“Considerations for Managing Mega Developments”

An AIA Japan Lecture by Rick Broene

Bio

Rick Broene is a creative real estate developer, a recovering planning and design professional, and an occasional academic. He has demonstrated exceptional leadership in renowned global companies and institutions, directing major real estate development portfolios and with expertise in strategic planning and economic geography, master planning and public realm design projects, architecture and product design.

Rick has dual graduate degrees in architecture and urban planning from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for research on development patterns in rural Turkey. Rick worked for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) as a Director, leading mega-projects in the Middle East for three years. Subsequently he joined Emaar, the leading real estate developer in the Middle East, where he served as Director for Dubai Creek Harbour, Emaar’s largest mega development to date. Currently he is the Regional Director of Development & Design at Al-Futtaim, in which he is responsible for ensuring design excellence across the company’s extensive international portfolio of land holdings.

Lecture Brief

How does one build a city within 20 years for 200,000 residents?

Mega developments have played an increasingly prominent part of the global real estate landscape over the last few decades, especially in particular regions. The model yields exceptional opportunities to more holistically consider design at a range of scales and with a more direct and iterative feedback loop.

The lecture will provide an overview on mega developments, including the nature of participants, different development models, and developer objectives. It will briefly touch on different approaches to mega developments across the globe but will ultimately focus on examples from the Middle East, the world leader in this form of development.

The lecture will describe the process of mega development, covering feasibility assessments, master planning, along with the development and design of buildings and other assets. The talk will cover key challenges in mega developments with examples of development successes, failures and creative management techniques to deal with these. The insights shared will be especially valuable for architects and other creative professionals to better understand and add value to this unique form of city building.

Objectives

1. Increase general awareness on the nature of mega
2. Better enable professionals to address the needs of developers by highlighting typical objectives for mega
3. Prepare architects to better navigate the process of mega
4. Provide architects with insights on how to provide atypical and disproportionately high value to developers, through a better understanding of the criteria and complexities for development successes