What if a renovation, a regeneration project or a new neighbourhood started with the lives people lead today?How do you make the promise of wellbeing tangible in the public spaces people share every day?What if the people who have to live with a change were the first to imagine it?
Your Challenge
Housing associations, municipalities and developers increasingly promise wellbeing, and rightly so. Yet between a plan on paper and a neighbourhood where people feel at home lies the real work. In new developments, future residents have not arrived yet. In renovation, retrofitting or regeneration, they are very much there, often with little trust in the institutions making the plans. Support is only measured once the plan is already on the table. After completion, attention to how people live together often fades.
Our Solution
We connect the lived neighbourhood with the built neighbourhood. From the earliest phase until well after completion, we take the social side as seriously as the buildings. We work along our line of insight, strategy and action: we make visible what matters to people in a neighbourhood, translate that into choices residents recognise, and take the first steps together with them and the professionals already working in the area. This is how the promise of wellbeing becomes tangible in everyday life and in public space, and measurable.
We help housing associations, municipalities and developers with:
Support Before the Plan Is Fixed: Traditional participation mostly hears those who shout loudest. We map who wants what in a neighbourhood, and why. With instruments such as our Postcard from the Future, we also reach the pragmatic middle, the people who never come to a residents’ evening. There is often more support than expected, and you learn where the real concerns lie.
Room for What Changes: In renovation, demolition and new construction, or when different types of housing are mixed, people sometimes lose something dear to them. We take that loss seriously and give residents a real role in what comes in its place.
Participation of Future Residents: For new neighbourhoods and buildings, we also involve the people who will live there, before they have arrived. That way you build for current and future residents at once.
Living Together After Completion: Living together is hard work. A mixed building or a new neighbourhood only becomes a community once people get to know each other. We help shape those first months, from shared spaces and courtyards to the ground floor and the street.
Story and Concept: We translate a vision into a clear concept and a story that residents and decision-makers can get behind. We build that story on the identity of the neighbourhood and on what residents want to pass on. That way a plan gains support and attracts investment, before the work in the neighbourhood begins.
Social Programmes and Social Impact: With proven programmes such as Young City Makers and Body & Mind Gym, we give a development a social layer. Together with our research partners, we show what a project brings to the neighbourhood, measured in terms of broad wellbeing.
Let’s create human & kind cities together!
Contact us to explore how we can help bring your vision to life.
