Urban planning & design

City strategies

We provide strategic urban development advice to public and private agencies, identifying the physical and spatial infrastructure needed to deliver social, economic and environmental regeneration across urban settlements. We take a two-step approach to ideas development: first, using world-leading techniques of urban evaluation, we ‘diagnose’ existing patterns of movement, value and crime and demonstrate how these are influenced by physical and spatial conditions; second, we develop planning concepts and run forecast models to show how these conditions will develop with the introduction of new urban infrastructure.

Area masterplans

Fitting new development into existing urban areas is our specialism. Working across scales, from the global to the local, our work spans what is often a divide between planning and architecture. We focus on masterplanning, either bringing together and leading multi-disciplinary teams or providing specialist design input to other lead consultants.

The tools we use to generate masterplan proposals are evidence-based and have been developed in partnership with the internationally renowned research programme at the Bartlett, University College London. Our approach is unique in the way that we take design inputs – in terms of layout, land use, density and transportation – and evaluate the combined effects of these on ‘critical’ outputs such as movement patterns, land value and urban safety.

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Public spaces

For over 25 years, Space Syntax has pioneered the development of new techniques for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of public spaces. Our work focuses on the fundamental relationship between physical design and socio-economic outcomes. We have developed world-leading methods for observing patterns of space use, analysing spatial layouts and forecasting future pedestrian activity patterns. We assess both movement and stopping activity and we work equally with the public and private sectors to deliver our advice.

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