6. Jonathan Smales, Executive Chairman at Human Nature

In this episode of Development Diaries, John is joined by Jonathan Smales, founder and CEO of Human Nature - the sustainable, community-focused developer behind Phoenix, a 685-home neighbourhood in Lewes, and one of the most unconventional figures in UK real estate.Jonathan's route into the built environment began not in a surveyor's office or a lecture theatre, but at Greenpeace, where as Managing Director in the late 1980s he oversaw membership growth from 40,000 to nearly 400,000 - and, almost by accident, commissioned one of the UK's first green commercial buildings. That act of making, rather than campaigning, changed everything.What followed was a decade leading the Earth Centre, reclaiming two South Yorkshire coal mines as a world centre for sustainability, before founding Beyond Green — a consultancy advising government, pension funds, the Olympics, and major new communities across the UK. The frustration of watching vision erode between the drawing board and the ground eventually led him to become the principal himself. Human Nature was the answer.The conversation covers Jonathan's circuitous but coherent path from the civil service to Greenpeace to brownfield regeneration; why real estate has both an ambition crisis and an identity crisis; what it really takes to push genuinely innovative placemaking through a system that wasn't built for it; and why the industry's greatest challenges - climate, nature, social division - are also its greatest opportunity. Jonathan also answers Chris Fleetwood's question from last episode on how the industry attracts the next generation of talent, and leaves a question of his own for the next guest.