The Construction Livery Group held a “London 2030 Skyline Symposium” at Guildhall. It was an honour to be asked for my opinion having had a side-career in architecture, property management, facilities management, and construction.

The video above is ‘as it was’, but a slightly stylized transcript went:

City of London Skyline Symposium (Construction Livery Group), Committee room, Guildhall, 13:30, Friday 5 July 2024 by The Rt Hon The Lord Mayor of London Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli

• ‘Connect To Prosper’ – importance of the Square Mile’s network of buildings, streets and open spaces
• Demand for office space, projects in the pipeline
• Groundage

Chair, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to join you for this symposium on the City’s skyline. Thank you to the Construction Livery Group for bringing us together … to today’s other speakers for their insights … and to all of you for being here.

As you know, the theme this year is very much Connect to Prosper, trying to celebrate the many knowledge miles of our square mile. We’ve been hosting a series of coffee talks at Mansion House, but we sort of maxed out on 25, having covered the 17 SDGs, et cetera. So I’m pleased to see other networking events moving on in our city and delighted that the CLG is doing this.

For those who don’t know me, I’m Michael Mainelli, the 695^th Lord Mayor of the City of London a place I like to refer to as the world’s oldest democratic workers’ and residents’ cooperative. I also spent five years doing architectural research in town planning between 1977 and 1982. I’m a visiting professor at the Bartlett School of UCL, and even further chaired a construction company for nine years. At one point I oversaw a board with an enormous MoD estate with about a hundred sites, 42 primary sites, 3,000 buildings, and nearly 30,000 of land (about 0.1% of the UK). So it’s actually a subject quite dear to my heart. I also spent three years on planning and transportation here at the Corporation, one of my first major committees, from 2013 to 2016

Before I begin, there are a couple of a questions I need to address.

What is a tall building?

Well, someone living in New York, where the tallest building (One World Trade Center) is 541 meters, might have a different definition to someone who lives in the home counties. In the City, we define a tall building as anything above 75 metres. 75 metres…around 25 storeys…or about 17 double-decker buses stacked on top of one another. Remember that figure!

When I was doing my research in the late seventies, my biggest observation as a researcher in the urban environment was that skyscrapers kill activity beneath them. It’s a bit like a tall tree killing everything underneath the canopy. And I personally attribute quite a bit of it to the early designs of skyscrapers being terrifying for primates. No primate wants to be at the bottom of a 541-meter cliff. Natural preservation says, move away from this place. This is not good. Why it took a hundred years for architects to realize that, I don’t know, but I think that is one thing that has certainly changed in the way that we look at skylines and tall cities.

And what is a City?

Well (and this is my definition) I like to think of it as a co-located network of human activity. The pandemic challenged our definition of what is a city, when do we need to co-locate, what activities need to occur in an urban environment? The core strength of a city, as exemplified by the research at the Santa Fe Institute in particular, has been the economies of scale that come with physical density and economic intensity. Remember that, too. The urban theorist, Jane Jacobs, said that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” That couldn’t be truer.

The City of London – commonly referred to as ‘the Square Mile’ as it’s 1.12 square miles (or 2.9 square kilometres) – so neither square nor a square mile – broadly occupies the same footprint as the settlement founded by the Romans in AD43. Two thousand years of different people, cultures, uses, and requirements shaping a City that’s now only a small part of the much wider metropolis that makes up Greater London… but which punches well above its weight on the world stage.

Now, many of you’ll be aware that my firm runs the Smart Centers Index and the Global Financial Centers Index and the Global Green Finance Index. So I see a lot of cities, we track about 140 of them, and I go and I visit them, and I chat to them. And I’m constantly interested in the urban environment. There is no place with London’s intensity. It’s not a bragging right, it’s a fact. We put 615,000 people, that workers cooperative, into one square mile.

And you’re gonna say, well, I’ve been to Manhattan. Well, the numbers for Manhattan are about 350,000 people spread over six to eight square miles. That’s not the same intensity. You’ve been to Tokyo? Well, so have I. Tokyo’s very busy, but there is no single center for Tokyo. It’s just people whizzing around. And as you go through the cities in the world, it is that unique intensity that we have that I would argue personally, we break that at our peril.

In the City of London, foot traffic is still down. We’re running still just under 20% down. But the pattern has changed. It’s very down on Mondays and Fridays, sometimes as low as 35%. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are quite big, in fact sometimes running at 120%. Doesn’t necessarily help retailers, though – the retailer geared up for a hundred percent has to turn the other 20% away. So it doesn’t mean you automatically get that infill in all cases.

We’ve had some proposals out. I’d love to see a learned institutions hub in the city. I’d like to see a lot more intellectual life. We’re looking at a 24/7 London Museum, which will be, I think, a great thing. Business people do not come to go and get drunk every night, whatever the West End thinks. There is virtually no business traffic to the West End unless they come with their family. Do you know of anyone who on a business trip goes on their own to watch a play or show in a strange town? Sure, very few though.

We had a record 331 office leasing deals in 2023. Major new occupiers include HSBC and Clifford Chance coming back to the city, and also TikTok was an interesting win. Our projections for our workforce, I said 615,000 – our projections are 731,000 by 2051. So over the next 25 years, we’re expecting an increase of 31%.

As Lord Mayor, I am constantly asked what the secret is to the City’s success. My answer? Networks.

Londoners are no smarter – or dumber – than anyone else, but we do have better networks, better connections.  Home to 40 learned societies, 70 higher education institutions, 130 research institutes, 8,600 residents and 24,000 businesses…with a dynamic workforce of around 615,000, speaking more than 300 languages, the City is, arguably, the world’s most connected commercial centre.

My mayoral theme, ‘Connect To Prosper’, celebrates the ‘Knowledge Miles’ of our Square Mile, the ‘world’s coffee house’…and it’s about leveraging those connections to tackle global challenges like mental health and climate change.

For instance, our Ethical AI Initiative uses ISO standards to help ensure the safe, transparent, and ethical deployment of this burgeoning technology…which has huge potential in the property and construction sectors across project lifecycles. Meanwhile, our Constructing Science: Offices to Labs Initiative has created and is promoting the international standard for converting commercial premises to life sciences facilities.

One of the City’s unique networks is the network of buildings, streets and open spaces that make up the Square Mile: the places where people live, work and play. It’s a network that, in turn, allows people to create new connections…coworker to coworker, visitor to memory: always generating activity, ideas and growth. The pandemic changed working patterns — probably for good, and probably for the good.

What does the reduction in business travel we’ve seen since the pandemic mean for our skyline? Well, there has been a drop But London, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Singapore and HK remain strong.

Should we move to residential? As I’ve mentioned, the Square Mile is most intense open (as opposed to tower block) urban working environment in the world with a daytime density of 180,000/km2. By contrast, Manhattan’s average density is about 27,000/ km2. If we go residential, we lose that uniqueness.

As you will see from walking round the City, office working is very much alive and well. The benefits of in-person contact with other workers – for learning and development, creativity, networking, relationship-building and more – are clear.

This is increasingly recognised by many City businesses and organisations, which are encouraging staff to spend more of their working week in the workplace. The City had a record 331 office leasing deals in 2023…with major new occupiers including HSBC, Clifford Chance and TikTok. And with the workforce expected to reach 731,000 by 2051 – an increase of 31% from 2016 – more high-quality, sustainable office space is needed.

Our City Plan 2040 has set out an ambition for a minimum of 1.2 million sqm of additional office floorspace over the next 16 years. In 2023, there was a 25% increase in applications received and a similar increase in decisions issued. There are hundreds of thousands of sqm of office floorspace currently under construction (c.540,000 sqm as of March 2023) and hundreds of thousands more in the planning pipeline. 11 tall towers are due to be built by 2030, dramatically changing the City’s skyline … as illustrated in the incredible digital mock-ups I’m sure you’ll have seen.

Now, I know tall buildings have been criticised for their impact on street life. And, sometimes, these buildings can feel overwhelming. But to quote Jason M. Barr, Professor and author of ‘Cities in the Sky’, “city planning and urban design that prioritises pedestrianism can then incentivise buildings that better engage with the street.”

Tall buildings are silos, but they don’t have to be nuclear silos. In new developments, the City Corporation has followed an informal policy of ‘groundage’, introduced by former Planning and Transportation Committee Chair Michael Welbank with developers having to provide improvements and enlarged spaces for pedestrians at ground level as a condition for building at height – to get more space out of this Square Mile for workers, visitors and residents, and make it easier to navigate. We’ve had some pedestrian disasters, start with the Bullring in Birmingham, around the corner I might point to the Jubilee walkways. Whenever we denigrate the pedestrian we denigrate our City.

In this way, we use tall buildings to connect, not isolate. In the 55 Bishopsgate development, buildings will be open at ground level providing 2,545 sqm of new public realm, flowing through to the wider Bishopsgate area. From ground level to cloud level, the City of London’s elevated public spaces are proving immensely popular.

And if we have ‘groundage’ then we can also have ‘roofage’. In the year since 20 Fenchurch Street’s Sky Garden welcomed its 10 millionth visitor, a million more have come, reportedly making it one of the world’s most ticketed destinations. Now, the Square Mile’s newest public roof gardens, terraces and viewing galleries are significantly contributing to the City’s increasing footfall, with 120 Fenchurch’s roof garden (opened February 2019) having recently received over 1.5 million visitors. I don’t know about you, but something that’s gonna get onto 11 million this year is not a gimmick to me. And joining these are Horizon 222 [22 Bishopsgate] and The Lookout [8 Bishopsgate].

And, you may also be interested to know that, as part of Connect To Prosper, we conducted an experiment of Einstein’s theory of relativity using an atomic clock placed at the top of 22 Bishopsgate – currently the City’s tallest building. We found that time really does fly faster the higher up you are!

Maintaining a city that serves such a diverse set of needs requires a systems-thinking approach, one that considers the interconnected impact of our interventions and weighs up the energy efficiency of our built environment, its interface with communities, ecosystems, and local economies, as well as material use and building lifecycles.  

Parallel policies and initiatives launched by the City Corporation, including our Retrofit First Policy and Carbon Options Guidance – both designed to ensure construction applicants give thought to the whole life carbon of a development – are supporting this goal. While our Skills for a Sustainable Skyline Taskforce is addressing skills gaps around the construction, retrofit, and maintenance of low carbon commercial buildings in Central London boroughs.

All of this feeds into our Destination City programme, which promotes the Square Mile as a seven-day-a-week leisure destination for visitors, workers, and residents alike. This has involved a new visitor and tourist brand for the City of London…a series of partnerships with Business Improvement Districts and commercial brands…more arts and cultural events…and radical changes to our streets and walkways to improve the visitor experience.

To conclude, we are very confident about the future of the City as a place to work … as a destination to be enjoyed … and as the world’s coffee house. As we reach new heights, we can create new connections: maintaining the physical density and economic intensity that make the Square Mile unique.

Now, that quiz question, how tall is an officially tall building in the City? 75 metres. Thank you.