Cities are the engine of the global economy. They are the primary centre for people, jobs, and economic activity, and will continue to drive global economic growth over the coming decades. And with such vast populations congregating in these cities—sharing ideas, talent, and creativity—it’s no surprise that they are also the cultural capitals of the world.
In this seminar, BOP Chief Economist, Jonathan Todd, will discuss the relationships between culture and property, drawing on his experience of the transformational power of culture and the creative industries. George Bowen, Senior Economist at Oxford Economics, will then put these cultural capitals in an economic context, showcasing the world’s largest city economies and their outlook for the coming decades.
Chair
George Armitage, Managing Director - Head of Global Real Estate & Specialist Markets Group, Oxford Economics
Speakers
George Bowen, Senior Economist, Oxford Economics
Jonathan Todd, Chief Economist, BOP Consulting
Panel Moderator
Yolande Barnes, Professor of Real Estate, Bartlett Real Estate, UCL
Panellist
Phil Ryan, Director, City Futures - Global Insight, JLL
Registration and breakfast: 08.30
Seminar: 09.00-10.00
Location: JLL, 30 Warwick Street London, W1B 5NH
Thank you to JLL for hosting this event.
George Armitage, Managing Director - Head of Global Real Estate & Specialist Markets Group, Oxford Economics
George began his property career in 2005 with Waterbridge, a UK investment manager, where he was responsible for a mixed portfolio of office, industrial, retail and apartments. Following Waterbridge and after a stint with Savills, George moved to CoStar towards the beginning of the GFC. It was with CoStar and RCA (Now MSCI) that George started his relationship with commercial real estate information, both as an analyst and on the commercial side.
For over 15 years George has been at forefront of developing real estate intelligence that is used by the industry every day. He has successfully grown businesses throughout the world and has an in-depth knowledge of commercial real estate and the evolution of CRE information. George currently works as Global Head of Real Estate at Oxford Economics in London. It was here George set up the Real Estate division back in 2012. George is a member of SPR, NCREIF, PREA, INREV, ULI & IPF.
Yolande Barnes, Professor of Real Estate, Bartlett Real Estate, UCL
Yolande is a practice professor who spent 33 years researching property markets in industry before joining UCL as Chair of the Bartlett Real Estate Institute in 2018. As head of World Research at Savills, she took a global, cross-sector view of real estate and became increasingly interested in very long run trends.
Her work at UCL is deliberately unfocussed, looking at the combination and interaction of disruptive trends in demographics, finance, technology, society, the environment, and governments in changing global real estate. She believes that real estate, meaning land and everything attached to it, is at the heart of sustainability. Understanding real estate value in all its forms is therefore essential to solving the wicked problems and grand challenges of the 21st century. To this end, she sees as imperative the communication of knowledge and the activation of partnerships between academia and industry.
George Bowen, Senior Economist, Oxford Economics
George is a Senior Economist in the City Services team, with over six years of experience in city forecasting and analysis. He manages Oxford Economics’ Global Cities Forecasting Service, bringing together city level forecasts for over 1000 locations globally. Alongside this, he also specialises in forecasting cities and regions in the Middle East, and regularly produces regional forecasts across the MENA region. George has also led the development of Oxford Economics’ novel geospatial techniques, which are used to analyse economic activity at a hyper-local level, alongside cross-cutting research into the impacts of climate change, urbanisation and the distribution of population and GDP across regions.
Phil Ryan, Director – City Futures, Global Insight
Phil Ryan is a director of JLL’s City Futures platform based out of London. In his role, he focuses on the structural changes underway with respect to urban development, best practices in large-scale regeneration, identifying innovation hot-spots, the effects of agglomeration economies and analysing commercial real estate performance in both emerging and mature growth clusters. In his previous role, Phil was the director of JLL’s U.S. Office Research platform in New York, where he focused on both national and local trends in the office market across more than 50 metro areas, with an emphasis on integrating economic and demographic data into real estate analysis, outlooks and decision-making as well as contributing to JLL’s quarterly office report suite and industry-specific reporting.
Jonathan Todd, Chief Economist, BOP Consulting
Jonathan is an economist with over a decade’s experience in impact assessment and evaluation, and high-level policy experience, particularly within the cultural and creative sectors.
At BOP, Jonathan leads the work on economic impact assessment and culture-led regeneration. Jonathan’s work at BOP has supported the growth aspirations of BBC Wales and Film London, as well as funding cases for major capital works, such as Symphony Hall Birmingham and the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre of Ireland. He is an expert in building Green Book compliant cases for cultural investment.
Jonathan built upon this quantitative research at BOP with ground-breaking assessments of the economic impact of live entertainment in Ireland and fashion in East London. His expertise in harnessing culture to support local economic growth initiatives was drawn upon in providing research and strategic direction to the Cultural Cities Enquiry.
He is a former Chief Economist at the think-tank Demos, where he published a major study on the future of apprenticeships. He was also a Senior Consultant at Europe Economics, where he managed pan-European impact assessments on behalf of both the European Commission and European Parliament, as well as Whitehall departments and leading UK companies.
He holds degrees from three universities, including a M.Phil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. Jonathan Todd is an RSA Fellow and has been named by City AM among the UK’s 100 most influential economists.