INTRO

Welcome to the Last Meter newsletter. This a service offered by BASE2 to customers, partners and collaborators to support service integration in real estate and cities.

And it hosts conversation in related areas - to support knowledge and skills development, planning and partnerships.

In addition to service integration, themes include:

• on-demand services, and their integration into homes and offices
• sustainable housing, consumption and lifestyles
• new formats of living and working
• urban efficiency including density, logistics, waste management
• platforms, digitalization, ecosystems, trust, scale
• retail, servicization, subscriptions & bundling
• urban morphology, planning and governance
• AEC (architecture, engineering construction), design, design tech, design-build verticalization, proptech

Professionals involved in these and related fields, and anyone who wants to design, build, sell or buy solutions in these areas is invited to subscribe and join the conversation.

The unifying interest of this newsletter - and conversation it hosts - is the evolution of the built environment to respond to complex challenges and changes, in other words how the above themes combine and create a better future. This will make it distinct from other conversations which focus only on individual strands.

The questions emerging from looking at how these forces combine include :

• Service integration is just part of an overall platformization and servicization of the built sector (see newsletter #1). What does a real estate company become in that world?
• Design tools and companies are starting to gather new technologies and cultures together around classic AEC: gaming, reality capture/AR/VR, robotic manufacturing and construction, software, cloud-based computation, and many more. Who will sell what to whom in what way for what result?
• Living and working formats are in flux, accelerated due to COVID, and new concepts are flooding the market. What should designers, developers and building users expect? Are we heading for mass standardization, mass customization or something else? How and when to adapt the existing property stocks?
• Retail, logistics, spatial and data regulation, sustainabilty, live-and-work styles are all evolving so fast the urban scale. How do city authorities and large-scale property developers plan, regulate, invest and manage so much change? What are cities becoming?

These questions are growing in number, complexity and importance: hopefully Last Meter Pespectives will help address them.

Content is presented in the following main formats

ANALYSIS | medium length (1500 words, <10m read) discussion of important issues, with guidance for action

EXPLAINERS | short (<1000 words, 5 min read) summary of important themes, explaining key technical issues

NOTES | very short (500 words, 3 min read) comments on contemporary issues, raising questions, not always offering answers!

BRIEFINGS | excerpts and serialized presentation of longer BASE2 material, available in full published formats to partners and customers.

GUEST CONTENT | input from experts and collaborators.

RESOURCES | Reference and development material, for BASE2 clients.

For newsletter #1 content, see the contents page.

For newsletter #2, here's the planned content (scroll horizontally on mobile):

Content here may be included in the Last Meter® and Space Engine™ products, and may also be presented in other contexts . This newsletter is in beta test in this form: comments welcome!

For questions and suggestions regarding subscription, collaboration or content, join the Discord server (discussion, help, feedback, community - subscription required), or email.