Future-proof urban development. Evaluating the impact of flexible assets in coping with the uncertain future conditions.

Project description

The project was funded by the Network City and Landscape (NSL) to investigate the impact of flexible designs in coping with the uncertain future offices demand. The potential growth in the home-office working mode poses a large uncertainty on the future offices demand. Flexible offices can help limiting the negative effect of this uncertainty by allowing future changes of use, though they often cost more than traditional offices. To ensure that the investments in flexibility is proportioned to the risk it minimize, the use of the real options method is proposed in this work for modelling the uncertainty of future space demand and estimating its effect on the stakeholders in the long-term. The method was tested on an example mixed-tenants office building in Zürich and the results presented at the external page AUM2020 conference. The project is now continuing with a follow-up study, aiming to expand the analysis with reference to both the scale, i.e. from the single building to the building portfolio, and the building use, from office only to multiple uses.