YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Jennings

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-11-01
most recent: 2023-11-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Biggest constraint we face is human capital. We're obviously not land constrained. We're unleveraged. We have very good cash flow. We have very good financing partners. We're absolutely not capital constrained in any way. So we're trying to do some world-class infrastructure, world-class execution, world-class buildings, world-class technology. And by definition, a lot of the human capital to do those things, it doesn't exist in this market. City of scale landscaping, urban realm. These schools don't exist, so you either have a lot of foreign consultants fly and fly out. They're not particularly focused. They're not necessarily the best consultants in the world. And it's just extremely inefficient. The constraint is embedding world class technical people within a Kenyan team.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industry might be, they'll want to come to your city because their children can go to a school that's as good or better than anywhere else. So that's the kind of thing that challenges us.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our models are exactly the opposite. It doesn't matter what we want or what we might want to pay for. It matters what our developers and our clients and our residents, what do they want, and what are they prepared to pay for. So we can bring all kinds of ideas of ours and all kinds of costs, but you can't do that, and it's wrong to try and do that. So we don't try and impose solutions or levels of infrastructure people don't want or styles that people don't want. It's probably not how we look at things. There's things that we think our residents will want that are hard to bring. So let me give you an example. You can have good schools that the community is happy with, or you could have a world-class school. And in my view, there's a qualitative difference between those two. Because if you have a world-class school, you will bring world-class professionals. The best professionals in the world and whatever that.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll answer the question, but we don't think like that So, sustainability means it's commercially viable. So you have a lot of city projects that are massively Subsidized by governments, particularly in petro states.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be the facade of a building, it could be the pattern in a plaza, it could be who designs and the cultural references in a major sculpture. Here, Magumatri is very sacred. So the scent we will be moving a massive historic and culturally important maguma tree into the center of the plaza. And then the other element is making it very green, very walkable and very beautiful and very safe, and baking that into how we plan the city from day one, really committing in a very deep way to those principles. Generally, they're quite superficial in modern cities. And this is because you're constrained by the old city. There's this huge element of retrofitting. We don't need to do any of that. But you need to embrace those principles in a very wholehearted fashion. Takes more time, takes more effort. But the payoff, I think, is going to be massive in the medium term.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the way we're designing our CBD, there are a lot of subtle cultural references from different Kokuyu but also other tribal groups.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in one of the most beautiful countries in the world. We're in a country with huge cultural diversity and a very vibrant and distinctive culture. And we have a clean sheet of paper. From a design and aesthetic perspective, we want this to be a Kenyan city. We don't want you walk into Tartar and you think, well, this is a bit like Dubai or this is a bit like Santon and Johannesburg. That would be complete failure for us.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Diversity, as you know, if you look through history, the cities that really prospered, that made a difference, that were hugely innovative. They were diverse. They were safe havens from people for all kinds of backgrounds, including foreigners, perhaps even people that have been persecuted in other environments. So this diversity, this mixing of people, this crossroads concept, this global marketplace, embedding that in everything you do is vitally important. So you need mosques, for example. We want to have a big Somali community here. If we want that, we need specialized infrastructure for them. We want to be the main hub for Chinese investment in the entire region. So we need specialized institutions. We need to pay respect to Chinese culture. We need to listen to them, work with them on quite new institutions sometimes. So you definitely don't want to go into any kind of segregation along those lines.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that people really want to walk. They really want to cycle. They're not even on the side of a road. They don't have to go near a road. So, they're the opportunities, and we're in one of the most beautiful and one of the nicest climates. We have opportunities that you just don't have in a normal urban planning setting to change mobility, to massively reduce the importance of cars, but to bake that into how we plan from the very beginning. And that's very unusual”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So a lot of ideas on urban planning are born or are driven by retrofitting of existing cities. There's a lot of principles that are paid lip service to, but the application of those is compromised by the fact that 99% of the time urban designers are involved in the game of retrofitting. Major you should sit down with a clean sheet of paper and you can think about how people are going to move around in the city, and you can do whatever you want to. So if you ask the urban planner he will still start with designing a road. But maybe you start by saying no, let's do human green corridors first, and then we'll talk about the roads about how they fit around those human green corridors. And let's, as designers would say, create an invitation”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's somebody else who would love to have a properly built, safe, secure apartment for 15,000 with nice amenities and a park and a playground, you can do that, but you probably won't have car parking for those people.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not so much what needs to go right, it's the planning, the technology, and the scale. If you want to get the costs way, way down for a unit, you can't have car parking. Car parking is actually very, if you're trying to go from 30,000 to 20,000 to 15,000, you can't have car parks. So you're building houses for people who will live within the city and who are going to be within a walkable distance of their work. Obviously, you're going to go up. You need more and more scale. It's a chicken and egg problem and getting affordable housing in sub-Saharan Africa because no one has cracked that scale problem to what we're doing here. So you need bigger scale. You need to go up a little bit. I think we know with our partners that we can go from, we already know how to go from 30,000 to 20,000. And then it's going to get much harder going from”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build your house, but it will be extremely beautiful. It'll have amazing amenities and you'll be in the heart of the project. But we do and we have to accommodate for that full range. And not just in housing, things like restaurants and services, nail salons. You can make it just for the elite in the shopping mall, or you can have a variety of formats where you accommodate everybody. And we go out of our way, and it's very unusual how we think about that. We want the worker who's earning $250 a month to do some of his shopping, to have a restaurant that is affordable for him. Make a big effort to provide those services for those people.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, people envisage these projects as being like gated communities for the elite. And that is one model, but if you think what a city really is, that is not a city. So a key dimension of building a city that's efficient and has agglomeration economies is mixed-use, mixed income. And you can't just pay lip service to that to make NGOs happen. It's actually in our interest to do that. So for housing, we go down to about $30,000 for what is really a world-class product produced by Unity Homes. So in terms of the finish, the environmental amenities, securities, pools, bars, these really are world-class units. Equally, we want the owners of major businesses and the biggest entrepreneurs in the region to come and live at Tartu City. So we might have a product where just your land is going to cost you a million dollars before you.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, that is a risk. So, the way you have to counterbalance that risk is you have to be adding more and more to the community and to the overall economy. So tens of thousands of jobs become hundreds of thousands of jobs. And those hundreds of thousands of jobs can end up supporting a million people or half a million people. If you're the largest source of FDI, if you're the largest proponent of investment within the country. So you have to be over time recognized as providing huge benefits to the wider community.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things you're solving is the hold up problem at many levels. So everyone has to deal with bureaucrats who won't supply water, who won't provide licenses, who create tax issues, every element of government you touch, there's a hold-up issue. So there's economies of scale in solving that or mitigating that on behalf of everybody else. We have to deal with it, but it's more efficient to deal with it once than thousands of times for each developer in each resident.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Challenges have to do with scale and time horizon. So in environments where utilities are not being provided by municipalities, everyone tries to solve their own solution, create their own solution so they'll have their own water solution, their own power solution, maybe their own sewer solution, their own security solution. Clearly, there's zero economies of scale, and people don't have the expertise or even the desire to solve those solutions. So you have these very patchwork, extremely efficient and non-sustainable solutions to these very basic problems. So a city has the advantage that you are able to solve those problems for everybody, and there's just tremendous economies of scale. So in terms of quality and cost, you get these tremendous advantages over what everybody outside of that environment is able to create.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bizarre situation that every area of reform and business that I worked in around the world, the threads of that are picked up in this project. So the governance issues through the reform efforts, designing SEZ legislation obviously is a public policy issue. But I've worked extensively in water and power, so understanding how those businesses should be structured and organized makes it a lot easier to set them up and managing them. So a city is very, it's much more multifaceted than you would think. The work that I did in New Zealand on Treaty of Waitangi issues with M ⁇ ori has also informed a lot of thinking around community and property right issues. So it's been this bizarre experience of all these threads fortuitously being drawn together in these projects.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First cousin, well, there's a lot of reasons that we haven't really had charter cities happen. It's a very interesting thought experiment, the whole issue of sovereignty, ceding sovereignty and taking someone else's sovereignty is a pretty kind of intractable issue. But we're like a first cousin to a charter city. So we're a private municipality with a lot of devolved authority. So we have the ability to make decisions the way that a charter city would be. We have the incentive to optimize the NPV, the long-term value of the city. And you can see that we've created many of the benefits in terms of quality of governance, quality of infrastructure, security, environmental amenities. So many of the envisaged benefits of charter cities are being realized within this model.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in seven projects in five countries. I think we're aware of every project across the continent, but there's very little doubt at all that this will be the leading new city and the largest new city in sub-Saharan Africa. And eventually it'll catalyze the whole region. You don't have a barrier around the spillover effects in terms of development and infrastructure will extend way beyond the borders of the city. And we already begin to see that.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taru City is the only operational special economic zone in the country. It is 5,000 hectares of fully planned urban development. It is at quite an advanced stage, so we have 70 large-scale industrial companies with us, including major multinationals and many of the regional leaders. We have 3,000 students come on site every day to our four new schools. We're advanced in building the first phase of the first new CBD for the region. We have tens of thousands of call centre jobs moving into that area together with other modern office amenities. So all of the elements, we have many residential modules, thousands of new residential units at a wide range of price points. So all of the elements of a new city are in place.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“15 years ago, it was a plan. I think it's way beyond the plan now. I think we've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. If you create new large-scale world-class urban infrastructure and administration, they will function as normal cities. And you'll have the demand that you would normally have for a normal, efficient international standard city.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that's very unusual about Africa. So, as you know, in Asia, with growth, you saw agglomeration of economies and cities became more efficient. There's some pretty obvious reasons why that hasn't happened here. So proper planning and controls really broke down in the 60s. So there were no, the plans were not enforced. The development was completely haphazard. Utilities were not modernized and capacity was not built. So you have huge capacity issues and shortages around power, water and other amenities. You have enormous congestion problems. So the cities are clogged, the service levels are poor, the planning has been almost non-existent and there are massive capacity issues and transport issues. So as they've grown, they've become more congested and less efficient.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a more pluralistic system. You haven't had the coups or dictators or disruption you have had in many other African countries. So the transition is very organic. We have the checks and balances of a system that you'd like to see in a country you're investing in for the very long term. It's not necessarily the case in the likes of Nigeria, Rwanda, or even in South Africa today.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kenya has been on a path of modernization, political and economic modernization and development, really going back to the 80s. So it's averaged over 5% GDP growth over that period. But it's also modernized as an economic and political system, moving away from one party essentially dictatorship to very vigorous democracy and pluralism as we saw last year. Huge development of infrastructure, modernization of the economy, improvements in school enrollment, life expectancy, every indicator of development, as with much of the continent, has really been transformed over the last 25 years. And our expectation is that will continue.”
2023-11-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source