Unpacking the label: Applying a social impact lens to regeneration

My role at Avison Young covers social impact, development, property and regeneration. It is a relatively new defined combination of responsibilities in commercial real estate, and one that doesn’t yet have a settled meaning across the industry. However, it reflects a way of working and thinking that will be familiar to many, even if it has not previously been articulated in these terms.

My job, as I see it, is to bring an awareness of social impact to the way decisions are made about a place.

In practice, this work involves elevating, introducing and translating different skills, experiences, and conversations to the centre of how decisions about places are made – including concepts which are familiar and well understood, such as social value, meanwhile space, community engagement, inclusive-design, and stewardship.

The advice we provide doesn’t stop at social value commitments, valuable as those are. It begins much earlier and runs much further into the life of a scheme.

Why social value is only part of the picture

Social value, in the way our industry has come to use it, is largely a mechanism of extracting positive additionality from financial-led decision making. It is often defined as the framework through which contractors, developers and consultants quantify the additional benefits they will deliver alongside a contract or project. Apprenticeships created. Local supply chain spend. Volunteer hours. It is measured, weighted in tender evaluation and reported against. It serves a purpose, and the discipline that has grown up around it has done a great deal to professionalise how the sector accounts for community benefit.

But social value, by design, sits within a contractual envelope. It is the things you commit to deliver in addition to the core scope of work. Social impact is something else entirely. It is the full set of consequences a development has on the people and places around it, intended or otherwise. It can be substantial or marginal. It can be positive or negative. And critically, it occurs whether or not anyone has set out to measure it.

A scheme can score highly on social value commitments and still produce a negative social impact on the surrounding community. A scheme can also generate significant positive social impact without ever being captured in a social value framework, simply because the right decisions were taken at the right moments.

The case for taking impact seriously is not a moral one. It is a straightforward reading of where the market is moving

It is also why the labels people often reach for practitioners like me do not quite fit. That ambiguity is worth examining, because how we define this kind of role tells us something about how the industry understands its wider responsibilities, where emphasis is placed in decision-making across the development lifecycle, and who is seen as a regeneration practitioner in the first place.

Ours is a discipline that sits between design, commercial advise, and delivery routes. That sits between design, commercial advice and delivery routes; between technical expertise and people centred engagement. Those working in this space would be unlikely to define themselves as ESG professionals either. ESG, as it is practised in real estate, is largely a reporting and risk discipline. It serves a purpose, but it is concerned with what can be measured and disclosed, not with the texture of a place. I am not a regeneration specialist in the conventional sense. And it is not separate from commercial advisory either: every recommendation is tested against commercial reality.

What a social impact lens changes in practice

In practice, applying a social impact lens means asking a more demanding set of questions throughout a scheme’s development. What is being proposed commercially – and what are the opportunities and potential challenges of this sector, of this proposal when it comes to localising positive impact. What forms of value and experience will it create, and over what time horizon. Who needs to be involved in making impact happen. What are the second-order effects on the surrounding economy, on existing residents, on local supply chains. What harm might it do, and how is that being weighed against the benefit it will create.

It means challenging assumptions that are often baked into a brief before anyone has had a chance to interrogate them or before partners, funding mechanisms, and wider stakeholders have been defined. Frequently, relatively small shifts in how choices are framed or sequenced can unlock significantly more value overall. This is not about abandoning financial discipline or overriding commercial decisions, but about aligning them more carefully with opportunity. The role of someone in my position is to surface those choices while there is still time to make them differently.

It also requires a clear-eyed understanding of stewardship and legacy. Viability constraints are real, as are investor return requirements. Planning policy, construction inflation and infrastructure capacity all set limits that cannot be wished away. A serious conversation about place has to start from that reality. But stewardship lies in what is done within those limits. Choices made at the outset shape how a place functions, adapts and is cared for over time. They affect not just initial returns, but the resilience of an asset, the quality of experience it offers, and the burden or benefit it leaves to those who live and work there long after the consultant and development team has stepped away. Taking those consequences seriously is not an alternative to commercial discipline; it is part of exercising it responsibly.

Commercial discipline and community benefit are not opposites

There is a long-standing assumption in commercial property that thinking carefully about impact comes at the expense of returns. The evidence increasingly points the other way.

Places designed with a clear understanding of who they serve, and a clear-eyed view of the consequences they create, attract and retain occupiers more reliably. They sustain rental tone through cycles. They generate fewer disputes at planning, build trust with local authorities and create the kind of reputation that compounds across a portfolio. Investors with longer time horizons, including UK pension funds and sovereign capital, are increasingly explicit about wanting this kind of asset. The case for taking impact seriously is not a moral one. It is a straightforward reading of where the market is moving.

Why regeneration needs a broader definition of value

Underneath all of this sits a question I think the industry has been slow to confront. What is the built environment for, and which perspectives are treated as central rather than peripheral to serious regeneration conversations.

The question is not academic. It shows up in every planning application, every investment memorandum and every design review. The way we currently answer it is often inadequate. A socioeconomic statement listing GVA and jobs created is not, on its own, a meaningful account of public benefit. It is a proxy. The real measure lies in the experience a place creates, the opportunities it opens, the breadth of people who share in them and the harm it manages to avoid. We have the analytical tools to strategise and assess these things with rigour. The challenge is one of will rather than capability.

Answering this question seriously cannot rest with one person on a project team. It has to inform how clients are advised, how partners are selected, how schemes are underwritten and how value is defined. That is the integration challenge facing the sector, and in my view it is where the greatest distance still has to be travelled.

My ambition is that roles like mine become a standard discipline within the way commercial real estate is practised. Not a function bolted onto the side of a project, but a perspective embedded in how it is conceived from the start.

The built environment shapes how people live, work and move through their cities. The decisions we take in this industry have consequences, positive and negative, that outlast our involvement in them. Treating those consequences with the seriousness they deserve is, I would argue, what social impact and regeneration ought to mean. It is the work I am committed to at Avison Young, and the conversation I would welcome with others in the industry who share that view.

Jasmine Ceccarelli-Drewry is director of place strategy & social impact at Avison Young and is also on Building’s Regen Connect advisory panel