Collectively Speaking Episode 9- Mike Saunders

🎙️ Dive into the exhilarating world of urban planning with the latest episode of "Collectively Speaking"! 🌆 Join us in the heart of Chancery Lane at Sidara's offices, where the host Max Farrell engages in a riveting conversation with  Mike Saunders, the visionary founder of Commonplace.

🚀 Unveil the secrets behind Commonplace, a groundbreaking platform that's revolutionizing urban planning. This isn't your ordinary podcast – it's an adventure through the squiggly lines of Mike's unconventional career journey, from physics and philosophy to becoming an urban design trailblazer.

💡 Discover how Commonplace is not just a product; it's a service that sparks ongoing collaborations, unleashing the power of early and continuous community engagement. Imagine a tool that can transform the outcomes of projects and redefine the way people influence the future of their neighbourhoods

🌍 Explore the success story of "Park Power," a project that brought thousands of voices together to shape the future of green spaces in London. Mike shares his vision for the future, including initiatives to engage communities in discussions about brownfield sites and the potential for a nationwide database capturing sentiments about the built environment

🎯 Get ready for a rollercoaster of insights as Mike delves into the role of social impact assessments, the possibility of mandating tools like Commonplace in the planning process, and the fascinating world of being an "activator" in urban planning

🔥 This podcast isn't just an auditory experience; it's an invitation to be part of a movement that's transforming the way we shape our cities. Join the excitement, gain insider knowledge, and be inspired to become an active participant in the urban planning revolution! 

🌟 Don't miss out – hit play now and step into the future of our built environment! 🏙️✨

Find out more about the LDN Collective at
https://ldn-collective.com/

Transcript

0:04

Hello and welcome, everybody, to the latest episode of Collectively Speaking. This is a podcast series where we look at the big issues in the built environment, it's a series where we interview members, but also collaborators with the LDN Collective. And very grateful to be here at DA Group's offices in Chancery Lane recording a few different sessions here today. And this session is with somebody who I hold in the highest regard and and really have enjoyed working with immensely over the last few years. And that's Mike Saunders, who's the founder of Commonplace. And Commonplace is quite a unique thing because it's a it's a product, it's a service, but it's really about driving a sort of movement to make the built environment and urban planning something that considers more the people that it affects and how to actually have those conversations right from the very beginning and keep those conversations going to. And I can always say to people that you can tell the difference between a project that has used commonplace and a project that hasn't because the outcomes are very different. Absolutely. Delighted to be here today with Mike Saunders, who's the chief exec of Commonplace. Many people would have heard of. Some may not have as it's it's an area that is increasingly seen as critical in the built environment, which is the ability to engage with as many people as possible about the shape and form and future of their the places where they live and work and play. and commonplace were and Mike himself was one of the founding members of the LDN Collective and we've worked on some really interesting things together over the last few years and other great things happening in the pipeline. but I remember there was one train journey that we spent together where you told me a bit about your background, and I just found that fascinating because I think in some ways it resonated with me because it hasn't been the typical journey in terms of how you first got into thinking about the built environment and what you studied. So tell us a bit more about that and the squiggly lines, as it were. The squiggly lines. Okay. Well, first of all, I'm really, really delighted to be a member of the Learning Collective. It's been a fantastic opportunity for me and for us as a company. Yeah, I quite like to describe my career as a small smorgasbord because it doesn't follow any particular pattern from the outside. And I guess I don't know, where do I start? You know, I was kind of I guess I kind of grew up in a community, in a quite strong community locally. My parents were really interested in community. And so a lot of what we did was based around, you know, people who live locally around kind of supporting various different things that were going on. And I guess I felt that that was a really positive thing. You know, it was part of my childhood strong sense of community. Yeah, you can probably him a broad Sheffield account now you mention it. I was really interested in architecture at school. I was very interested in the possibility of being an architecture school. But back in the eighties, certainly in the school that I went to, which was a very good school, but it was quite kind of you were either a scientist or you were doing the arts and architecture kind of fell somewhere in the middle. And so I was I was persuaded not to think about that as a career option, but I was always kind of fascinated, I think, by, you know, how people live, how they connect the role of their neighborhood and the design process as well. But I ended up studying physics and philosophy. I'm a labor and so needed to be a balance and went on to work in a bank. So I kind of took the first job that was offered to me and was trained as a software engineer for a couple of years, which was a fantastic grounding. But I decided fairly quickly that I didn't want to work in finance and left that to do an Emma, an interactive design, what was called interactive design, which was really early days of the Internet, sort of working out how this Wild West was going to develop and you know, what you can do with it as a medium and how people communicate on it and all that sort of stuff, which was totally fascinating and, you know, really blew my minds by that because it was something that I've never really encountered before. This idea of a network that extended globally and, you know, was chaotic and could allow people to communicate, peer to peer and all these brilliant things finished. Emma And then again, weirdly and without any sort of pre thought on my part, became an entrepreneur and started my own business, which was a web agency which we ran for about eight years and grew gradually and eventually sold. And we kind of focused on what ended up being, I guess, crowdsource saying, using the Internet as a way of getting lots of people to interact together in different ways. A lot of it was around education, so we did, you know, what it would be called Now, something like citizen science, lots of work with schools. And once I sold that company, I, I decided this was something I really wanted to try and find a way of pursuing, which I then did through some work in broadcast, through working in government, through working for some of the software companies, and then finally landed up in a really interesting role with a scientific and education institution where I was doing lots of the citizen science stuff. But I was also responsible for some of the communications things. And at a point about three and a half years into that job, I think I was asked if I would take care of this urban what was essentially an urban design project, because it required this organization, which was also a landowner, to interact with the community about a scheme that they would think you're building, which wasn't a particularly big or complicated scheme at all. So I was thrown into this world which I'd never encountered, never had really any experience of, and was forced to try very quickly to learn the language, to understand the process, to try and work how on earth I was going to do to make this project work and ended up really, really messed me up, quite frankly. Like, like all great physicists start with like experiments that often go wrong. And, And it was quite painful for me personally. And it was, you know, it caused some problems for the organization as well. And it came to me kind of during that process or soon after that. There was something really interesting in that mistake, which was that if I'd had some sort of information and better understanding, better way of knowing the community that it was trying to interact with, I would have had at least a kind of good chance of having making a better stab at it and perhaps it being a bit less painful and a bit. Right. So it was really interesting and that's how common place was born was was out of that, how the idea was born. Yeah. In the first place. I mean, it took several years after that for it to become anything that was recognizable. But you recognize the need at that point. And then that's what started on the journey towards creating a platform that can be relied upon. Yeah, who heard or been told about that, right? Well, I have. I haven't seen that. Mike have to go and watch it. I can tell you one thing. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure I did, too. But that was interesting because that was around the time that we published the final review, 1010 or ten or 11 years ago when we started it 11 years ago. And I remember one of our main conclusions and recommendations was that we need to be engaging with people in different ways and using technology to help do that. But at the time there weren't any really established sort of platforms or organizations that you could work with to do that. But so it's something that really has transformed in the last ten years in the sense that it's now seen as something that is not nice to have. It's becoming more of an essential tool for for urban planning, urban design, architecture at different scales. and so I think it's quite an interesting time to be talking to about this because obviously there's a lot's happened in the last ten years, but as I'm sure you'll agree, there still quite a long way to go. And I don't know whether you know, but before I got into architecture and work for Pharrell's, which was, you know, 11, 12 years ago, I work for electoral reform Services. Yeah. And one of the projects I worked on and it's just reminded me when you were talking then one of the one of the projects that I was asked to sort of take a lead role on in terms of the management, not not the sort of programing side that I do that. But was the shift from physical voting with ballot papers to online voting? And it sounds like quite a straightforward, simple thing, but it was hugely complicated, not least because of the issues around trust. And it was particularly when it's something like a vote and your own, you know, being part of a Democratic process. You know, there's kind of the technical side wasn't hard hardware, it was actually people's emotions around it and the desire to stick to having a piece of paper that you can do across on over, you know, a four digit code which, which, which you know, was at the time. It was it was it was very challenging. But obviously now it's very commonplace, excuse the pun. But I mean, there's still there's issues, isn't there, around trust and around whether or not they believe that taking part in these types of things will change anything as well. You know, how how do you sort of make sure that you're tackling the human emotional side at the same time as the sort of technical side of what you do? Wow. I think I think the answer is that you the the human emotion side and particularly this issue around trust has to come first in every instance. And, you know, sometimes that means the digital isn't the right tool on its own. And in fact, it always means that it's not the right tool on its own. Every single project's, I think the common has been involved and maybe one or two has had a whole mix of different approaches and different tools that have been used to engage people and understanding who is potentially going to take part, what their kind of their thoughts and sometimes their kind of baggage is relating to it, you know, because in many cases the projects have had a previous set of kind of phases or interactions. So you have to, you know, always starting from a blank piece of paper, as it were, with the community. So you're often having to come in and work out what's what's up and where the community is. So it's a very, very complex situation. Every and every situation, every project is different. But you more more often than not, you do find that people that wouldn't have otherwise got involved do because they have the ability to to go online, use their phone or their laptop when you know, they might not have the time to turn up at a town hall on a Wednesday afternoon, which, you know, not everyone does. That's right. Yeah. I mean, digital provides a completely different way of interacting that can be extremely time efficient. It can feel completely different. I mean, you know, doing something on your phone when you're sitting on the set or when you're on the bus on the way to work is a completely different experience from showing up to a town hall meeting. And in some ways it's not good. And in other ways it's much better. But it can have the effects of lowering the barriers significantly, and particularly for certain types of people. So, you know, for people who are time poor, particularly younger people sometimes who don't see it as that kind of environment, to go along to these meetings or maybe feel a bit anxious about going along to those kind of meetings. But I really bought into where they live and really want to have an influence in what's going on. And it's the younger generation that are most affected by things like the housing crisis and the climate crisis. So in many ways they're the people we need to be reaching out to. If we're going to of help address those big, big issues. Yeah, they I mean, the the future custodians of every place. And, you know, one of the things I'm really interested in with commonplace is the idea that the problems and challenges that face places on their communities have to be, I think, dealt with from the bottom up as well as the top down. I don't you can't just do the bottom up. But I think if you're if you're missing the bottom up, it's really difficult to make a meaningful change happen that actually benefits the majority of people who are living in a Interesting. And one of the most sort of memorable and most enjoyable projects I've worked on since we set up, you know, the collective was part power, and that came about initially from a conversation between the two of us around how do you engage people more broadly about the built environment, the places that they live or work that isn't necessarily linked to a particular site or a particular planning application? And actually that was one of the things that came out of the final review when we did it ten years ago, was this idea of having rather than having design reviews of a project and a scheme is what we then call place reviews where you're having much broader conversations with what might be missing from a place or what what parts of the public realm might really affect people's daily lives that that don't often get talked about, You know, and we focus on parks and green spaces and and that was just a really interesting sort of journey because, you know, we had to create a map of London essentially, that people could then drop a pin on, talk about their own park or where they might want to have a park, where in the more post-industrial areas, and then answer questions about all sorts of different aspects of planning and design and green spaces. and you know, we managed to get, I think it was 3500 people to take part in a space for a month, not least because we did a lot on social media. which I found fascinating because it was actually one of those sort of targeted social media which was for social good, rather than trying to influence people to vote in a certain way. It was, you know, if you live in Clapham, then you'd be asked on social media what you think about Clapham Common and I thought that was incredible. It was a real eye opener. But how do you see moving forwards? How are you engaging with people more broadly, maybe even outside London on the the future of the built environment about urban regeneration? Do you see that there's other sort of other thought leadership projects that commonplace can get behind that influences things? Yes. Is this your answer? I mean, Pop house, fantastic projects. We really, really enjoyed being part of it. And I think, as you say, that the opportunity that was created by thinking about providing this kind of engagement theme that wasn't related to any specific project, so it wasn't commissioned, if you like, by a developer or a local authority or another organization who is, you know, developing or catalyzing change. It was just trying to get a sense of what people in London thought about their green spaces. And then there was a whole fantastic set of activities and and outputs that came from that. And by the way, I think that was a fantastic example of how the London Collective works really, really well together. Yeah, it, it clicked into place and. Yeah, yeah, it really, really did play. So, you know, in terms of going forward, there's a whole bunch of different themes and topics and so on that we would love to take a similar approach with the one that we're thinking about quite hard at the moment is Brownfield sites. And you know, there are several thousand I think there's actually about somewhere between 20 and 30,000 brownfield sites around the UK. So these are sites that have previously been used or developed in some way. And each of those sites is in a community of some sort. Some of them are more developed. You know, some of them have planning permission, some of them don't. But we're thinking about whether there is a way for commonplace to be deployed to allow people to talk about the brownfield sites close to them on the basis that they, as communities are going to have a lot of interest in what is developed and how it's developed on those sites going forward. Well, that sounds brilliant. I mean, in many ways we had a session with Natasha Reed earlier, who's an expert in social impact, as you know, and one of the things she was saying was that there is enough sort of data and understanding of people's sentiments about the built environment in the same way that there is readily available evidence when it comes to the environmental issues, the social issues, there isn't enough for people to really understand in a granular way about each each street, each community and what they think and what they want and their hopes and dreams and how the built environment regeneration can help facilitate some of that. So I suppose what you're talking about is almost having a sort of national database that gives that sort of sort of barometer of, of of feeling about change in the built environment, which I imagine from an investor or developer point of view would be very helpful to before, you know, they commit to billions of pounds on a planning application, sort of understanding the law of the land as it were. Is that is that something, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that kind of packages up quite neatly. What we try to do as an organization. We try to bring together developers level authorities of that kind of change makers with the community and actually provide a bit of glue for them to have a collaboration that may be without the sorts of data that we can help collect is much more difficult because you've already got a lot of people already kind of on on that level of data, so we've got close to 3 million data points around the UK. So we already have, you know, mainly in large towns and cities, quite a good understanding in some places. So, you know, in certain boroughs in London we've got a really, really good understanding can actually look at how people from one war to the next ward are thinking about green issues or about safety, for example. And we'd love to be able to extend our ability to do that more broadly. And I think I mean, back to what you were talking about a little while ago, commonplace doesn't commonplace isn't a Democratic tool in any formal sense. You know, we're not being commissioned to be part of any elections, but as part of a kind of broader conversation that I definitely see as part of the Democratic process, I think it's really, really important and valuable, and I think it's a slightly different way of having those conversations, which I would love to see kind of developed and extended in the Could can you see a scenario where it's almost mandated, like to have something like, a commonplace or that type of a social impact assessment because, you know, we have environmental impact assessments as statutory requirements in a planning application, but, but not social impact. And yet it's something that's talked about in the same way, you know, big discussions these days around ESG and and it but it's there is, isn't it in ESG which is often misunderstood or not properly kind of considered. Yeah yeah. I mean a lot of what we do now we see as being part of that of the ESG, and that means really helping extend the conversation from what is still the majority of our work, which is pre-planning, consultation. But increasingly we're seeing commonplace being used beyond the planning kind of microcosm, if you can call it that, and being used for post occupancy evaluation, for understanding behaviors around energy consumption for a whole range of different things that when you put them all together, is very much, I think the s the kind of social impact, social understanding of social value and that I would love to be a kind of accelerating part of what we do going forward. Back to your question about whether that could become statutory, I think as part of the planning process and I've been, you know, whenever I'm asked, suggesting that there should be more teeth to what's included in the planning legislation about what is expected, what are the what are the actual expectations in terms of engagement. And I think it would really help if the bar was set a bit higher for those. Whether you can mandate that more broadly outside of the planning process to have social impact assessments would be fascinating to think about, it. What wouldn't? Yeah, and good timing, I suppose to be trying to influence politicians, different parties. Can we go to a general election and a mayoral election in London next year? So, you know, this is a good time to be calling for more structural changes in terms of how we ask people to think about these things as a as a matter of course. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the politician does have to make the decisions on these things. And as you say, there's a there's a window of opportunity as they're currently thinking about their manifestos. And then as they get into the rolls and start working out what they're actually going to do, Okay. Mike So this might now sound a bit like we're playing a party game, but it's a question that I often find is very revealing about people that particularly who work in our, in our industry. So if you had to choose between how you describe yourself and the choice was between being an agitator, an act of voter, an ambassador or a protector, or some combination of those things, what would you choose? How would you describe yourself? So I'm definitely an activator of the kind of top of the pile I my personal kind of approach to management, for example, is very much hiring people, you know, trying to hire people who are smarter than me and then trying to get out of the way for them to be able to perform. I like and enjoy seeing people develop and giving them given giving the new opportunities. It's one of the joys of running a company is being able to do that. And commonplace is, you know, I see as an activation tool. It's something that gives people a platform, a way of speaking of having influence that perhaps they didn't have before, and to the end of having a collaboration that can actually make a change. So both personally and in terms of what commonplace as a company does, I definitely see myself as an activator in terms of being an agitator. I think in working in the areas that we do, some of which are quite controversial, some of the some of the topics of consultation are quite controversial. We do become an agitator not because we're trying to be agents of agitation. Yeah, it's, it's weird. And sometimes I find it quite hard to understand, but sometimes we're I guess we're kind of mistaken as the platform that's providing the opportunity to talk for the organizations who are actually trying to drive the change. So we quite we quite frequently get accused of being biased of pushing certain agendas, and we try really hard to be completely neutral and independent well, it's that classic don't shoot the messenger type situation, isn't it? Because ultimately you're carrying a conduit for channeling people's views, which if you don't like it, then at least you know that this is what exists and it's something you have to react to one way or the other. it's, there's a worse scenario which is not knowing in the first place, isn't it? And I think where we agitate a little bit over and above that so in a slightly different way is that there hasn't always been a way of having these conversations is quite actually quite open. So one of the things that is slightly, slightly different about context is the most of the conversations, not all of them, but most conversations are commonplace, are quite open. And that's a bit of agitation, I think, to the way that these processes have often been run. And it's, I think, very beneficial because it gets more people involved and it generates more trust. But it's definitely a slightly different way of looking at things. It is, yeah. I often think the commonplace occupies is interesting territory, which is because there's other sort of software platforms, if you like, that are just that they are a piece of software. You buy a license, you might speak to someone when you buy the license, but you'll never speak to them again because you get trained on it and on off you go. But I think commonplace for me is and also this is interesting about the culture of the team that you built and the service that you provide is it's a sort of ongoing relationship that is like a consultancy in many ways because, you know, more often than not, the people that are using it need to be able to adapt to each situation, but also sort of feed back what they've learned and improve, you know, the product ultimately. But it's much more than just a product that's being sold, isn't it? It's I know I often that's why I often include you in teams that we put forward when we're bidding for things is you're kind of part of the team rather than something that you buy off the shelf, as it were. It was something that you, we consciously set about to do or something that surprised you about commonplace. think it's I'd describe it as a service. So it does have a product at the core of it, but the the way it's used, the way it's consumed is very much as a service. And that service includes, you know, the support and as you say, the kind of bits of the service which are recommendations and suggestions and reviews and so on to make sure that everybody who uses it is getting the best possible experience out of it. Was it something unplanned? No, in the sense that I sat down and thought, that's is going to have to work like that. But it has become you know, it quite quickly became evident that that was the way that it would have to work in order for it to be successful. And so, you know, the people who work for commonplace are passionate about the kind of projects, the kind of customers we work with, the communities we work with, the the kind of outcomes that we're striving to achieve. Well, that was absolutely brilliant, Mike. Thank you so much. And I've learned a lot in the last sort of half an hour or so, even though we've known each other and work so closely. That's something I find really interesting about doing these podcasts is you do really sort of get under the skin and it's brilliant to to be working with you. Mike and I look forward to carrying on, working with you and doing even more interesting and exciting things in the future. And good luck to you and commonplace. And I know that it's something that you're at the very forefront of, and that's a nice position to be in, but it's also quite challenging and and, and always not the easiest position to be in either as a trailblazer. So, you know, congratulations on what you do and really looking forward to carrying on working in the future. Thanks, Max. It's as I say, it's been a joy and a privilege to be part of the Learning Collective, and we're looking forward to seeing what we can do next.