Tomorrow marks the start of MIPIM – Le Marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier – the global urban festival first held in sunny Cannes in March, 1990. An inaugural crowd of 3,000 property professionals representing 22 countries has grown into the over 20,000 from over 90 countries who descend on the seaside town. One of those 20,000 with be Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, who is attending the annual event for the first time.
I first went to MIPIM in 1997, having set up inward investment agency London First Centre (LFC), now part of London & Partners, in 1995. I have been back in many of the intervening years – not this one, sadly, though colleagues from LCA, the communications agency I founded, will be there in force.
Until 1997, London had been represented at MIPIM by two separate stands – one from the City of London Corporation and one from the since-dissolved London Docklands Development Corporation. They were split apart by a large, coordinated Paris stand. However by that year, through the tireless efforts of the late Barry McKeogh of Pipers, a proper “London model” was created. It has been at the beating heart of MIPIM ever since.
Some readers may be asking two simple questions. First, why does this event even happen? Second, why is Mayor Khan attending and why now?
To answer the first question one has to go back to the 1970s and early 1980s. Smaller cities than, say, London or Paris, interested in attracting businesses, jobs and economic growth, started to develop promotional campaigns, backed in some cases by financial support and by politicians keen to “sell their cities”.
Event services company Reed Midem (now RX Events) spotted this shift, hence the creation of MIPIM. London’s business and political leadership sensed it too. The value of promoting London properly was first referenced in a highly influential 1991 report by the London Planning Advisory Committee called London: World City, which led to the creation of LFC (more on that here).
And the reason MIPIM is so important today is that global businesses are mobile and, even in today’s high-tech world, like to have offices in key markets. Competition for inward investment has intensified and grown, as attendance at MIPIM demonstrates.
The answer to the second question is driven by a number of factors.
One is that the Mayor is championing growth in London’s economy – what he calls “good growth”. Only last week, he launched the London Growth Plan.
Another is that this aligns very clearly with the Labour government’s agenda. And although there is always a tendency to think that London is fine economically, the case needs to be made time and again that not all of London’s streets are paved in gold.
Furthermore Chancellor Rachel Reeves is desperate for growth and London remains key to achieving this. We can assume, therefore, that the government is supportive of the Mayor’s MIPIM trip. It will be interesting to see how joined up London is with UK plc.
In addition, the Mayor has witnessed the launch and early success of Opportunity London, a partnership between City Hall, The City, London Councils and over 70 private sector partners, enabled by growth agency London & Partners and New London Architecture. Opportunity London’s sole focus is attracting more investment to the capital.
Cynics who carp about our Mayor’s occasional international travel – and some will this time – should note a key obligation written into the Greater London Authority Act (1999) is for London’s Mayors to promote London’s economic development. Attending events like MIPIM, visiting emerging markets and important trading partners is part of the job. Were I to criticise Sir Sadiq at all, I’d simply say I’d like him to do more of it, not less.
And his programme in Cannes will be back-to-back. He’s been invited by RX Events to speak as part of the main programme. He will open the London stand, along with Shantanu Rajawat, representing London Councils and his own borough of Hounslow, which he leads. He will be joined, too, by Claire Holland, chair of London Councils, leader of Lambeth and co-author of the Growth Plan. Mayors from the likes of Rome, Madrid, Athens and many others will be there too.
MIPIM is a place to debate and discuss issues – with housing top of the list for many – but it is also where deals are struck and messages are pushed. When he was there, Ken Livingstone famously negotiated aspects of the Shard project. Boris Johnson used to love reminding his French hosts that the ninth largest French city was…London, due to its large number of French residents. And legend has it that the first proper discussion between future collaborators Google and King’s Cross developer Argent started next to a model of the King’s Cross project displayed at MIPIM,
And if I have one piece of advice for Sir Sadiq it this: find an hour during the trip to Cannes to wander round the stands of such as Paris, Berlin and Manchester. He’ll get a real feel for the way others are promoting themselves. London, great city that it is, cannot afford to rest on its laurels.
Robert Gordon Clark is a partner and senior advisor of LCA.
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