GP 57: Investing to Make Life Better in Cities: with Jesse Shapins of Urban Partners

Hello and 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 Larson. Jesse, thanks very much for joining me today. I'm so grateful we managed to squeeze this in on your visit to London.

And you know, we've had such a good relationship over the years, all the way back to your time at Cyborg Labs and NREF and now Urban Partners, and so fascinated to share that journey with everyone today. Yeah, I'm Bob, very excited that I can be here with you and to catch up. Good. So we're here today, obviously, you're giving a talk this evening.

And where would you like to start the conversation on that? Because how far back do you think we need to go in your life to realize where we are today? I mean, I do I definitely, at least in my own understanding of myself, certainly do start with where I grew up in my family and the experiences that I had as a kid. So I grew up in a small town in Colorado.

Um my parents were both landscape architects. Um they're actually entrepreneurs as well. They started an urban design studio in the town, did a lot of work for the city, you know, things that you know now we all in this field sort of understand to be things that people talk about and make decisions about. But when I was a kid, they would take me to see like bike lanes that were going at a different direction than traffic and trying to promote walkability.

And those were topics that basically were the dinner table conversation. Um and I think it did really leave a huge impression. My uncle was also an architect or is an architect. Um, he specialized in historic preservation.

Um, and this is at a time, I mean, in the field today, there's a ton of discussion about transformation, appreciation of existing buildings. You have to understand this was, you know, in the 1980s, 90s, a period where this was not at the forefront of the agenda. And for him, working in the Northeastern United States was to work with historic structures in old mill towns, primarily in New England, but really see those as forms of regeneration and economic growth and community development.

Um, so that childhood experience really has shaped me in terms of just a passion for the role of place in society, um, and that the place has an enormous impact on everyone, um, and it doesn't happen by accident. It's not something that just sort of falls out of the universe. Uh, there's really intentional choices that people make, institutions make. And um I've kind of devoted my career in different ways to that topic.

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, yeah, fascinating. And um I'd love to go into that a bit more detail in a second, in terms of your your backstory and that development. But you touch on sort of regeneration, economic growth, and community there. And that those kind of three pillars kind of underpinning place.

And would you would you say that that as a as a framework is something that has always sort of evolved for you? Or do you think that your perception of of what makes makes regeneration, makes place has sort of has fundamentally changed over time? It's certainly evolved as I've had experiences and learned. I think the things, you know, so I my father is also originally from New York City.

Um so I spent a lot of time in New York as a kid and ended up falling in love with the big city and went there for college. Um and I think also living in New York then sort of started to bring with it sort of a curiosity about not only the role of the kind of physical environments, um, which is a lot of what the work that my parents spent time working on. Again, the bike lanes, the plazas, the, you know, the park spaces, but also, let's say, the kind of mental models of place and how those shape lives.

You know, a city like New York is sort of notoriously not just the city that we experience when we walk down the street, but the city that's seen in films, that's seen in media. Um, it has that whole identity of being, you know, a 24-hour city and the big apple. And I think that sort of curiosity around media narrative and culture and the role that the arts play has also really been a major theme. I ended up while in college studying urban studies, I was traveling in Europe and um ended up, I have some family heritage and visited Berlin, and this is in the late 90s, and was just sort of completely um struck by the city and in sort of that period of time, but also a city that in so many ways basically wears on its sleeve that sort of the visible and the invisible together, right?

Like you see things, but there's obviously things that you cannot see that are present in the place with you. Um, and I think how the society and how the place navigates that relationship and how it also comes to understand its history and its future at that period of time just was incredibly captivating. So I wrote my master's thesis about a park in this in Berlin called the Mauer Park, that's that's a park that is the former stretch of the wall and how that space was sort of transformed, both in terms of preserving its openness as a former death strip, but also um introducing new elements like a very simple landscape gesture of a of a hill that would allow for swings at the top scale to the scaled to adults, so that as adults could actually swing over the city and see um from a different vantage point.

So I guess, and I could keep going, but I think these um I've just every different chapter of my life has sort of been different ways of exploring place. But I think it is, while I might have used the words regeneration, economic growth or development and opportunity and topics like community, those are common threads. But I think every instance there's been sort of different primary kind of lenses. And I think, you know, if we speed up to today, we can cover the middle period.

But I think increasingly through my time, I became more and more interested in the role of the kind of capital markets and institutional investment that fundamentally shapes our places. I mean, we we live in a capitalist society, and the this is a reality in which we inhabit. And the decisions that sit in terms of investment also are critical. And I became hugely curious to understand if there were actors that were approaching that in different ways and opportunities to basically think more creatively about the way that the capital and developers and municipalities and society can can come together.

Yeah, no, fascinating. And then and picking up on two of those examples names that I think most people will will have heard of. Obviously, Cyborg Labs, as I mentioned, where where we first met, and now um urban partners. Um how how do you see that that that thinking then in two sides?

You know, one obviously North America, which was an um an amazing initiative I felt that was started by obviously by the parent company Alphabet of Google and had projects there. And then um in a European context with um with NREP now Urban Partners. Yeah. So I I I joined Sidewalk Labs um quite early on and was working, you know, with the former deputy mayor of New York City, Dan Doktoroff, um, his co-founder, Josh Syrifman, who has a really deep and interesting development experience, was part of the Bloomberg administration, working on projects like the Highline Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Um but before that I'd been involved in actually some media and technology entrepreneurship. Um and so this idea of basically how do you integrate cities and innovation around sort of technologies and not only kind of digital technologies, but also innovations in policy and design, and use that to kind of really shape better future cities in terms of human life and the planet. So that was in many ways the kind of entry point for me to sidewalk. And I think the level of ambition that the company had and the kind of categorically different way of thinking about the city and truly thinking also holistically about the city was was was really exciting to be a part of.

I think, you know, the the company's journey was was very much one where I think it it grew up at a period of time where there was also, you know, uh I think a quite robust optimism around the role of technology and technology companies. Um I think this project unfolded that we were doing in Toronto from, you know, I started working with a company in 2017 and um, you know, the project that we were working on in Toronto, the we won a major bid to be a funding innovation partner to Waterfront Toronto there.

And, you know, Cambridge Analytica, the scandal that took place in the kind of, I think, quite appropriate wake-up call to people around the world that basically a company like Facebook or a company like Google, these are not just because they're technic technology and innovation, doesn't mean they're benevolent actors in society. They might also be contributing some really important and interesting things for us. They might also be driving really important economic growth. There might be aspects of sort of, you know, freedom of expression and other things that they are enabling in different forms, um, but they're not a given to be a good.

And I think that the Sidewalk Labs project is one that was with a parent company at Google, became sort of ensnared in a broader, I think, very appropriate societal discussion about what is the appropriate role of a company like Google in the lives of Torontonians, in the economy of Canada. And I mean, we're sitting here, you know, a week after Mark Carney's comments at Davos, and you know, the relationship of Canada and the US is is is complicated. Um, and I think there's reasonable questions to ask about whether or not Toronto's waterfront should, in fact, be capitalized and developed in part by a company backed by Google.

So I think what that I go into that because I think what sat in the center of Sidewalk Labs was a group of people that I think is kind of historic in terms of the diversity of experience, level of ambition, scope of kind of curiosity and research into cities, from you know, district heating and cooling systems to the most advanced ways of energy management to new models of health and kind of public health and public realm and literally every topic you could imagine that's important for cities.

There was really intelligent people with really good ethics and motivations working on those. I think it was caught in a business model that was inappropriate, in fact, for the venture. And I think, you know, ultimately we stepped out of the work in Toronto, I think, because the uncertainty became so high and the fraught relationship with the actors there was so high. But I left that experience not sort of soured on the challenges of large-scale mixed use regeneration, but only kind of emboldened to kind of pursue that further, but to find the right business model and kind of institutional framework through which to pursue that.

And that's what brought me to what is now Urban Partners, what was it, Interep at the time, which is a company that now for over 20 years has been working first in sort of the Nordics, now sort of more widely across Northern Europe, and really with a strong kind of purpose around solving problems and making things better in cities, um, initially through sort of single-building, you know, more sustainable real estate, increasingly through broader kind of approaches to neighborhood scale transformation, but doing that in a way that also was in partnership with public authorities, um, especially in Copenhagen and the work that we've done there with many of the kind of municipal actors, but also earning the trust of institutional investors because of the commercial returns that we were delivering through these quality partnerships and these quality development projects.

And I think that sort of foundational base was really intriguing to me as a platform from which then and meeting the founders and understanding the ambitions to really think about what does urban partners mean? What does it mean to be a partner to cities and help cities solve challenges by matching capital and capabilities? That's what motivated me to kind of move up, move across the Atlantic and take the huge leap with my family to relocate to Copenhagen. Yeah, yeah, no, amazing.

And um and on that cyborg labs piece, I I completely agree with the way that you summarised it there. Um I when I first saw the uh the vi the manifesto documents, they called MIDIPs? Yeah, the MIDIP, yeah, the master innovation and development plan. Yeah, I I still to this day think they are some of, if not the best visioning strategy documents I I've seen.

And as you say, if you strip away the the um the really, really important and relevant context that you put around the alphabet thing, if you think about it as a piece of just urban thinking with the amount of input and and the people involved in it, I still think it it's a really, really relevant and and great case study for that and something that we I've got on my shelf at home actually. That's right. Um and then and then maybe on to the to the urban partner thing then. So in a in a in a maybe sort of in an elevator-pitched way, you know, what is what what is being a good urban partner then for you?

How how do you see that, all your learnings and and what you're trying to put into practice today? Yeah. I guess it's you know, it it starts from this sort of fundamental, you know, perspective that says that cities are at the heart of kind of our lives today and our future, whether we like it or not. It's where the vast majority of people live, it's where the increasing majority of people will be living.

That's certainly true in Europe, that's true around the world. Um, it's also where many of our challenges exist. It's where you know the vast resource use related to climate takes place. It's also where many of the social challenges exist.

It's also where so much of our economic futures are being shaped. And so I think that the the notion of urban partners is to say cities are in fact a kind of ecosystem to understand and to basically understand what those challenges are, and then look at how we can best be a partner to those public actors and societal actors to bring institutional investment to help address those challenges and balance the kind of risk and reward that sits in that partnership. And I think it and I think what's really different, it's not, you know, there's a history of public-private partnership, and that that term, I think, especially growing up in a North American context, maybe it's similar here in the British context, to me sounds like basically divesting public assets to the public to the private sector and having them take over.

It's basically take our water, take our utilities, take our train systems, you know, take our energy grids. These are all critical infrastructure, and but you know, the public sector can't manage them, it doesn't have the resources, let's let the private sector take them and do that. That's not what this is. It's a fundamentally different logic that says there is a co-responsibility that is shared.

If you are also gonna have a kind of long-term stake commercially in a place, you need to also make sure that the kind of fundamental societal infrastructure functions. And it doesn't mean that there's sort of a kind of it means then that basically that the public sector has a real responsibility to chart what is the kind of needs, what are the the vision, what is the future that is required, what does society need in this place, and work collaboratively to find ways to both from public balance sheets and sources, but also from private to make those kind of investments that are needed for the future.

And I think so. That's Urban Partners is designed to basically support that interface. Um, and that is very different than a traditional, you know, we grew up in the core of our business is you could say in real estate. But that is a very different way to understand also even the role of real estate in a city.

It means you can't only look at a building on its own terms as a kind of asset or a transaction. It sits in a context, it sits in a neighborhood, it sits in a wider setting. And the logic for how you approach that needs to encompass that wider lens. Um, and then there's obviously many other things that start to become important to invest into, whether it's larger scale regeneration schemes, whether it's electrification of bust and systems, whether it's you know, energy grids and things, what is needed and how do we kind of create the infrastructure for the future in the right way between the different parties?

Yeah, and we we talk a lot about um you know quality of life and that experience of place and and and I know you know you do as well. And and so you've mentioned scale here. Sort of what scale do you feel like you know you have to operate at or or you need to operate at to really try and move the needle on some of these big kind of quality of life outputs that you're you're focused on and know you're passionate about? I mean I think I think that every urban scale offers different opportunities.

I mean, a small business in a like in a in a storefront can have a meaningful impact on quality of life in a community. I think multiple housing units in a single building can have meaningful impact on a community. So I think they're I think all of those pieces add up. Certainly if you're able to work at what I would consider kind of a neighborhood district scale, where there is, you know, if you try to put a number to it in square meters, maybe like 100,000 square meters or more, I guess about a million or so square feet, you start to get the ability to work where you get intentional synergies where you can plan and invest so that the public realm comes early and serves certain needs, and then you can then introduce some ground floor experience in retail that sits in adjacency to housing of different tenures, that benefits certain office uses and all these things.

We know in good city neighborhoods these things all work well together. In new developments, it can often be hard because the traditional investment and development logic is a building. And if you suboptimize just for a building, you don't get a place. You get a series of buildings.

And so that's, I think, from an investment and development lens, you do need sufficient scale to basically harness the synergies. And that is also where, from a commercial perspective, you get the opportunity to, you know, make some choices that say, we will, in fact, early on make sure that there are the right type of local tenants and they have the long-term tenure that is needed. They might have a slightly different, you know, retail rent than some of the tenants that will come later.

If you also have a really great place that's becomes incredibly attractive for the wider city, your rental values will go up because it's a place that is highly desirable. And I think that's okay as long as, you know, and from a society and inclusivity perspective, if the whole of the place has a mix of tenures built into it. So if you have a range of affordable housing that's integrated into the project that probably does have some price controls around its growth, but then that sits next to market housing, those things can work in concert.

And I think that's the investment logic that we need, because it's not the case that private capital is simply seeking the highest possible profit. It's seeking a kind of logical risk return that can it can make sense of in concert with its partners. And if there's credible social housing partners, if there's credible, you know, municipal partners in terms of infrastructure, if there's credible ways in which the whole can come together, and then the profit sits in a couple pieces of a whole area, that's a great investment case.

And it will deliver something that I think cities really need. Yeah, absolutely. And um, and what sort of time horizons are you are you thinking about in in your approach to this sort of regeneration? I think it has to be, I think in many ways, the most important thing is you need to start with the mindset that is the end is a functional operating place.

It is, you know, King's Cross in London here, I think, is a great example of this. And it is a place that, you know, was designed with the end state in mind. Um, and so it's not a place that is designed to kind of sell individual buildings, but if you're only going to harness that long-term quality if you have an ownership mindset and an operational mindset. And that's, you know, it might sound a little strange, but that's actually like infrastructure investing works this way, right?

So you build windmills and offshore wind to produce energy for the future. You don't focus on like building the windmill for the phase of like building the construction of the windmill. The purpose is to produce the energy. And here, what you need to do is produce the energy of place.

And it's the energy that comes from diversity of housing and diversity of workplace and ground floor and all of that together. So you just need, and that is a kind of basically to say that is an open-ended long-term mindset that is an ownership or stewardship mindset. In order to get there, every project is at a different stage and will require a different amount of time. I think, you know, can you go through that development journey over the course of a decade?

I think so. I think there's evidence that you can. Does the stages early on where you kind of have to align landowners and stakeholders and a vision and get public planning permission and all of that work take often decades? Unfortunately, yes.

Um, so I also think we have to acknowledge it takes time. I think we need to move more quickly because I think cities do need to kind of deliver on the housing needs, especially that we face. Um, and planning, you know, policy and regulatory structures need to move more quickly. But this stuff is important.

So it's not to just sort of like throw kind of regulation out the window, but it is to truly get them even more resources to kind of manage these planning processes as effectively as we can to get them to move more move more quickly. And then how how much of your work is very much location-specific versus um sort of systematic and process-led? Because I know we've talked in the past about how you apply that model maybe to different locations. Yeah.

And so how much of it is kind of you know hyper-local, how much of it is sort of more strategic, and how how do you view that in your thinking and your work? Yeah, so I think we, let's say, as a firm, as urban partners, are I think a big part of what has made us successful is finding a combination of these two things. We are sort of hyper-local by definition, and I think anything that is place-based is hyperlocal by definition. And knowing the local tenants, the local kind of demographics of people and stakeholders, like you don't do great development work if that's not in the DNA of the team working on it.

At the same time, can you start to have sort of some replicable kind of systems-level models that inform that? I think absolutely. And I think how does one, you know, how does one approach the question of, you know, you know, whether it's housing unit layouts, whether it's also kind of in a district scale, the sequencing and phasing and the prioritization of public realm and ground floor relative to other uses. So I think we we very much work in both of those.

Um, but I think it has to be a combination. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Um and there are some there are some big themes.

I think every place is is unique, as you say. But if you look at if you look Look at cities across the the world, you know, lots of them are struggling with you know carbon and decarbonisation programs. Lots of them obviously have infrastructure, big transport, and how how do they move the move people goods around? Um and then I would say like you know, affordability and the cost of living and you know, you could say equality within that are kind of a big themes.

Now there's probably others that you probably give me off the top of your head. But maybe you know, starting with those, how how how do you think um good place-based work from from you know capital structures down to to place-based initiative can kind of address those? And how do you see your work, urban partners, sort of tackling these sort of big overarching macro themes that cities are facing? Yeah.

So I think the I mean, the so if we start with the decarbonization and broadly, you could say climate and nature agenda. I mean, I think that in particular, that's one where I think we know now an enormous amount around the technologies and solutions, both from a kind of embodied and operational carbon perspective that would put us on a kind of Paris 1.5 pathway. That's I think Urban Partners has been a real front runner in the industry of sort of already now decade plus kind of taking very bold commitments in this.

And our whole portfolio is actually now is Paris aligned. And a lot of that to the question around systematization. This is one of those things where we have real playbooks and real knowledge of sort of, there's obviously variations to some degree in a local context, but building structures and systems and things of this, and energy structures and systems, these things can kind of be replicated and scaled. Um, and I think we need to do that more and more.

And I think that also certainly applies also to the energy infrastructure and what's needed in Europe. I think on the on the question of sort of the transport, I think this is one of those topics where honestly this that that is where the metropolitan scale is what is necessary in even pan-metropolitan regional scale. So I think in order to, you know, at a building or certainly even a neighborhood level, can we have more intentionality around how we sort of create incentives for walking and biking and reliance on um, you know, non-reliance on cars?

Should we focus on brownfield sites that have good existing transit infrastructure? All those things are things that are within our control as sort of urban investors. But the transportation infrastructure as such is a different topic. Um, it certainly doesn't fully sit in the scope of what we do.

Um, it is the things that are sort of being managed at sort of national, regional government levels. And I think it needs to be truly like in a European context, done at a European level. You see great European rail planning and infrastructure planning, and I think that needs to happen more and more because that's the scale that is required. Um and then on the affordability, this is you know, this is an extremely important but really challenging topic.

Because at least on the, you know, when it comes to housing, the delivery of new housing has sort of baked-in costs. You know, we can find ways to kind of try to kind of optimize, but in new construction is is is is is costly, both in terms of economics as well as in terms of carbon. So I do think the notion of starting from where is there existing housing, where there's opportunities to reuse and repurpose housing, that's a huge need. And I think we're seeing more and more work around that agenda.

And then I think on the on the new housing side, we obviously in growing cities, whether it's London, Copenhagen, Munich, Hamburg, Stockholm, these are all cities where you do have strong economic concentrations aligned with future industry. And I think you know, it's no mystery that's why people move to cities and have for centuries. Cities are sort of the centers of our kind of civilizational economic dynamism. And so we need to provide more and more housing for people as they move to cities, and that won't only be done through retrofit and existing stock.

And so I think there, the affordability equation does just need to be quite pragmatic and acknowledge there's a range of housing and demographics that need to be served. A big part of that is a pure supply side factor. I think cities that struggle the most in the United States, and I find this deeply depressing with affordability are often the cities that have had, you know, progressive democratic leadership. Cities like San Francisco that I lived in, and a big part of why they've struggled so much with affordability is they literally have built nothing because it's a lot of incumbent residents with ostensibly progressive values that resist change and say, no new buildings will be built near me.

But then they sign up and say, you know, I really believe in affordability. And, you know, I think it's a huge challenge that we have in society. There's a real, and I grew up in a town that I would say sort of is an embodiment of this, what I would call progressive hypocrisy, where people advocate for affordability, but they're doing that from a real position of privilege, often homeowners in certain cities that are highly attractive and they resist change. And that is like the NIMBYism.

And I think that's very real. So I think that that is some a piece of the puzzle that needs to be overcome. And it doesn't mean that pure market supply side will solve it. But if you start to unlock more housing, you start to deliver housing at different price points, and you start to also bring in more public investment to also support on keeping some of the kind of rental costs down.

Again, the construction costs are going to be pretty consistent, you can start to address the challenge. Yeah, fascinating. And um uh that insight into a very varied set of um considerations that I think is is is really, really valuable. So if I was to ask like a sort of short question, so so so what next?

Like how how do we kind of solve, begin to solve, tackle, address some of these um systemic issues that that cities are facing? And and maybe you could give some sort of on the ground real examples of some of the stuff you've you've done or are doing um towards that. Yeah. I mean I think there is, I think at the root of it, there is a degree of a kind of mindset shift.

And I think there's a mindset shift that needs to kind of put cities at this at a as a real kind of focal point of attention. Um I think that means it's also you know giving and supporting municipal leaders with even more kind of mandate and and and resources. And then I think it's also in in the European context, and I and I consider the UK a part of Europe. Um I think it is it is it is stepping up and saying our future actually depends on the kind of viability of our of our cities going forward.

Um if we you know we are living in a period of time where there's obviously a really significant change taking place in the kind of global world order. Europe cannot rely on the United States in the same way that it has in the past. And it Europe also has a set of kind of values and a quality of life, even if challenged, that is, that I think is extremely important to defend. So when we talk about security, it's also to secure what?

And I think it is to just secure the kind of democratic values and principles that underpin European cities, that is where that is lived and breathed. And I say all that because the security piece, in the classic sense of also, you know, military uh investment, that will require a lot of investment as well. And in order to do that, we also need economies that are able to be competitive and that can grow. And so we need resources, we need to invest in our own cities, in our own economies to be able to create this sort of standing and strength in the world that we need.

In order to do that concretely, you know, I guess, you know, to make it more practical, like as a firm, we're looking at how do we orchestrate investment funds that help focus on really moving forward large-scale mixed-use regeneration projects in ways that are different than traditional funds have done in the past, that are aligned with that long-term kind of stewardship and ownership model, that truly kind of work with the best local kind of partners that are both developers and municipal partners.

And how do you do that at scale across Europe? So it's not just one bespoke project, but actually do that, you know, in concert in London, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, you know, that geography actually, and actually also get even more collaboration between those cities around a common agenda and common knowledge sharing. So we have projects already that we're working on in the center of Copenhagen that sort of embody this agenda and this logic, the railway district, in English as it's called.

And it starts there with a transformation already of an existing building into a community center that is working with local associations, working with municipality, working with local philanthropy to give people access to a type of space that they haven't had before and to build the community around that. And to build the housing needs and mix-in social housing, mix-in ownership housing, mix-in student housing, all of that in one quality place. So I think that's one very concrete way that we're working on this agenda.

But I think it is also, again, truly a mindset. Like Europe needs to take ownership of its future and really see cities as core to that future and step up in terms of the urgency and kind of commitment on this different sectors, both public and private, to make that future that we want. Yeah, yeah. Very well said.

And um every cloud has a silver lining, I think is the saying, isn't it? And I think in in in uh in Europe, there's definitely been an awakening, or there should be an awakening of what's going on at the moment. Um and I think there's yeah, there's a lot of agency that we can we can take to move things forward, align with those macro trends and then with what with what's going on today, um, and and plotting a course through that. And um and so so maybe then like do you I don't know whether you have a sort of strategic plan for urban partners or or what, but if if you were to say sort of zero to five years, five five to ten years, I don't know how you'd structure that internally, but but it within that context that you've mapped out for you as a as a business, as a fund, you know, what does that look like?

How do you deliver returns for your investors over those time horizons? Um, yeah, what do the next few years actually entail for you guys? I mean, I think we we certainly, you know, for us, a lot of the focus is around kind of inhabiting the promise uh that we've made around being urban partners and actually being a problem solver with cities and institutional capital. And I think part of that will be through these ideas that we're exploring around new fund structures for urban regeneration.

Um, you know, I hope we can make you know concrete and public what that could be over the course of this next year. I think we certainly see a need to kind of innovate and hopefully kind of find solutions that better support affordable housing, social infrastructure. We've got great examples of actually working with sort of municipal schools in in Finland that I think have relevance to cities in Germany and across the UK. So I think some of these key themes, and I think also for us, while it's almost like to a degree in our culture taken for granted, the climate agenda remains essential.

Um, and I think continuing to also grow that and scale that, especially in Germany, um, which is a country for us that's extremely important in terms of how we believe that the sort of future of Europe also does, you know, in history, you know, Germany's success also means Europe's success. And Germany's challenges and failures also have not led to the best outcomes in European history. So I think for a lot of us, the the focus on Germany is really important. I think the UK is a really important place.

And so I think this this part this process also of us as a company that started in the Nordics and is now truly kind of stepping into a northern European role and really working and developing a model with partners in these different countries is is is sort of core to what this next sort of two to five years will bring. Great, great. And you may not be able to say too much of this, but on a on a very practical level, I imagine. So so you as an you know an institutional investor, as we say, um uh you're you're sort of looking upwards to capital partners and sort of what do they want and how do you align with them, and then as you said, down to um supply chain partners, operating partners, however you you call that.

Um maybe just firstly the kind of the the investment partners. Uh I I assume like there must be a sort of uh a profile that those those investors are looking for in terms of their returns, their um their metrics on being involved with you. So have you have you had to scour the market to find very few partners who would really align with what you're looking to do? Or is is there a weight of capital that's really like looking to get into this?

My first question on that. So I think I mean I think what's important to say, and I think this was again to go back to the to the to the transition of my own life from sort of sidewalk labs to urban partners. I think one of the things that has stood out about urban partners and rep originally was this agenda and this commitment to purpose has also sat in concert with delivering really strong returns to investors. This is not a kind of it, and it is evidence that that can be done.

So our our our kind of co-founder, our chairman Mikkel, his favorite phrase is like, doing good can be good business. And so I think that we we we really do hold that to be true. So our sort of engagement with capital partners is not to say, well, we can do these good things for society and you will get lower returns, is to say that actually if we do these in the right way, manage risk in the right way, focus on value creation and capture that value in the right ways, we can deliver you actually really, really quality returns, but it does require trusting us in our specialist capabilities to do that.

Not every firm can do that. That is what we are sort of building a kind of specialization around is that management of a different type of partnership model and a different type of risk that we still think, in fact, should deliver even better returns in some cases based on sort of the outsized performance that quality can deliver over time. Again, if you look at King's Cross, it's a tremendous investment for the partners involved. If you look at our project in Norho and in Copenhagen, it's delivered great societal value and it's a tremendous investment for us and others.

So I think when it comes to capital partners, what is needed is, you know, a capacity to kind of think a little bit differently. It is to acknowledge that there is sort of, in our case, we offer a range of different sort of solutions. We do have our bread and butter value add real estate fund that will invest in single buildings. We do have other funds that you know we're working on that have a different sort of structure and logic that are sort of first ever in their design.

So we will need partners that are willing to start to do something a little different. We have the benefit in in Denmark, there's been pension funds that historically have leaned in into kind of, you could say, assets for the future. They were core kind of investors in capitalizing the offshore wind and renewable industries across Europe and now the world. In many ways, they see this as sort of similar.

It is, again, a logic that says, what are the assets that we need for the future in society? And how do we build kind of risk-assured structures to deliver on those assets and give returns back to their pensioners that are commensurate with that risk? So it is, it's not every investor that is kind of right fit for us as a partner, but there are plenty. And there are really significant pension funds, sovereign wealth funds that I think really do share this agenda, and that you know, we're finding good resonance for this work.

Great, great. And and then in terms of the operating partners then that you work with? And then on the operating partner level, you know, there's it's you know for our first, you know, I can speak at least from the the work that I do, which is largely focused on this sort of regeneration agenda. So it is finding and getting to know the kind of developers in different communities that have really demonstrated that they have a capacity to think differently about the role of place in long-term value, how to kind of think about a different relationship to public and kind of community relations in partnership.

Um, I think to the work that you guys do with Grow Places, I think not just sort of seeing placemaking as sort of like a noun, like a thing that you do once and is static. Like even if you use the word placemaking, it needs to be a verb, it is always ongoing. And then in every place is also already a place. Therefore, like a place grows out of what exists, and there's a future that is kind of co-created with that existing community and history.

So we look for those developers that kind of have that in their DNA and have a track record of having done that type of work in the cities that we invest in. Great. Yeah, and thank you for saying that, Jesse. I appreciate that very much coming from you.

And um and then maybe you know, just to end, um uh a personal question for you. You know, you know, you've got a young family. You know, if you look forward to to when your children are, you know, in their uh working lives, their adult lives, whatever that might look like at the time, what are your hopes for the types of places that they live in? And you can kind of take that physically, structurally, kind of how would you imagine that being?

That's a great question. Um I mean I think the I guess uh I think the things that are really important to me are I think it's a place where where place provides freedom. It is a it is the that it is the that you you are able to kind of be and move and operate and connect and interact in the world without a sense of threat from you know being run over by a car, the threat of sort of violence, the set the the the that this is a a space of safety, but not in the sense of like a police safety.

It is a psychological safety and it is a kind of safety to exercise your freedom as who you are and you want to be. And I think that gives space for kind of democratic gathering and democratic institutions and the roles that also public space play in society from that perspective. That is in environments where you have true kind of multiplicities of people and community actors in terms of business and entrepreneurship and institutions that are part of a community life. Like it that that is the type of place that I want.

And I and I think it is, you know, is it sort of more urban or is it more natural? And I think the best places are combinations of all those things. You know, I grew up in a town that is on the, you know, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I love the mountains, I love the woods, um, I love camping.

Cities are different environments. I love New York City and I love Berlin and I love London. Um, I think finding more harmonious relationships between city and nature is something that I think we definitely need to develop as we kind of evolve. I think cities like Singapore are doing more and more creative thinking in that regard.

I think it's not just about trees, I think it's also about even attentiveness to sort of not just the kind of human life that exists, but also sort of the, you know, the other life forms that are that we are cohabitating with. So I think I want a place where that sort of sense of freedom and say kind of, you could almost say kind of multi-species kind of sensibility is is sort of supported and is kind of inhabited such that my daughter and and and my family can kind of feel that in the streets.

Jesse, thank you very much for joining me today on the Grow Places Podcast. Yeah. Yeah, it's been really fun. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Grow Places Podcast. For more information, visit growplaces.com and follow us at We Grow Places across all social channels. See you next time.