Search Results for: smart cities

August 7, 2018

Prague best city in the world for remote working, but Johannesburg has cheapest coffee

by Sara Bean • Cities, Coworking, Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology

New research has revealed the top 15 cities worldwide that are best for remote working and Prague is on top, with London ranked as the 5th best city in the world for remote workers. Inspired by the top 15 cities listed in InterNation’s Expat City Ranking Report, Powwownow analysed the cost of living, average monthly salary, internet speed, price of coffee, and cost of public transport in different places across the world. Cities were individually scored on each factor and ranked by the total number of points, to calculate the top 15 cities around the world. Calculating an overall ranking for each city, Prague was revealed to be the best city worldwide for remote workers. More →

August 6, 2018

Government launches challenge to shape future transportation strategies

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Flexible working, News, Technology

The UK government has begun work on its Future of Mobility Grand Challenge. First announced in May, the government believes the initiative has the potential to make the UK a world leader in strategies for moving people and goods. The announcement includes two calls for evidence, the first focused on improving first mile/last mile transportation connections, with a focus on electric vehicles and microtransit. The second addresses the more general issue of new technology and trends for urban transport. The government also claims the move will address changes in working cultures including lower levels of commuting and flexible working.

July 5, 2018

Why a Google office simply does not work for everybody ⁰

by Dr Caroline M. Burns • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design

The open plan office versus closed debate rages on, and rather than running out of steam in the face of all of the evidence and reasoned argument put forward one one side or the other by many industry thought-leaders, it seems to have nine lives. Those grand and ground-breaking new offices occupied by the world’s tech giants seem to be particularly popular examples of why highly open and transparent workplaces do, or don’t work, especially those headline-grabbing offices created around the world by Google. This public debate has led to some very interesting and insightful discussions in various forums (to which I have contributed), inspiring me to synthesise the key themes into four reasons why a Google office is not necessarily the right type of office for your organisation. Many thanks in particular are due to David Rostie and Kay Sargent for their valuable online contributions to the debates which inspired this article.

April 4, 2018

Government announces details of new real estate agency

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property, Public Sector

The UK government has announced the creation of the Government Property Agency (GPA) which will aim to ‘improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the Government Estate and generate benefits of between £1.4 billion and £2.4 billion over the next ten years’. GPA’s initial portfolio of 80 properties will grow to over 1,000 as it takes on increasing responsibility for managing the general purpose central government real estate portfolio. This is intended to manage the government’s property portfolio strategically in order to realise the benefits that departments cannot achieve on their own. The GPA will partner with government departments to find innovative property solutions, and provide expertise to enable them to deliver wider business change more efficiently. More broadly, the GPA will also be an enabler for the delivery of Civil Service transformation, regional growth and the government’s vision to strengthen the Union.

March 16, 2018

Full fibre broadband could deliver £120bn boost to UK economy

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology

A new study conducted by economic consultancy Regeneris, and commissioned by Cityfibre, claims that the total economic impact of deploying full fibre ultrafast broadband networks across 100 UK city and towns, could reach £120bn over a 15 year period. The study examined ten areas of the UK economy likely to benefit from full fibre roll-outs. It also sought to quantify the impact of each of these areas in 100 distinct UK town and city economies over a 15-year period. According to the researchers, the UK’s business community – and most particularly its small and medium sized companies – could stand to benefit enormously. Access to full fibre could unlock £4.5bn in business productivity, innovation and access to new markets in these locations; a further £2.3bn in growth could be driven from catalysing new business start-ups; while the increased ability for companies to support flexible working could add £1.9bn.

February 16, 2018

Seven workplace related stories that have inspired us this week

by Mark Eltringham • Features

There is no such thing as a smart city

The radical idea of a world without jobs

The next stop in AI is augmenting humans

New technology to reduce the amount of sleep we need

Strengths based cultures and the future of work

Like coffee, great ideas take time to percolate (registration)

The myth of Apple’s great design

January 12, 2018

BSRIA launches urbanisation megatrends report

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Facilities management, News, Property

The Building Services Research and Information Association (BSRIA) has launched a new report called Megatrends – Urbanisation (registration needed) which claims to look at the major forces that are shaping the ‘world in which we live and do business’. The report cites as inspiration a 2015 McKinsey report called No Ordinary Disruption, which examined ‘The Four Global Forces Breaking all the Trends’. The four key trends which McKinsey pointed to as already impacting on almost every society, or will do soon, are urbanisation, an ageing population, globalisation and the technological revolution. Since 1950 there has been a massive global movement towards urbanisation. In 1950 fewer than 30 per cent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By 2010 this had reached 50 per cent and by 2050 the share is forecast to exceed two thirds of the world’s population. This represents one of the biggest and fastest human movements in history and the report sets out to explore its implications.

September 7, 2017

Leeds latest city to announce major new Government Hub

by Neil Franklin • News, Property, Public Sector

Following the announcement of new UK Government Hubs in Cardiff and Edinburgh, a total of 6,000 civil servants are to be relocated to a new Government Hub in Leeds in what is claimed to be the biggest ever commercial property letting deal in the city’s history. HMRC, working with the Cabinet Office, will take approximately 378,000 sq ft at Wellington Place on a 25 year lease. The deal will see 6,000 civil servants working in a state-of-the-art new city centre premises in 2020.

June 20, 2017

The self employed have to rely on each other as government offers almost no support ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News

The self employed are turning to one another for business and financial support, according to new analysis by the RSA think-tank. Commissioned by the Federation of Small Business (FSB) to examine how self-employed workers might manage the risks they face, the RSA report claims that growing numbers of workers are turning to collective sick-pay funds to manage ill health, cash pooling schemes to deal with late payments and micro-loan services to plug gaps in bank finance. The RSA’s report, The Self Organising Self Employed concludes that, to date, both the state and the market have struggled to keep pace with the rising numbers of the self employed. Although successive governments have been vocal in their admiration of people who strike it out alone, holding up their attributes as ‘self-starters’ and ‘strivers’, this had led to a ‘non-interventionist, hands-off policy agenda, with the self employed broadly left to their own devices’.

January 24, 2017

The impact of technology on corporate real estate: A Panglossian future? ⁰

by Antony Slumbers • Features, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of Loss Aversion in 1984, highlighting people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Lose £100 and we will feel a remorse that easily outweighs winning £100. In a similar fashion we find it very hard to see future positives when confronted with short term loses. We understand easily what we have lost but cannot imagine what there is to be gained. Furthermore, as Frederic Bastiat wrote in an 1850 paper, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”, man has a tendency to “pursue a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, rather than a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil”. Put these together and it is no wonder that, by and large, the future of work, corporate real estate and the workplace is so widely misunderstood.

November 24, 2016

Autumn Statement could undermine the growth of London’s tech firms ⁰

by Sara Bean • Cities, Facilities management, Legal news, News, Public Sector, Technology

Changes in business rates announced in yesterday’s Autumn Statement are likely to hit hardest the areas in the Capital such as Shoreditch and Fitzrovia where innovative tech companies are located, commented Jon Neale, head of UK Research, JLL. “The impact will no doubt undermine government plans to boost tech investment under its ‘Industrial Strategy’ announced earlier this week,” he said. “Meanwhile, office costs are high in London and post Brexit we need to minimise the risk that companies, will see cheaper continental cities such as Berlin as better bet place to set up shop.” He did add however that the promised “£1.3bn to improve roads and ease congestion is welcome and is likely to unlock development sites and promote economic development in many parts of the country. If the UK is to really address the challenges and opportunities of Brexit, investment in infrastructure needs to be more ambitious as well as more focused on an increasingly digital, hi-tech future. Green and smart city technology, new tram and underground networks and truly high-speed broadband would help provide precisely the platform UK business needs.”

November 23, 2016

UK government announces plans to invest in next generation technology ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, News, Technology

The UK Government is at last to invest properly in the next generation of technological infrastructure to ensure the company keeps pace with developments in broadband, the Internet of Things and 5G. It is to invite the country’s major cities to bid for a chance to pilot 5G from next year. The technology is a key enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT) because it is up to a hundred times faster and more reliable than existing 4G connections. In turn, the IoT will boost the application of game changing technology such as driverless cars and smart building systems. Although the Government has recently focussed on headline physical projects such as HS2, it has come under sustained criticism for the country’s often creaking technological infrastructure.