of projects as opposed to someone designing or making, and we've talked about this before, so I'd be interested to get your thoughts on Mike, about kind of you know. How would you approach being?
Speaker 1:a developer if kind of in a zero zero world, you were telling your how to development.
Speaker 2:Have you got any thoughts on that?
Speaker 3:I yeah, we've wrestled over the years and say maybe put that particular issue on the back burner for a little while, but probably my gut feeling tells me something. It's about sort of the time scale, a lot of development. Yeah, you can't deny it's an economic cooperation or a commercial operation. It needs to actually work in a global financial system of debt and interest and borrowing. It's this going into the sort of dark matter world of things it's?
Speaker 3:regulated by a planning system. So there's no easy answer because your hands are so heavily tied. But if I think there's a glimmer of hope, it's about how can you transcend the short term, how can you actually look at securing the value and leveraging the value of a long term investment, Whilst it's hugely centralized wealth. The estates in London, sort of the Howard Dall and the Portmans, the West Duke of Westminster, the curation of those estates over hundreds of years. Yes, I'm not saying that it being held by those few families was a good thing.
Speaker 3:But the idea that they understood investments, actually sort of return value they could deeply invest into place. And so I think that's for me there's a sort of hope there that if you could structure I think that the phrase is patient capital, people who can take a sort of a long term view of things, then the immediacy to extract value hopefully goes away and the idea to invest in quality and longevity, in actually deep success of place, becomes actually tangible and bankable. I say I see a lot of our problems is that yes, it's been a sort of build it, sell it, walk away from responsibility type mentality. Yes, it's delivered the homes we really desperately need, but as it delivered them in a lasting way and a way that will say create those successful places of the future, I think the jury's out. So, yeah, my, somehow I don't have the answers, but I fear it's actually trying to bring sort of longer term thinking into. It is part of the solution.
Speaker 2:No, no, I agree, and you know, as you were talking there on a previous episode guest, we have Will Pozzano, who works in the digital assets space, and we were talking there a lot about fractionalised ownership and maybe with some of these other systems you know we talked about financial systems, cryptos and other things, maybe kind of opening up opportunities for fractionalised ownership for these. If you could create an estate, you know, in a similar way, but it's an estate, that's you know sort of yeah, there's much more crowdfunded in that sense that has much more kind of community engagement within it.
Speaker 3:There were some great models in the 1970s around this and, yeah, I think those stakeholders have to be, I think, vested in place, not just financially.
Speaker 3:Again, that could lead to a sort of yeah, an exiting, sort of an off-tune moment. You could see how it leads to booms and busts and things, I think somehow factoring, and then it could be through sort of digital means and cryptos, a relationship with time and okay, what is your investment worth in our 100 years and how do you actually deliver and then curate and support and nurture that place to maximise that 100-year horizon. And I think that will actually well, saying this aloud, I can see how this could align with some of these environmental imperatives and sort of things we're hearing from the big global insurance agencies and sort of stranded assets and things that actually don't have that durability. Maybe the sort of growing pains or this crisis we're in leads us to a place where thinking is fundamentally more sustainable. We can't be working to five, 10 year sort of time frames. We've got to really think what is the world gonna look like in 100 years?
Speaker 1:Who's prepared to?
Speaker 2:invest today to realize that, yeah, and that's where built environment thinking should be well placed because of multiple industries, we do have to think longer term. We are historically thinking about design lives, and we're looking both backwards and forwards at history about how cities and places evolve and what works as a system, what doesn't. So you would think that the skill set is there to enable this mindset within our industry.
Speaker 3:Well, I mentioned, we've sort of returned to architecture in the last few years with a keen of focus and things like when you're weighing up how you are investing your carbon in the embodied energy of a building.
Speaker 3:Exactly that. There are components that we're designing that, in our mind, stand there in 100 years time and, whilst we do have a particular issue that we can't really afford to create any more carbon emissions in the next 20 years, actually in a more sustainable view of development, if you can say that parts of those buildings, if they are a precious resource of material and energy, they've got to be durable, and so I think it comes through in some of the buildings we're designing and delivering at the moment.
Speaker 3:There's almost a visual hierarchy of these pieces, the pieces that are a hugely valuable investment of our shared natural capital, which, if we're gonna take the responsibility of delivering, have got to last.
Speaker 3:And then there are other layers on the building that their lives will be shorter, or they will be sort of ingredients in a circular economy that can quite easily be stripped and reprocessed and returned to the material cycle.
Speaker 3:And so we've found, I think after nearly 20 years, more of a language of the design we're interested in that taps into this and say, yes, maybe we're gonna have to sort of build an awful lot less for a short while, but when we do return to accommodate the needs, I think we need to go back and mine our existing built environment as much as we can. We do need to look where actually renewable materials are the appropriate materials, and maybe we'll need to develop a culture of maintenance which is a lot more about replacement more frequently. But at the heart of it, I think there are big parts of buildings that you just got to think these are your sort of lifetime investments and how, on that basis, might even be a programmatic. It could be used as housing for the next 50 years, but then it could be used as something else. How do we design buildings to be repurposed?
Speaker 2:So yeah, no, no completely agree and in a nice way, in a nice circular fashion. We've kind of come back a little bit round to some of those early things we were discussing today about regenerative processes and when you think about that with the buildings, with the systems and within, the wider ecosystem that's where it gets really interesting, and I think that's why speaking to you today has been really great day. So I've just got one final question for you, which is one that was left by our previous guests.
Speaker 2:And they leave it and I'll know who it's for. How do you define social value? Kind of talked about some of this, but how do you define it? Sort of in a elevator pitch.
Speaker 3:I don't know how these two thoughts converge into an answer.
Speaker 3:One is for a long time we spoke about the democratizing of the process, and this is why I think, like open-desk to furniture companies spend their whole witty house.
Speaker 3:And that democracy we're interested in is not sort of periodically giving someone a vote to choose their leader. It's about actually a profound equality into being sort of able to action your own lives and actually bring down the barriers to that. So there's the social value, not in a sort of Western liberal way, say democracy is such. It's more a profound democracy and giving them an agency of a word you picked up and I suppose that that's also a theme of ours is about a permissiveness. Actually, how do we create an openness for people to really take action themselves? And that does come back to our buildings and the ideas that they're infrastructures or platforms and they really are just a step up to then the person and even in that description of 100 years sort of visions I'm not gonna be here in more than perhaps 20 years time, so it will be the response of the others to pick up the baton and reinterpret and do.
Speaker 3:And so I think the social value to us, yes, it comes down to both an individual helping an individual and collective agency to affect those changes.
Speaker 2:Sort of man. It's awesome. No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:You did it. Yes, really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really insightful success and I think it kind of sums up everything that you're doing here, so, david, that's a really nice way to end it. That's a very great for you given time for the relationship we've got and, yeah, really, enjoying seeing what you're doing.
Speaker 3:I'm passing the map a lot, tom. Now we're throwing down the gauntlet and what you managed to achieve because I do think there is a deeper alignment in this sort of set of values and vision, and we, and others I'm sure you'll speak to, will explore it in their own ways, and we need that diversity of exploration because none of us have a solution and there won't be one solution. So, yeah, I'm rooting for you as well. Good.
Speaker 2:Right, David, thanks for your time.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the People Grow Places podcast. For more information, visit growplacescom and follow us at. We Grow Places across all social channels. See you next time.