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The Bartlett Real Estate Institute (BREI) is rethinking the value of real estate and will explore the impact the built environment has on society, wellbeing and our environment
UCL has been part of London for almost two centuries, and our own growth from radical beginnings has tracked that of our megacity home. UCL has built a strong reputation for purposeful, interdisciplinary engagement with the built environment through the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, and through cross-cutting initiatives like UCL’s Grand Challenges: Sustainable Cities.
We are already bringing industry, the public realm and academia together in innovative new spaces at Here East, in a location that truly demonstrates the changing face of real estate value. The Bartlett Real Estate Institute (BREI) is rethinking the value of real estate, and is a successful initiative based at Here East.
We want to bring more to the mainstream those issues that have been percolating at the periphery of the majority that comprise the industry, but which are important to both the human experience and our planet’s health and wellbeing. At the grandest scale, our mega and global cities are truly vast collections of real estate – great social, economic and logistical systems that underpin the shifting power dynamics of contemporary life. At the individual level, the built environment can uplift us, safeguard us, delight us, or leave us frustrated and despondent; it can even put our health at risk and lives in danger.
Short courses and research centres that are currently in development range from ‘The Future of Retail’ to ‘Off-World Living’, the latter being an area of interest to the European Space Agency as a way of exploring the challenges and possibilities of future settlements on the Moon. The first postgraduate taught courses will focus on types of real estate that many of us recognise as vitally important: our healthcare facilities and learning environments.
Activities will take place in an executive education suite – complete with two Harvard-style lecture theatres, three large seminar rooms, breakout spaces and an open, informal and flexible ‘lounge’ area. BREI invites people and organisations from industry, from the third sector, and from local and national government to join us in an open, discursive environment; somewhere designed solely to encourage the thoughtful discussion of value.
BREI will work with industry, students and academic colleagues to understand and to explore the impact the built environment has on society, on our wellbeing, and that of our environment with those responsible for building and managing real estate around the world.
“The Bartlett Real Estate is an idea, a concept and now a reality that epitomises the radical thinking UCL is founded on. Some may think that real estate is housing and commercial buildings that are bought and sold, leased or rented. But it is more – much more than this. Real estate affects us all – every day, and we all rely on it. We need to understand more about what comprises the many facets of real estate and all its impacts if we are to create and operate real estate that works for us all.” – Professor Andrew Edkins, Director, BREI
