People in Property 2021: reflections on our series of four online panels exploring architecture’s shadow identity as real estate

“The market, technology, taste and fashion play their part in the making of obsolescence. They do so through architecture’s shadow identity as real estate.”

Cairns, S. & Jacobs, J.M. (2017) Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture. MIT Press, p.103

I don’t usually post about my teaching role. In the daytime I’m course leader for Sheffield Hallam University’s BSc Real Estate course. This draws on my practical / professional side and that isn’t really what this blog is for. But, partly because it’s consumed the best part of the last six weeks setting this up, and partly because it serves no-one well to perpetuate rigid distinctions between an unequivocally virtuous urbanism and a irredeemably dastardly real estate sector I’m offering up this reflection of our series of events.

The idea for the sessions – unsurprisingly – springs from our forced embrace of video-conferencing. That which was written off as a very poor substitute for the ‘in the flesh’ benefits of face to face meeting and conferencing has become the new normal over the last 12 months, and its has certain benefits too. Pulling together a total of 30 former SHU Real Estate students (and other industry contacts) from around the world would have been near-impossible if attempted the ‘old way’. But through Zoom it became very do-able and felt like an opportunity not to be missed. Also, we were very conscious that normally our students would be getting out on field trips and meeting professionals and touring their sites. But that’s not been possible this year.

So, we thought we’d use our networks, and this new techo-reality and bring that world to our students. When I thought up the events, my focus was probably on how the panellists could tell our students about the projects they were working on and give them a virtual sense of the physicality of their sites. But something made me opt for a series title of ‘People in Property’ (it may simply have been the alliteration that hooked me). But actually – looking back on the events – it is the way in which the sessions gave access to these real estate professionals as people that has been the project’s best value.

The exigencies of ‘broadcasting’ from your spare bedroom and trying to make intelligible to an unseen viewer what has driven your career, forced an openness and honesty that makes each of the encounters surprisingly intimate.

Many of the panellists described real estate as being ‘about people’ – and by extension about communication, interaction and trying to anticipate how people are going to want to associate (at home, work in their leisure) in the post-covid future. None of the panellists chose to speak about buildings per se, instead they invariably spoke about processes involving the interaction of people. Clearly interaction isn’t always harmonious, all projects engender conflict, compromise and a degree of competition. But all of that acts out in an arena of people, and is shaped by our collective notions of progress, value, community and lifestyle. And the panellists were (perhaps surprisingly) very open about consensus-building, as key to moving their careers, projects and communities forwards.

There are many rich career insights for our real estate students in these videos, but perhaps there is something of wider relevance too. I think there is a sense of real estate professionals as people – people in property – people who are acting in and upon the physical world, and who individually and collectively have a variety of hopes, dreams, fears, motivations, practices and logics. Yet, it is much more conventional to write of such things for architects. These videos give a glimpse of the human face of architecture’s shadow identity: real estate.