This question sat at the centre of last week’s annual meeting of the Davos Baukultur Alliance in Bern, convened by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (Bundesamt für Kultur BAK ) in cooperation with the World Economic Forum.
More than 110 city leaders, investors, developers, planners, and policymakers came together around a shared challenge: aligning capital with long-term quality outcomes in the built environment.
Three themes stood out, each reflected across the work we do at BwB:
- Cities remain indispensable actors - not only as regulators, but as long-term stewards capable of creating the conditions for private capital to engage constructively.
- Resilience is beginning to be priced into investment decisions, but often too late in the development cycle to meaningfully influence quality outcomes.
- More patient capital is needed - particularly institutional capital that is willing to engage earlier, while planning and design decisions are still being made.
As BwB Vice President Lisa Engelen noted during the discussions:
“The gap between where quality decisions are made and where capital currently engages remains a structural challenge. Closing it requires public and private actors at the same table much earlier in the process.”
This is why bringing investors into project preparation is critical — so quality and financial viability are designed together, not negotiated apart.
Whether at the building or the neighbourhood scale, the central issue remains unchanged: decisions about quality are often made before capital can fully understand their long-term value.
This dynamic is explored further in BwB's work on place-based retrofit finance, tackling the same early-stage capital problem across the built environment.
To learn more about place-based retrofit finance, read our article published with World Economic Forum.