Challenger Cities EP101: Chain Drain with Bryan Boyer & Greg Lindsay

A restaurant learns something every night. They hear what people say about a dish, see what comes back on the plate and see the financial impact it has on the books. It's a pretty awesome feedback loop.But the urban realm doesn't work like that. There is a much longer and less responsive chain at play where the planners, developers, architects, engineers, construction firms, designers, financiers and clients do not have such rapid or sophisticated mechanisms of connection and communication.An architect can finish their work on a building before moving onto the next project. They don't have the right of return, access to the energy data of the finished project, may well have had the work adjusted in the process and aren't the ones experiencing what it's like to use it.It's what Bryan Boyer from Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan and Greg Lindsay, newly installed Urbanist-in-Residence at School of Cities, University of Toronto call 'Chain Drain'.Think of the handoffs, where an architect might place a window, but a structural engineer needs a column exactly there, and the mechanical engineer needs a drain. One of them will likely win an argument, and the others will adapt. Multiply that by every handoff on every project and you get an industry where each job starts roughly where the last one started, and where value leaks out at every transition.That matters as US construction productivity has fallen something like ~30% since 1970, while productivity in the wider economy more than doubled. We are asking this sector to deliver housing, climate adaptation and the retrofit of trillions in stranded assets. That's a big ask when over the last half century, it's in some ways getting worse at building things in the first place.It's a properly good paper that I hope will bring the Challenger mindset to the people tasked with designing, planning, making, building and operating Cities and Place.Find the paper in full here: https://www.bryanboyer.com/chaindrain/Challenger Cities Summary: https://challengercities.substack.com/p/challenger-cities-ep101-chain-drain