Why Place Still Matters

[00:00:02] Keith Zakheim:

Welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast. I am your host, Keith Zakheim. Today, as we do with every podcast, we're going to ask our guest one question and one question only. What is your Age of Climate adoption story?

A little bit about the Age of Adoption: We live in an era where enterprises of every shape and size, regardless of industry, must rapidly transform to become more sustainable and climate sensitive. My day job is CEO of the marketing public relations firm Antenna Group. Our agency works exclusively with conscious brands.

What is a conscious brand? It is a brand that is conscious of its responsibility to be on the right side of history. Like most businesses, our clients are experiencing a transition from an age of innovation, an era in which technologists, entrepreneurs and investors focused on innovating climate and sustainable solutions, to this age of adoption which characterizes the world today.

So, if you accept the Age of Adoption hypothesis, then there's really only one salient question to be asked: What is your Age of Adoption story?

Carrie Denning Jackson, Director of Innovation and Sustainability at Jamestown, grew up in Connecticut, always begging her parents to take the train into the city instead of driving. While other kids would play video games, she built elaborate worlds with Playmobil sets. And two forces were always present in her imagination: the physical world of cities, bridges and infrastructure, and the relentless march of technology promising to transform them.

My guest on today's episode of the Age of Adoption, brought to you by Antenna Group, arrived at Stanford not knowing that a field called urban planning existed. Then, in a course on utopian architecture tracing how visionaries from Le Corbusier to Dutch futurists imagine the perfect city, a light bulb went off. In Carrie, in her case, actually an LED light bulb, of course, went off. A graduate student in the program drew a striking parallel: The network-distributed cities imagined in the 1970s and 80s mapped almost perfectly onto the architecture of the early Internet. In other words, these fledgling virtual platforms were in some ways replicating the dynamics of physical cities.

That insight shaped everything that followed, including her Stanford thesis exploring the phenomenon of a physical stock exchange when trading is in fact virtual. And her answer in that thesis, which history has validated, was that humans are hardwired for physical space and social interactions and as such, crave built environments. Far from being anachronistic in a world becoming more digital, demand for thriving, healthy and dynamic cities would grow. That conviction eventually led her to Jamestown, the global real estate investment firm behind some of America's most iconic mixed-use destinations today.

On the Age of Adoption podcast, Carrie explains how adaptive reuse produces dramatically lower life-cycle carbon emissions than new construction and challenges us to consider why the smartest cities in the world are still essentially running on infrastructure built 50 years ago. Back with Carrie in a New York City minute.

Carrie, welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast.

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[00:03:31] Carrie Denning Jackson:

Hi. Wonderful to be here. Thank you.

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[00:03:35] Keith Zakheim:

Carrie, as Director of Innovation and Sustainability at Jamestown, so I know that you are leading innovation or sustainability innovation for a global real estate investment and management company. And the company I know has transformed some of the most iconic urban properties into mixed-use destinations, which is great. But you know, for this podcast and for our listeners, the focus always and the, I think the area of interest is going to be around how to make those properties, how to make those areas, those destinations more sustainable, that ultimately facilitates better living, healthier living, better communities, healthier communities.

And what I'm fascinated by before we get to the Age of Adoption question, your background really has married together technology and technology around urban infrastructure and smart cities. And now being at Jamestown, the application of those in real-life environments and again, building these environments that ultimately are optimized for sustainability, for healthy living. So if you don't mind reflecting on your career journey, which at this point has clearly been a successful one, and if you can reflect on that and kind of connect the dots for us in terms of how you got here today?

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[00:04:51] Carrie Denning Jackson:

Yeah, of course. And it's, it's wild to be at a point in a career where you can look back on things. So it's, it's a, it's a, it's a definite moment when you're like, wow, I'm at that stage. But so I, I've definitely had a jungle gym of a journey. I haven't had the corporate ladder traditional route. And I think that's an important thing for people in this field to know that it is a very vast field. Like, I wake up thinking about how I can make cities more—and really the places I live, it doesn't have to be a pure urban environment, but the place that I live—healthier, more joyful, frictionless. And like, how can that, just how can I do that in all avenues of my life, whether it's through Jamestown or work I do. I'm on the board of Governors Island in New York City. I'm also on the board of the Nature Conservancy for the New York chapter. And so just thinking about that broadly is something I live and breathe every day. And there's so many ways you can tackle that and do that, whether it's policy or real estate or, you know, just being a, you know, a parent at your kid's school, things like that.

So, so I really want to stress that it's—my career has been very much like a winding road. And for me, it started—I was reflecting on some of the questions for this podcast over the past few weeks, and it's this interesting mix of—I was always fascinated with the world around me. So, like, I love taking Metro-North into the city. Like, my parents would want to drive, we lived in Connecticut, and I would always want to take the train because I loved, you know, all the different train stops and watching the cities go by. And I really like, just, I loved like the bridges, the infrastructure. I played Playmobil nonstop. I was obsessed with just creating places and I loved it.

And at the same time, my dad was a technology investor and he was always bringing home like different gadgets and like the MP3 player before the MP3 player. And like, my brother would test out games like Doom and things like that. And so we always had tech in the house. And I think there was very much this techno-utopianism, like, build-it-in-your-garage, can-do attitude and really this view that technology brings progress and brings great things. And that's not always the case, but in our family it was really like, innovation is a wonderful thing, entrepreneurship is a wonderful thing. And so I think that was just always in my head.

But at the same time, I had no idea that there was a job called urban planning or I didn't know the term built environment. Like, everyone I knew growing up was probably an investment banking or like maybe a lawyer. So I just had no sense of that. And when I went to Stanford,

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[00:07:35] Keith Zakheim:

A quick funny story about you said, like, everybody knew as an investment banker. So I grew up outside of Washington, D.C. in Silver Spring, Maryland, which pretty much everybody there is government, you know, so it could be defense, it could be commerce, it could be energy, what have you. But everybody's for the most part serving government. And when I went to New York for college, I remember a lot of people were talking about they want to get a job in finance and investment banking, but they would call it banking. And I promise I thought, like, why would they want to be a teller? That seems really boring. I mean, that's literally what I thought of investment banking. So a little bit of a different perspective.

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[00:08:09] Carrie Denning Jackson:

I still don't really know what they do, but God bless. But it really wasn't. So I went to Stanford. And you know, at the time, who knows what you're going to major in? But I just, I'd been very good at history and art history in high school. I loved art, again. It was like I loved visual things, like the cities around me, the art around me. Architecture I loved. And so I did those dual degrees. And I remember exactly where I was when kind of like the record stopped and I realized, oh, my gosh, there's a field called urban studies. There's urban planning. I can study cities. And I had no clue that that was a thing. And everything I just remember being like, wow, everything suddenly makes sense as to what I love and what I want to do with my life. And so it was too late to change my major, but luckily I could take—there's tons of city-related urban architecture courses within history and history. And so I did that.

And then there was a class called Utopian Architecture. And it was all about, you know, the future city. And it was looking at how, you know, architects and futurists and thinkers had thought about the perfect city, you know, all throughout the 20th century. And there's been lots of different versions, like Corbusier, there was a group called Archigram, there's Superstudio, there's so many different groups. And I was fascinated by this. There was even, you know, a city by a Dutch architect where he just imagined robots would do all of our jobs and we could just play. And this just, I thought it was the most fascinating thing. And there was a master's student who was in the program, a grad student, and he wrote a paper on how the utopian cities of like the 70s and 80s, where they were really distributed, there are these like networked cities and like bots that walked around. He was like, this really resembles the Internet. And the Internet's this redundant networked thing. And he kind of showed how like, the architecture of the city matched, like the kind of the packet-switching that the early Internet, how it was created. And this too also was like this seminal moment of, wow, we're making—we have physical cities, but we're also making these virtual cities. And they map the architecture in this really interesting way. And we are recreating aspects of the city online. Like, you have social networks, you have the grocery store, you have all these places.

And so this became this, this really interesting interplay for me of understanding what is the impact of the Internet and the virtual world on our physical lives. How is it replicating it, how is it not? And so I was grappling with this, and this was in 2004, 2008, when a lot of scholars and thinkers and like people like Bill Gates were saying, you know, you don't need the city anymore. We can work from a mountaintop. We can have virtual windows with the mountains. Like, we don't—we don't need these physical places. It—it's not, it's irrelevant now with the Internet and this, this to me, like, I—I don't know if I was mature enough to have quite an opinion. I was more just following what people said. But I ended up writing a thesis on the New York Stock Exchange. And is there relevance to a physical building, a physical exchange when you can just do online trading? And, you know, what was the point of that?

And what I ended up landing on, which is where we're at today, is no, there is huge value in the physical space. Like, people want to go on the floor, ring the bell. Like there's a reason it's covered. Like the New York Stock Exchange columns are sometimes covered in the American flag. Or there's a reason we barricade the street so there can be no, like, terrorist attack because it is such a symbol of our financial institutions. And so what, what ended up happening, as we know is like, cities only became more and more of magnets for people. We crave physical spaces.

And so when COVID was happening and everyone was saying, oh, we're going to go totally remote, I was thinking, there's no way, like, people are going to lose their minds and we need to be back. And we crave humanity and being around each other. And it's a big reason, like kind of switching a little bit to Jamestown. It's a big reason why I really love Jamestown. I think, I think we're one of the best real estate firms because we create human places for people and they're very analog in some ways. And, and that's—it's just something like a constant trend I see throughout of, you know, how can technology help us and how can innovation help us? I think there was this view that you wouldn't need physical space, but now I see it much more married together and how can technology be a tool and a way to make our places better? So that's kind of a little the bit of the background.

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[00:12:35] Keith Zakheim:

Yeah, that's great. And it's interesting today in the Wall Street Journal, there was actually an article about a student at Columbia University who a few years ago decided one day he'd read all about loneliness and how the health impacts and societal impacts. So he just put a chair outside with a sign, "How you doing today?" And it's become a movement. And now I think in Central Park there—I don't know, there's huge tents where number of students are sitting there every day and people come over and you know, there is so much loneliness even in cities today because of technology and other probably ways that communities and societies and cities have evolved because of technology. It is analog to a certain degree. But it does seem like every study shows we're hardwired for those social interactions and we need them. So that makes a lot of sense. And so what Jamestown is doing, of course, is doing that.

I'm fascinated also by adaptive reuse. And I know that in climate circles it's lauded as one of the most effective climate strategies, certainly when it comes to real estate. And just to define it a little bit for our audience—I know that you're going to do a deep dive—it's really rather than demolishing and rebuilding so owners can take existing assets and extend their lives. And Jamestown, in preparation for this, I was reviewing your sustainability report and it found that life-cycle assessments of two adaptive reuse projects that they had done resulted in significantly lower life-cycle carbon emissions over 50 years in the study than new construction would do. I know there's a project in Atlanta where there was great data that came out of that as well.

So, Carrie, I'm going to get now to the question of the day, the question that carries this podcast, the question that constantly is top of mind for me as I go about my day, which is, Carrie, what is your and Jamestown Age of Adoption story?

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[00:14:37] Carrie Denning Jackson:

I love that. No, it's, I think it's a good question. I love the, I love the adaptive reuse piece and thinking through that. So I think with Jamestown, so I've been leading the innovation and sustainability teams for some time, innovation for about five years. And with Jamestown, what I really see, and the firm's been around for several decades at this point, but innovation is very squarely within the company's central foundational building blocks. We say it's in our DNA. I really believe that. And it's something that is all of our partners feel very strongly about. Like, this is not window dressing. A few years ago, a lot of innovation teams got cut in the real estate space when capital was scarce. And that was never, to my knowledge, at least I hope, never a consideration. And it's, you know, this is driving this force across the company is such a big deal. And it wasn't just about me and my team. But so much of what we did, at least in the beginning for me, was learning where are all the pockets of innovation within the company and how can we just cheerlead and celebrate that and really champion the work across the org. So in many ways, it was like pulling out these interesting little pockets.

We've had a program since 2017 called Innovation Ideas where anyone in the org can send a note and it goes to me and Michael Phillips, our president, and we read them. And it can range from a new leasing idea. Like, it could be a new food and beverage concept they saw over the weekend. It could be like a, a virtual display. It could be, you know, one of the ideas someone presented was actually the car—the parking company Metropolis, which we, you know, now we've rolled out in some places where they use license plate readers to see, you know, did your car drive into the spot? And then you're automatically—it's connected to your credit card and you automatically pay. So it's very frictionless. But about 25 to 30% of our pilots across the organization come from Innovation Ideas. And it's a testament to the excitement people have in new ideas and how they want to bring them to the organization. And they're thinking about the organization, how they can make our buildings better or our internal operations better.

And so what our team will do is in some cases, we will, you know, run with the pilot ourselves. We think, okay, we can, we can help, and we can add capacity and we can help do the contracting and the pilot kickoff and all of that, like, fun work. Or in many cases, the person will just run with the idea themselves. Like they're an asset manager. They have their own, you know, budgets, and they know, okay, I have this amount of, I can do this. I can put in this really interesting, like, sunshade concept or I can do, you know, a robotic food delivery thing. And so there's a lot of leeway to try new ideas. And I think that's like, very core to our focus at the organization. And it's something that I don't—I haven't seen in too many places, but it's really foundational to, to who we are. So, like, having that, having that as something that's so core is really, really important to the organization.

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[00:17:51] Keith Zakheim:

What's the next frontier and all of that from your perspective?

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[00:17:54] Carrie Denning Jackson:

So I think we're at an interesting point with, with technology in the built environment. And I think first and foremost, we're absolutely going to have, you know, AI back-office transformation. And we're going to see that across every industry. And like, we're figuring that out. No one is—no one has it right. There's so many, so many vendors are coming to us, selling us different topics, different things, you know, using cloud or using this or using that, and like, how can we optimize lease abstraction and all these different processes? And I do think that will have a big impact for us in every single organization and really play that through.

But then I also just think buildings are the buildings we have, which are a lot of older buildings. Like, they are not as smart buildings as you would think. Like the idea that people have when they're, when they're new to this space or don't know much about it: Oh, you can just instrument the building and you can do this and that and you can control the air conditioning and you can do that. Like, think about your apartment building or think about your home. We are very far behind in terms of like how tech-enabled our physical infrastructure is. We're still like, you know, Dan Doctoroff, who I worked with at Sidewalk Labs, always would say, like, the city you look at now is not very different than the city you looked at 50, 60, 70 years ago. Like, we're still in the same infrastructure repairing the same potholes. Like, we haven't made the transformational leaps.

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[00:19:21] Keith Zakheim:

In some senses, you juxtapose that, for example, to go into a city in China, which of course didn't have a lot of those legacy issues, and you see how far behind we are.

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[00:19:30] Carrie Denning Jackson:

Yeah, yeah. And, and just for example, getting building data for, to report on our energy, greenhouse gases, waste and water on an annual basis, it takes a very long time. And it's, you know, it could, you know, in some cases, because we don't have information from the tenant, they don't share their, you know, their utility bill. But in other cases, like, you know, the API with this particular utility is buggy, or we have to manually upload this waste data because we don't have an automated data flow.

And so there's so much work to do to get our, you could say analog physical infrastructure buildings, really, really digital. And like, until we can do that, there's just a long way to go. But there are just so many companies out there focused on that, but you know, we just, our buildings, like, like I'm looking out at New York City right now from my building, like they're, they're all these different vintages and they have all these unique aspects to them and different, different incentive structures that exist. So there's, there's a ton of room to play, but there's still a long way to go. I think, like the fact that it takes us about six months to get our prior year's data is pretty wild.

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[00:20:42] Keith Zakheim:

Yeah. Okay. Well, Carrie, thank you. Thank you for sharing your Age of Adoption story and Jamestown's Age of Adoption story. And what I'm going to take away from all of this is we've made a lot of progress in transforming our cities in the built environment and there's still a lot of opportunity out there. And so we'll be optimistic about that opportunity and believe that we are getting there and we'll continue to get there and hopefully it accelerates. So, Carrie, thanks again for joining the Age of Adoption podcast and look forward to seeing you in person at some point.

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[00:21:14] Carrie Denning Jackson:

Yes, that would be lovely. Thank you.

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[00:21:17] Keith Zakheim:

The Age of Adoption podcast features CEOs, investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers sharing their climate and sustainability business transformation stories. Episodes can be found on your favorite podcast apps including iTunes and Spotify. The Age of Adoption podcast is brought to you by Antenna Group. Antenna is the home of conscious brands.

We partner with companies that don't wait for change to happen. These brands shape the future, are awake and already moving. Unsure if you are a conscious brand or even if you are one, whether you are positioned as one, please visit our website at www.antennagroup.com and take the Conscious Compass Assessment, a groundbreaking tool that enables enterprises to assess their brand against the eight traits of brand consciousness.

At Antenna, we partner with companies big and small, from growth stage to Fortune 100, to tell their climate and sustainability stories. So once again, if you're interested in joining the conscious brand movement and learning more about Antenna Group, please check out our website at www.antennagroup.com, ping us on LinkedIn and make sure to visit the Conscious Compass.