We recently reached out to long-time supporter of UKREiiF, Samer Bagaeen, Technical Director at Arcadis, and Professor of Planning at the University of Kent, to gain his insights on diversity and inclusion, as well as Arcadis’ mission to drive a sustainable future and create inclusive communities. Discover more in the comment piece below.

“Hello there. My name is Samer Bagaeen. I am a technical director at Arcadis in London and professor of planning at the University of Kent where I have set up my second accredited town planning school. I am also a RICS board members, RTPI trustee, and design council expert. I have been working in partnership with the team at UKREiiF since our first gathering in Leeds in 2022.

I am grateful to the team at UKREiiF for the invite to share a couple of thoughts with you here.

The first is on diversity and inclusion, and the second is on Arcadis’s mission to accelerate a planet positive future. Arcadis is the world’s leading company delivering sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets. We are more than 36,000 people, in over 30 countries, dedicated to improving quality of life.

On diversity in and across the built environment professions, this is an area where I have spent a lot of time, passion, and energy to increase and attract young people from more diverse backgrounds into our professions.

I say our professions because, in additional to planning and surveying, I am heavily engaged across a number of other professions including engineering, architecture and construction.

Working with others, I am able to ensure that a network of cross-sector collaboration underpins the development and delivery of plans currently in place.

We are still at the beginning of the plan to increase equity, diversity and inclusion in the Built Environment sector. No ifs, no buts.

We need an ongoing commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion to address long-term and engrained inequalities in organisational systems, policies, processes and practices, as well as people’s conscious and unconscious biases and behaviours. EDI is not something that an organisation does when it beings together panels for UKREiiF, it is something it should always do as the norm.

UKREiiF, and the team there, has been leading from the front on this and I am confident this will long continue and grow.

At Arcadis, we are committed to diversity and inclusion through our internal award winning affinity groups. We have affinity groups across our business, for religion, for Pride, neurodiversity, looking at topics such as Equity for all, and many others. We put together all sorts of groups to advise us internally, to find out what do they want, and what would make people feel more welcome in our business.

Accelerating a planet positive future is central to all that we do. We are committed to ensuring that the solutions we develop with our clients are sustainable and inclusive, positively impacting the environment, society and economy and Improving Quality of Life.

We explore how we can collectively ‘invest in our planet’ by delivering nature-based solutions for people and the environment. All around the world, our work on projects like these maximise habitat creation and other environmental benefits such as flood resilience, erosion resistance and carbon sequestration.”

Samer Bagaeen, Technical Director at Arcadis, and Professor of Planning at the University of Kent