“Time Square is one of the great success stories in what pedestrianisation can look like in terms of income for businesses around there, for it becoming a thriving tourist destination and the knock on effect in terms of value of property around there which, again, is ballpark but I think the value of property in and around Time Square went up three four, 34% following the pedestrianisation.”
Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome Arthur Kay. Arthur is an entrepreneur and advisors to organisations building solutions for sustainable cities. He is the founder of several urban design and technology companies including the clean technology company, Bio-bean, the design, technology and development company, Skyroom and the £100 million Key Worker Homes Fund. Arthur is an advisor to organisations including Innovo Group and serves as a board member for Transport for London, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Museum of the Home and Fast Forward 2030. In addition, Arthur holds academic appointments as associate professor at UCL Institute for global prosperity. He has lectured on urban design at MIT, NYU, LSE and Imperial College London. Arthur is co-author of the book ‘Roadkill – Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars’, with Professor Dame Henrietta Moore. Arthur’s work building solutions for sustainable cities has been recognised by the UN as a sustainable development goals pioneer, by The Guardian as sustainable business leader of the year, MIT Technology Review as a 35 under 35 and Forbes as an All Star 30 under 30. His words and work have appeared in many publications. Arthur studied architecture at UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and entrepreneurship at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
So now we’re going to hear from Arthur Kay about his role as an entrepreneur and as an advisor to many organisations involved in building solutions for sustainable cities. And of course we’ll be talking about his new book, ‘Roadkill’, discussing our dependence on the car. Arthur, good morning, it was really good to see you on the, uh, London Real Estate Forum Panel last week. I believe that you are now in New York for Climate Week?
Arthur Kay
Well it’s great to see you Susan and thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
Susan Freeman
It’s a pleasure and there’s a lot to talk about. It did occur to me that you are in New York, it’s Climate Week and, um, we have President Trump calling climate change the greatest con job. So I just wondered how it was all going?
Arthur Kay
Yes it’s a pretty interesting time to be here and certainly there’s a lot of debates amongst the, uh, or kind of a lot of eye rolling let’s say, amongst the kind of Climate Week attendees. I’m with some friends from, who work at the United Nations Secretariat last night and I think a lot of them are also kind of fearing for their jobs in the very near future as well, um, looking by the fact that there’s likely to be a big funding cut to the UN. So it’s an interesting time let’s say.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, you can say that again. So, let’s start by you perhaps telling us a little bit about your, your early life and journey, where you grew up, what first drew you to architecture and urban design. Where did it all start?
Arthur Kay
So for me it started in London, I grew up in Camberwell in South East London and had been a Londoner all my life and I’ve always been, I think one of the only things I was actually any good at school was drawing, so I’ve always sketched and drawn and really loved that process. I had a really amazing art teacher at my school, Glenn Smart who’s still a good friend and he was kind of a great mentor and support for me when I was a very naughty, 6, 7, 8, 9 year old. So that was kind of my starting point and then I think when I was about 4 or 5, well really young, I was going to marry my best friend, Archie who actually now lives here in New York and I drew a floor plan of a gypsy caravan that we were going to live in together. And so that was really kind of my first floor plan and kind of interest in getting into, into that and I didn’t marry Archie sadly, he’s now married to a lovely, lovely person living out here in New York but, um, you know what could have been.
Susan Freeman
Yes, well that’s a very, very early start. So just looking at your career to date, would you say there is, there is any main theme. I mean, we will talk a little bit about the start-ups in a minute?
Arthur Kay
Yeah so my career as a kind of seedy
Susan Freeman
How old were you when you, um, when you actually started your practice?
Arthur Kay
Yeah so my career as a kind of CV looks completely bonkers. I mean I, I studied architecture, I then set up and founded, scaled and sold a renewable energy company making bio fuels and bio chemicals from used coffee grounds. I then went on to set up a company that builds new buildings in the airspace above existing buildings – it’s called Skyroom and then today I do a number of board roles ranging from the board of the Royal Academy of Engineering to the board of Transport for London to the board of the Museum of the Home and teaching at University College London. To your question on what’s the kind of common thread between them and this may be a bit of reverse engineering from me but I’ve always been really interested in kind of cities and how cities work which is why I got interested in studying architecture in the first place and I see them more as vehicles through which to make a city function better, to make it more liveable for people, to make them richer places, to make them happier places, to make them cleaner places, to make them more friendly places, to make them in my view, a good thing is incrementally denser places and all of these seemingly very desperate threads in my mind connect around how we make urban life fantastic. The way that kind of a, you know, Victorian education system and the way universities and school is set up is that you segment everything into different professions and different academic disciplines. So, you know, you have anthropology, you have architecture, you have graphic design, you have finance, you have what… you know accounting, whatever it happens to be and I kind of look at it from a slightly different perspective is that you need all of these things to make cities amazing and you kind of reverse engineer that and so the vehicles happen to be, you know, board roles at the moment, start-ups in the past, teaching and alongside that I run a Think Tank with a professor at UCL around how to help early stage start-ups with a social and environmental impact and then most recently I’ve got my book out which is also a vehicle for an idea but, you know, why not a start-up for that, why not… so there’s no particular rhyme or reason as to what the piece is, it’s around how we can tell a story and kind of try and make that incremental change to make cities better.
Susan Freeman
Yes so you’re a real renaissance man actually.
Arthur Kay
I am not sure about that but, uh, definitely kind of have a wide array of interests that’s for sure.
Susan Freeman
And was there any particular moment when you decided it was time to move beyond the sort of architect designer role into this sort of wider area?
Arthur Kay
I am not sure exactly when it was but it was, sorry I started architecture at University College London and the Bartlett School and it was in one of the lectures we had where it was… because I always had this idea the kind of the architecture’s master builder, kind of when you’re growing up if you are interested in this you typically see who designed the building but, you know, the world that you operate in Susan in terms of you know as well as I do that it’s often actually the architect is doing some elements but they’re a relatively small cost line amongst a whole array of incredible disciplines ranging from people like yourself, like lawyers through to, you know, structural engineers through to façade engineers through to the developers themselves, the banks and it was discovering how low in that food chain in some ways that the architect was. Like especially in a city like London you have a planning envelope that’s so well established already that an architect is not going to be materially breaking that. You have your cost plan which is set out by QS’s, you have your, obviously your, your use which is defined both by the developer and also by the Local Authority and it was understanding how un-influential in a way that the architect is, obviously I am not speaking for everyone and I think it’s a bit of a crisis of the profession that it’s let and I know the RIBA has worries about this and talked a lot about the profession has narrowed from the master builders of old who were really handling all of those elements or a very large portion of those elements and how throughout the course of the 20th century that has been narrowed to now an incredibly thin slither of the cost plan.
Susan Freeman
And it’s interesting actually looking at the, uh, NLA recent Built Environment report which really, you know, for the first time is trying to bring together all the professions and everybody involved in the built environment to show that it is actually one sector.
Arthur Kay
Completely and I think, you know, Nick’s work at the NLA in terms of championing that and it’s a bit of misnomer now calling it New London Architecture, I think maybe there’s going to be a re-brand in the coming years in terms of that but being able to talk as a, a single voice in a single sector and I was amazed and shocked to hear how it’s, you know, what twice the size of the financial services sector which is kind of assuming there’s the kind of the darling of the, of a, the treasury and one of our real success stories globally and so I thin… that, that ability to talk with one voice and to truly collaborate and talk in terms of, I mean, I’m interested in, in cities as the tier before that but it could equally be the built environment of the built world as a way to talk about that. And all the amazing disciplines and professions in richness that sits within that, um, that ecosystem and the millions of people it employs throughout the UK.
Susan Freeman
The question is how we get people to see it as a sort of growth sector in its own right because it’s not really seen as a sort of cohesive sector at the moment?
Arthur Kay
Completely and I think, I think stuff like what you’re doing with the podcasts is a big step towards that because I think it is storytelling which is being answered but we are also our worst enemy because a lot of this has been our own fault in terms of that storytelling, there has not been a kind of central, there’s been obviously things like the British Property Federation and different kinds of property life asset, you know, lobbying groups and interest groups and that sort of thing but that’s often talking about from the perspective of land owners and house builders rather than necessarily the skills and services that go alongside with that. So then the ability to, to step back, that is, why would it be that, you know, banking in, you know, large parts of, of lending is around mortgages, i.e. property assets and also around the development process in arranging different forms so there is no reason that we should be folding large portions of finance into the ultimate end point which is an amazing built environment. And I think it’s, it’s a disservice to the people who work in the industry but, but by the fact that there aren’t people out there telling that story in a really clear way to central Government and to Treasury, saying what you’re doing, what Nick’s doing, what Peter Murray’s doing are all kind of working towards that kind of narrative that hopefully over the coming years will cut through. I will be very surprised if we see anything material in the, uh, in the upcoming budget in November, um, but you never know.
Susan Freeman
So, you mentioned the Bio-Bean Company which, I mean, it seems such a simple idea. It seems that you took used coffee grounds and are able to convert them into all sorts of useful things. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about that?
Arthur Kay
Yes so this is an idea that I came up with whilst I was at university studying architecture so most of my, my friends and peers there were thought I was a pretty weird guy to go off and pursue this rather than become an architect in one of the top firms in the UK. So the idea very simply was taking used coffee grounds and it’s not as niche as it sounds, there’s about 500,000 tonnes of used coffee grounds produced in the UK alone, 34 million tonnes of coffee waste produced, you know, throughout the supply chain, produce globally. So this is actually a pretty chunky issue and what we were really looking at was how we could use a circular common business model to upcycle or, you know, valorise to use some jargon, um, these coffee grounds. So think of it almost as a, if you didn’t get it coming from an economic perspective, at the moment or before Bio-Bean came along you’d be paying if you are a café or a producer of instant coffee like Nescafe, you’d be paying around 100 tonnes to get rid of your coffee. So you think of it as in your kind of minus 100 as your cost to get rid of and what we are interested in is how we could turn that into so it was both economically valuable, so can we turn that minus 100 into plus 100 or even plus 1,000 and also environmentally impactful. So coffee when it degrades it produces methane which is a very potent greenhouse gas, about twenty seven times more potent than CO2 and so if you can actually use that in different forms you can, you know, have a positive economic and environmental impact. And that was really our kind of theory of change with it and what we did was we built a, a factory in Alconbury Weald in Cambridgeshire which can process about 50,000 tonnes a year, so like 10% of the UK’s coffee waste and partner with some of the big retail coffee chains but also instant coffee manufacturers to do that and the products we were making were some that maybe one or two of our listeners may have come across, so our only consumer facing product was called ‘Coffee Logs’. There were our bit what they say on the tin, they’re fuel logs that can used as a, we argued, a better alternative to wood because they’re less expensive, higher energy density. So burn hotter and for longer and also had a positive environmental impact, um, and then we also made high value bio chemicals, so flavours, fragrances, extracted caffeine and very other things from it like that.
Susan Freeman
What gave you the idea because it is such a good idea, something must have, must have triggered it?
Arthur Kay
It was very random, I was, we had had a study trip to Istanbul and for whatever reason I decided to design a coffee shop and coffee factory as part of that and then I was looking around about some of the waste streams that come from that. So I, you know, as I think a lot of people are, the only time you actually deal with coffee grounds is if you drink a cafetiere or the Nespresso pods or something like that, there’s a relatively small amount per cup at home down the drain. But we are interested in the, I guess the retail waste and the sheer volumes of used coffee grounds that were produced by a coffee shop was really the kind of first insight. And then our first bit of funding was, and actually took me on the path for that was being one of the winners of something called the Mayor’s Low Carbon Entrepreneur Prize, backed when I was at university, by the then Mayor, Boris Johnson and the grant was £3,300 which at the time was, you know, I was as rich as Croesus and, uh, thought this was enough to go and set up a, a company. So what I always say, when I do as I mentioned a bit of teaching at UCL, and run this Think Tank with Professor Henrietta Moore at the moment, where we work with a lot of really early stage entrepreneurs who are kind of their early stages setting up their companies and they are always saying, I can’t get going, I need to raise £200,000 or a million pounds or two million pounds because I can’t get going and I always use this as a starting point saying you can, you can beg, borrow and steal and with £3,300 you can actually build a pretty substantial business, you know, obviously over time growing up.
Susan Freeman
That is a great story and did you sell the business?
Arthur Kay
Yeah it’s got taken over by a company called Envar, um, who now operate it and, and use less of the bio chemical stuff but more the solid fuels and they use some of the additional use coffee grounds as compost as well so it goes, mixing in with some of their compost products.
Susan Freeman
And then the next company was Skyroom and it is obviously entirely different from Bio-Bean so again, how did you come up with the, the idea and perhaps, you know, tell our listeners a little bit about how it works?
Arthur Kay
So Skyroom was a company that was seeking to build new buildings in the air space above existing buildings. So we were working and specifically with a focus on building sustainable homes and those terms, the end term being for keyworkers and so we set out in 2018, we wrote a white paper with my co-academic appointment at UCL and we were lucky enough to collaborate with the late Lord Richard Rogers on that, who was a big supporter of the idea, I mean a lot of his work, in particular his Reith lectures from the 90s and his ideas around the compact city have been incredibly influential to me and my work in terms of how you can make cities denser and in doing so more liveable and particularly we will come on to talk about cars later I am sure but, uh, in particular his cantankerous comment that cars have done more than anything to destroy quality of life in cities, which I, which I quite like. But, you know, our projects were mainly in inner London, ultimately the business hasn’t continued mainly because after Building Safety Acts and some of the really important legislation I was brought to around that but that eventually made the, the business model not long-term viable at the scale we wanted mainly because without going into the technical detail - I am sure some of your, many of your listeners I am sure will be all across - but without going into the technical detail when you extend the height of a building and especially when you go through certain thresholds of height, the whole categorisation of that building becomes end code compliant as of 2025 and so that basically meant what we’re trying to do you could still do it but it meant that economics were so out of kilter with what we were looking at and in particular with the, the macro economic environment in terms of, I know you talk on your podcast and public about some of the challenges of bringing forward new projects anyway even when they are relatively conventional ground up projects, imagine doing that then with the complexity of above an existing building which is typically occupied working with a whole range of stakeholders. So in terms of the kind of the risk profile it was definitely at the higher risk lower return end of the spectrum and kind of decided to pursue other things.
Susan Freeman
Now I wondered, I wondered about the Building Safety Act but I mean the idea of just adding additional storeys just to have similar higher densities which would make us more like Paris, just seemed such a good idea so hopefully we will find a way of doing it in the future?
Arthur Kay
I am sure we will, I mean it’s one of those things which, whether Skyroom was the right vehicle in which to deliver it or was this the right time or place to deliver it I think remains to be seen but in terms of the I guess, the core insight around how can you make cities incrementally denser and again, this is well known to many of your listeners but in the public imagination, people often assume that density means large skyscrapers with dead space around them and then a massive tower. But as, as we know, and again which Richard Rogers kind of evidenced very, very well, um, some of the denser and most desirable places to live in the world are places like Pimlico, places like Notting Hill, places like central Paris, places like Barcelona and they typically have what we would call mid-rise or kind of mid-level density. So maybe it’s five to eight storeys or, you know, four to eight storeys, this kind of level of density which actually makes a really nice urban green. And some of the challenge around what we see in terms of how cities have sprawled particularly since the invention of the car, is around how you can then knit together some of those less denser and less successful neighbourhoods by making them incrementally denser. Obviously there are different typologies and ways to do that. There is a really interesting book called the, the Sprawl Repair Manual which is very specifically for a, a US audience but it’s looking at how we can kind of knit together sprawling communities and everything from infills to repurposing car parks to airspace development and everything in between.
Susan Freeman
Sounds interesting, I will have to have a look at that. And so did you carry on with the keyworker homes fund or did that go?
Arthur Kay
Yeah so we, we raised a 100 million pound keyworker homes fund which was to work with Local Authorities and Housing Associations to accelerate the delivery of their programme. So very crudely we were looking at SBV joint venture type mechanisms where the Local Authority or Housing Association will put in land or in this case, air space and we’d then put in equity and debt on top of that to then bring forward that housing. And it was, we raised it roughly at a time that some of this legislation was coming through and so we had a very, uh, let’s say, frustrating situation that we’d raised 100 million equity which then could obviously be leveraged in terms of debt and land so the actual how you then leveraged that up, that, you know, easily getting up to half a billion in terms of what you can actually deliver but had the very frustrating situation of talking to our LPs and returning every penny of that capital and not spending it. So it was a frustrating situation particularly at a time where London urgently needs more housing, um, I think there’s a long way to go still in terms of some of that legislation is unpicked and really builds a confidence again in terms of getting people building again and also getting building in more innovative and kind of sustainable ways rather than sprawling out on to the greenbelt and building on greenfield and brownfield sites kind of suburban type homes, I strongly don’t think is the, the way forward so how, how we can get our cities incrementally denser is something I am really, really interested in.
Susan Freeman
Yeah well I am confident Arthur you will find a way to work round the legislation. So let’s talk about the book. You have just published ‘Road Kill: Unveiling our Toxic Relationship with Cars’, you co-authored it with Dame Henrietta Moore who you mentioned earlier. I mean it’s a fascinating read with some incredibly alarming statistics on the number of people killed by cars and, um, how, how the car is responsible for blighting our urban life. So what motivated you to write the book and do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about some of the key statistics?
Arthur Kay
Yeah thank you Susan. The starting point was really, you know, that anecdote around people standing in a room blindfolded and touching an elephant and there is someone at the front who’s kind of stroking the tusks and saying, well it’s kind of smooth and kind of glossy and hard and then someone said, the bum and holding the elephant’s tail and it’s kind of bristly, it feels like a, a loo brush or something like this and someone’s on the side and is stroking the side and it’s all kind of bumpy and gnarly and this kind of thing and I felt like this around cars. I mean, I read a lot around this space, around urbanism, around both economic viability in terms of how some kind of urban economists and geographers through to environmental sustainability through to my background in architecture and urban design and I kind of felt that everyone was describing a similar kind of thing but with a different angle and asides from a few people like Richard Rogers, most people were too nervous to say, and by the way a large part of this started, you know, after the end of the Second World War and with the rise of the car, industrial complex and expansion of that model of urbanism. So we kind of felt that there were a lot of things telling parts of the story but no one had really told that full story in terms of what is our relationship with cars and how did it come to pass was I guess the first piece. And then the second was, when people were talking about those really important things like number of deaths or like environmental sustainability or like the economic impacts, they were usually with a pretty, I mean these are really grown up academics doing some very technical work around road safety for example. There was a book that came out recently which is ‘I was Killed by a Traffic Engineer’. For example, this was written, a really interesting piece of work focussed on deaths on the road in terms of traffic engineering but again nobody had in our view tied that all together and the reason I was so excited to write it with Professor Dame Henrietta Moore, is that she’s from a completely different discipline. She is a philosopher and anthropologist and these are two words that in the technocratic world of urban design and transport engineering, you just do not hear. The idea of having a philosopher coming to talk to a bunch of transport engineers would kind of blow the mind of a lot of people and so, but what she’s brought to the, the table is just this really rich and you have a chance to have a look at the book but, but the really rich kind of philosophical underpinning of that, I mean I am so not qualified to talk about Kantian philosophy by any stretch or to do so in a way that’s even vaguely lucid or coherent or anything like that. But what she’s able to do is bring that together in a really readable and coherent way and tie that in to some of these big, these kind of more technical ideas around urban design and things and we used the car as a vehicle to discuss a whole bunch of quite meaty issues about how we can live better together in cities. So in the same way that there are some, I think some interesting books on housing do a similar thing like they kind of use the house or the home as a way to then discuss broader impacts of, again some philosophical impacts but also cost of living crisis. Also what is the life and these sort of quote – meaty – quote, quite deep questions about how we can live better together and what Henrietta’s brought is that incredible vein of, which I could never have done or even come close to doing myself.
Susan Freeman
I was shocked when I started reading the book and I, I looked at the figures you give for deaths as a result of cars and it seemed to be, I mean how many, how many million? It was, I mean, and equivalent to the number of people killed in the First and Second World War?
Arthur Kay
I mean the numbers are mind boggling and especially what we’re really interested, yeah as you say, I mean the car has directly killed more people than World War 1 and World War 2 combined. Let alone then the indirect deaths and then the early deaths. So indirect deaths would be things like if you’re seriously injured and then your life is shortened from that or if you, if your quality of life is diminished to air quality and you develop a, a heart disease or an asthma from it and shortening of life from that. But what we were really interested in was this, why we call it the toxic relationship and we are kind of intentionally playing on this relationship with someone or something that you both love and hate and it’s not necessarily good for you but you are tied into it with what we call car dependency and to be totally clear, we’re not saying cars are universally bad, we’re not saying that cars are if you live in a sort of urban or rural area, that you need a car of course, the car has been a huge boost for quality of life for many millions of people around the world and also provided accessibility to people who would otherwise be very cut off from society. We’re very narrowly focussed on the role of the car in the city. Which may sound quite niche but actually there’s one billion cars in our cities around the world and depending on what happens over the next area of development in some of the big mega cities in the global south, that could double very, very, very quickly and if you read the business plans and shareholder reports of every big car company, they basically say our three opportunities are electrification, move over to autonomous vehicles and autonomous cars and number three, sell to the emerging middle classes in the global south and places like Culcutter or Shenzhen or Lagos.
Susan Freeman
Yes so you’ve got to save the global south cities from going the same way. But in the book you challenge a number of common narratives around cars and the one that quite surprised me was electric vehicles because we all think that, um, you know by driving around in an electric cars we’re solving the problem but you describe it as a bit of a red herring?
Arthur Kay
Yeah so we think that, we wrote two chapters on this in the book in terms of electric cars and in terms of autonomous cars and I think both are huge red herrings. I mean to look at electric cars first. To be totally clear they are incrementally from a carbon perspective depending on the model, they pay off from a carbon perspective after you’ve driven about ten to twenty thousand kilometres. So they use more carbon upfront but then after you’ve driven ten to twenty thousand kilometres you are typically in the back in the black in terms of a net positive compared to a, internal combustion engine car. The big issue that we have with this is that it’s, we think it’s a massive sleight of hand of the industry to say, by the way the issue is not cars, the issue is what happens to be fuelling your car and all you need to do is swap oil for power, for electricity and we’re all good again yeah. And we are saying, absolutely not. The issue is actually the gross tonnage of car in the world and some of the big, you know, lies or, or sleights of hand of the industry have been things like no tailpipe emissions or zero tailpipe emissions which is technically true, there are no tailpipe emissions. However, I saw amazing research and very, very detailed research out of Imperial College London has shown that actually the tailpipe emissions from a car are around 33.0% of the total emissions created by that vehicle in terms of urban air quality. So the other things, which again I was completely blown away from, so 60-70% depending on the model are from things like dust from the road and from things like tyre wear, and things like brake pad wear, things like all the other things around it which create both you 60-70% of it and also much more potent types of particles as well which are more damaging to humans. And so the idea of saying no tailpipe, zero tailpipe emissions is technically true but narrowly true in the sense to what, if we are being honest about it, what you and I are interested in when we walk along the road is, are we going to get air pollution into our lungs, not does it happen to this part of the car or this part of the car. The other piece which is really interesting and this is not actually in the book which is a shame because it’s research which has literally just been published as of this month, as of September 2025, which is from Norway. So Norway is one of the, I think it’s in the world, is the biggest user and buyer of electric cars in terms of percentage of population. So ninety four, 94% of new cars bought in Norway last quarter were electric, 6% were traditional internal combustion engine cars. They’ve got to where the UK and the US and Germany dream of getting to in terms of that much sought after energy transition. However the result, you know, we all really need to be careful what we wish for because the results have actually ended up from this very detailed study that there’s been a 45 billion pound subsidiary by the Norwegian Government to fund this transition and people end up driving their cars between 10% and 20% more than they were before when they were driving conventional internal combustion engine cars. So we’ve ended up basically privatising and subsidising transport and people are now bizarrely moving away from active travel, moving away from public transit and moving towards private car usage even more. So it’s one of those really, yeah I’m, I’m definitely not a behavioural scientist but that kind of piece around how an incentive works and what that then incentivised people to do, we just need to be really careful before we put all our eggs in one basket. I often go to the Net Zero APPG in, in parliament and again here at climate week, and you go to these events when they are quote/unquote have sustainable mobility. It’s a lobbying shop for the electric car lobby. I mean, I was there, I was giving a talk at the main stage at New York Climate Week and, afterwards they had about seven people coming up to me, giving me business cards from the electric car lobby saying, we’ve got to you know, and I was, no, no, hold on, I didn’t happen to give a talk about electric cars but I’m not saying the answer is, the issue is not oil, the issue is the model of the car and the car industrial complex and car dependency.
Susan Freeman
Ah well I’m a very unhappy owner of an electric mini now. I thought I was, I was doing the right thing.
Arthur Kay
Well to be clear, it is definitely better from a carbon perspective, it is definitely better but it’s more this point of undoing lock in, as if we transition over do we both spend I mean our estimates from the book in terms of the cost of transitioning to electric from a fossil fuel fleet, is something like 60-90 trillion dollars. So this is not a, obviously that is going to take many years and multiple countries and 1.6 billon cars. That is a big number even by Donald Trump’s standards of throwing around trivia.
Susan Freeman
It is. So the answer is going to be less cars and, and less car dependency but in practical terms I mean, just looking at London, how do you shift people from, from their car dependency because everything seems to controversial, you know, low traffic neighbourhoods are controversial, 15 minute city is controversial and there are some parts of London that actually aren’t terribly well served by, by public transport and not, not everybody can ride a bike so what do you do?
Arthur Kay
Completely and one of the roles I hold at the moment is sitting on the board of Transport for London and so I should maybe say a disclaimer that this is not an official view of Transport for London, this my, my personal opinion. So I think the main thing here is not to blame in the individual and there are a whole bunch of people in London who both need to drive in terms of as you say, the kind of things like personal disability, need to drive because their work is so disconnected that they need to be able to get around, need to drive because their job is as a driver and therefore need to drive. So we are not saying that no cars in cities or you’re a morally bankrupt person if you dare to jump in your car whether, you know, diesel or petrol or electric all the rest of it. It’s saying that can we think about how we can make a journey, design a neighbourhood, integrate transport in a way that puts the car as an option but not the only option. So we, we write in the book about a dream city which is our, you know, close your eyes and imagine a city of the, of the distant future in which you have, you can walk out your front door and there are you know, ten really amazing options in terms of how you can get to work which are all reliable, all affordable. There are multiways of getting round your city and doing this in a way which is benefit to you and your way Susan, will be different from my way. I sometimes like cycling but also I am a bit of a fair weather cyclist. If it’s raining heavily I am definitely nipping into a bus or tube or whatever it happens to be and so giving that range of choice is what we’re really talking about and what the car industrial complex has done has made us think that the only choice is which model of car to buy and whether it’s electric or diesel or whether you get the, you know, the red or the blue or whatever it happens to be. And we go back to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and look at some of the, because I’ve grown up with this narrative that basically everyone was going round London on smelly, dirty horses having a pretty rubbish time and horses were always dying and pooing everywhere and all this kind of stuff and then Henry Ford came over and said, whoa, hey guys you can do this way better and, you know, the Model T took off and before we knew it, everyone was driving cars. But the range of transport options in London was as rich if not even richer than it was today. We talk about this incredible suffragette called Lady Priscilla Norman who, there’s a photo in, in the book you’ll have seen Susan who in 1916 was wearing full kind of late Victorian dress going round London on an electric micro scooter. So this is not an invention of kind of silicon valley in the, you know mid, you know, the 21st century, you know, selling, lying or whatever it happens to be. This is someone buying a, you know, electric micro scooter who is going round London very happily wearing full Victorian dress and this is just a story that is not spoken about. And it was made by Autoped, they made an internal combustion engine model and an electric model, similarly the electric bike, you know, we’ve seen it after the tube strikes, we’ve seen everyone hopping on Lime bikes and going round London. Again this is not a recent invention and we don’t have Silicon Valley to thank for it, this is 1897 it was patented, uh, the first electric bike. I think it is well known in terms of the, you know, Mrs Henry Ford much like you Susan, preferred driving an electric car. We’ve been sold this idea that there were basically no real options to get around, then the car came along gave us all this freedom and all this additional mobility but actually what’s happened is it’s, in our opinion, it’s hemmed in our cities, hemmed in our choices and what we are talking about in terms of people let’s say in London, who have a portative choice the role of someone like Transport for London or the role of the Local Authority thinking about planning the role of how we can think about our landscape and our streetscapes is to give that person or that family additional options that are genuine options. Not, okay I’ve got to take seven buses and which I can never get on because they are always too busy or I’ve got to pay out for really expensive train fair or whatever. What is a genuinely good option they can have to be able to connect to the neighbourhood and that’s where I think some of, you know, you mentioned 15 minute cities and the controversy there but a core idea there is around ignoring some of the politics is around how can you have what’s important to you relatively nearby. And what’s important to you Susan is different to me. One of the stats I love is that to Parisians their morning coffee and croissant is very, very important and ninety four, 94% of Parisians are within a five minute walk of a Baytree that makes a fresh baguette or croissant. This is a 15 minute city for croissants. Like in London that’s completely bonkers, they would be like okay well we’re obviously not there, I mean maybe we are now but we’re obviously not that interested in croissants but it’s kind of saying what’s the important kind of commercial node in your network that is really important for you and I’ll be different from you, then it’s to me than it is to Archie or you and whoever it happens to be.
Susan Freeman
It makes a lot of sense but I wonder about things like pedestrianizing Oxford Street which is a great idea but you know we’ve wondered for years where are the buses going to go, where are the cars going to go because it’s the more, I suppose unintended consequences you sort of move the cars and the buses, it upsets somebody else.
Arthur Kay
Completely and I think it comes back to that range of choices. I think when it has worked unsuccessfully areas of pedestrianisation is when it is happening to a community and it’s some kind of somewhere saying, alright let’s cut that out and there’s no engagement with businesses. I was talking to a friend the other day who, a restaurant in their neighbourhood in San Francisco had their area pedestrianised and the business went under because the whole culture in this part of San Francisco was you get in your car and you drive to restaurants, you eat in and you drive home. So removing that option and particularly the car parking around that option meant the business was not viable. Obviously most people don’t drive into Oxford Street to eat or drink, I think it is something like, don’t quote me on this, but it’s something like 85% of journeys are already made using active travel or public transit. So a relatively small percentage of driving but those people still need a genuinely good alternative, that is viable, that is reliable, that is affordable and also critically for the businesses that are there, you know the Oxford Street generates 25 billion pounds in terms of economic value to the UK economy, roughly 1% of the entire UK economy is on that single street. It cannot be an afterthought to think about last mile delivery and how you integrate into that. So the warehousing around it, the last mile delivery, the, you know, the many more smaller vehicles because obviously one truck coming in there at 4.00am is twenty smaller vehicles that are delivering it by other means and so the integration of that and making sure that it’s a genuinely – and I think it actually needs to be an economic project rather than a mobility project – you know, it happens to be that there’s going to be fewer cars there. It happens to be that there’s going to be primarily focussing on, on commerce and people on foot etcetera, or on wheel but looking at some of the other examples around the world, I mean I am here in New York and you know Time Square is one of the great success stories of what pedestrianisation can look like in terms of income for businesses around there, for becoming a thriving tourist destination and for the value of the knock on effect in terms of value of property around there which again, this is ballpark but I think the value of property in and around Time Square went up 33%-34% following the pedestrianisation.
Susan Freeman
Interesting. Now you mentioned your, your role at TFL and I just wondered, you know, how do you see your role? Obviously you have an entrepreneurial mind-set, how do you go about influencing decisions in that sort of organisation?
Arthur Kay
Well it’s an amazing organisation and a very large one and also a very diverse one, so it does everything from being one of the UKs largest house builders and developers under Graham Craig and a team at Places for London. It does amazing stuff in terms, and through that it also has a pretty significant property portfolio. I believe it’s the biggest landlord to SMEs in the capital for example. It also has things like it’s the biggest consumer of electricity in London as well as obviously delivering, you know, millions of journeys a day for kind of core transport for millions of people. I’m definitely not a transport expert, you know, I’m much more coming from an entrepreneurial background. The executive team are superb already but where I try and add value or to challenge is around some of that more innovative approaches around thinking about kind of joined up approaches to environmental sustainability. So things, we spoke a bit about the zero tailpipe emissions and you know TFL is not always, you know, also talks in those sorts of terms. So again, how can we tell a true story about outcomes for Londoners rather than the narrower story about the technical piece around that. So trying to join together, I was talking earlier about how typically we think in disciplines about this is transport engineering and this is finance and this is… and I’m again trying to bring this kind of city centric narrative to how and what transport can enable the city to do. And I was lucky enough to be briefly on the board with Professor Greg Clarke who I am sure, you know, on various things but he’s been, you know, an inspiration to me on terms of how he speaks in well, both intellectually incredibly clear but also actually just verbally very articulate in terms of the role of the city as an economic engine which then does have a knock on effect to a whole bunch of other stuff including environmental sustainability, including social cohesion, including some of those, you know, cultural values and some of those other pieces around it and, you know, there’s another book I’d recommend called ‘Triumph of the City’ by Eddie Glaeser who you should definitely get on the podcast Susan because he’s an amazing economist and thinker. But making such a lucid case around why cities matter first and foremost but also how transport is the key enabler to make that city join together and work.
Susan Freeman
It must be pretty exciting actually to be involved with that and I, I am a great fan of what TFL do. I have had Graham Craig on podcasts so there, I know there’s a lot going on. And you are also a director at Innovo and I have recently interviewed Bishoy Azmy, the, the CEO on the podcast and I know they are an international lead in construction and innovation and I was wondering, you know, about your role there and how you see that?
Arthur Kay
Well Innovo is an extraordinary organisation, it’s still a very young organisation. Most of its work is still in the United Arab Emirates, um, as one of the biggest contractors there but also has grown very rapidly into one of the largest contractors in Egypt. It’s doing amazing work and development in London and Toronto and in various places around the world. I am sure Bishoy Azmy and his sister, Mariam are two pretty extraordinary and still very young leaders as well so growing this business with huge ambitions in terms of what it can become. So I mean I’ve been working with, with them for a couple of years now, really a similar kind of role to with Transport for London in a way in terms of trying to think in a more joined up way in terms of how they can position themselves in terms of particularly with a focus on innovation and sustainability is kind of my, my angle there. And I mean the London team is working on our first few development projects at the moment, um, led by Brendon Moss and John Forester, um, and some of the team there as well so, you know, it’s at an early stage in London but globally really kind of beginning to, to find its stride, um, so it is exciting to, a very different kind of organisation but exciting to be part of that, that journey, um, in a small way.
Susan Freeman
No it is, it is very exciting and we were talking to Bishoy about it, about some of the sort of huge projects they are dealing with in the Middle East and then some of the challenges they are, you know, having to deal with in terms of planning in London?
Arthur Kay
Completely. I mean the new deputy CEO as well, Simon Penny has been very good with that because he was the, um, UK governments trade commissioner to the Middle East region as well so I think kind of like supporting with some of those much bigger, really ambitious projects working often with governments and with sovereign funds and that sort of stuff as well. But I mean they must be one of the few businesses who are doing the opposite, you know, when they zig, we zag kind of thing. So a lot of businesses and people and talent are moving to the UE and Bishoy is very bullish on the UK, very bullish on London specifically and what that can be and I personally think that’s an amazing kind of confidence and unusual in a good way in terms of I think long term he is going to be proved so right when a lot of people are, are going in the opposite direction. And so, yeah having, having the Innovo team investing time and capital, um, and trying to get it working even with the, I think again your, your listeners will be very familiar with some of the challenges of London planning and when you compare it to, to what, what can be thrown up in Dubai in a few days, it’s a very, very different world, um, but the patience to be able to kind of take that and think long term is, is rare un, especially for an ambitious entrepreneur like Bishoy.
Susan Freeman
It’s very exciting so I, I hope they will be patient. So you’ve taken on a new role recently as board member of the Royal Academy of Engineering. What will that involve?
Arthur Kay
So I am not an engineer by background so again I think probably the common thread here is, you know, I know nothing really but it’s around, but in terms of some of the technical skill and already round the board table they’ve got some incredible engineers ranging from people doing some stuff with the cutting edge of software and computer science through to people who are doing things in structural engineering and civil engineering tan that kind of stuff but again what I am trying to bring to the table is a lens in terms of innovation, sustainability and particularly there the start-up world. For several years I’ve been chairing something called the Climate and Sustainability Round Table within the Royal Academy of Engineering and that’s around how we can work with, it’s got something called the enterprise hub. I think it’s, you know, was voted by The Financial Times as the top start-up accelerator in Europe. So it’s an accelerator for early stage companies and for people who aren’t familiar with what that is, it’s, you know, you and four friends who are really good at, you know, whatever nuclear fusion, get together and say, right we’re going to set up this company, we need to get maybe a little bit of money, we need to get a bit of support and mentoring, we need to work out how to sell this product or service into the market and it’s a one-stop shop for providing some of those services and insights for free but particularly with a lens on deep tech engineering. So this is kind of the really hard not science but kind of like beyond science of terms of the commercial application of some of this stuff is going to be. And they do really incredible work and it is all, I should say is equity free, that means they don’t take a portion of your company when they support you and I was lucky enough with Bio-Bean actually to receive this support when I was doing my first start-up, bringing it back to that and saw first-hand the impact it made. This was when I was still a, a very kind of wet behind the ears young entrepreneur and still definitely finding my feet in terms of how to run and scale a business and it was really supportive there in terms of that stage and so now I am very proud actually to be back now in a board member role and hopefully providing similarly championing of that programme specifically but entrepreneurship in engineering specifically.
Susan Freeman
That’s brilliant and you talking about, you know, being a young entrepreneur and I just wondered what advice you’d give to young entrepreneurs now who are interested in, in breaking into the built environment. How would you advise them to start?
Arthur Kay
Well I guess I’ve got one, one piece of advice on this but also then a plea in terms of it. So my, my plea first which is think from a perspective in terms of the built environment I would say as within an urban lens and specifically what can deliver a social environmental and economic impact. When it works really well is when you can combine the three but always try and lead with the economic impact. Where I’ve made mistakes in the past has definitely been I guess believing the press releases and CSR campaigns of, of bigger organisations who say, we care about this, that and the other and then you think again and go in and tell them that we can solve, you know, that, that environmental problem as an example and actually, mm maybe not so much and actually, you know, so, so always try and lead with that econic lens but try and bring that social environmental impact along with you. There’s a line I don’t necessarily agree with the essence of it but the insight is correct in terms of Peter Thiel, a very controversial Trump supporter and venture capitalist had a line which says, ‘we wanted flying cars, we got 150 characters’ and kind of talking about how, where has deep tech innovation got to, um, in terms of we’re now very good at doing some ‘service level software engineering’ but actually where are we in terms of actually making the quality of lives of people living in cities better. In terms of piece of advice, it’s essentially to keep it really simple, this is advice to me more than anyone else but what I often end up doing is trying to kind of play 3D chess or try to go straight to expert level of whatever it happens to be but to kind of think about really carefully and clearly who is my customer and how am I going to make that customer’s life so much better that they are going to be willing to give me actual money for what I am doing for them. So where is the, and in start-up language this is called a value proposition, so, you know, what is the value proposition, what is the product or service I am going to deliver that’s going to make their life materially better. And materially might be two times, might be ten times better but so often we’re looking at incremental changes or not really clear who our customer is. We kind of think the customer is maybe like a vague group of people who are out there, you haven’t yet met any of them but you’re pretty sure, you’ve got a good hunch that they exist, um, but the, the best kind of person who’s problem you can solve is, is yourself. Second being the people that you know and can look in the eye and say, ‘if I was to be able to deliver X, would that be good? Would you pay money for that service or product?’ And often people forget that really simple but critical step in the start-up journey and it’s just reminding one’s self that every day, which I definitely don’t do. I, I, this again applies to myself more than anyone.
Susan Freeman
Well that, that’s terrific advice Arthur, thank you so much and we’re, we’re out of time so I am going to let you go and do all the important things you need to do in New York this week.
Arthur Kay
Well it’s been a real honour to be on Susan, as I, as I mentioned, um, before we started recording, I’ve listened to the podcasts over many, many years and absolutely love it so it’s a pleasure to be here, um, hopefully this provides some, some insight or interest for your audience.
Susan Freeman
Thank you so much Arthur for talking to us about everything your multi-facetted career to date and your various roles which allow you to contribute to the creation of more sustainable, liveable cities. And of course congratulations on the publication of your ‘Road Kill’ which I recommend to our listeners and you won’t feel the same about your car after you read it.
So that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.
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