In high summer, our attention turns to south.

Even when the heat endures, the Mediterranean seems to have an allure like no other place on the planet.

is a seasonal Substack exploring the region’s relationship to heat through culture, edited by , with contributions that connect the dots across the territory and its diaspora. From Libya to Marseille, Beirut to Barcelona, some of our favourites include...

🧿
The brilliant Hannah S on Cairo’s superstitions
(so fascinating how this pervades the whole of the Mediterranean)

🤗
on the death and life of Mediterranean squares
(perhaps the most ancient form of social media)

❤️‍🔥 Christos Koukis on the Mediterranean climate coming to London,
and how the city might adapt (this one’s coming up later this month)

Most of the writers have a background in cross-cultural research, creative practice and futures. And the connections across this big body of water transcend national borders, political boundaries, languages, and religions.

But in the lazy days of summer, why does this content feel so urgent?

Because the Mediterranean is one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth—one of the places where climate change is being felt most intensely. While technical solutions abound the FT reports that 3 billion euros of damage has been done by wildfires in the region this year. Above all we also need a cultural understanding of how we relate to each other and what heat means to us to make it forwards.

Whether you’re reading this from the beach or back at the office, dive into an exploration of how heat connects this messy, beautiful, ancient territory — and how it must hold the key to its future.

In this climate, waterfront cities are rising. As the world heats up, we seek spaces to cool down — rivers, lakes, oceans, seas: we’ll take it.

We’re seeing a boom in waterfront living worldwide. But it comes with a cost — flood risk, uninsurable homes, ever higher property prices in highly unequal coastal towns. Living by the water is no longer just about its wonders. It’s about knowing how to read its temperament — its dark side as well as its joys. Something swimmers, sailors and surfers have hardwired in through spending time in, on, under and by the water.

Perhaps we all need a new water knowledge.
Enter watersports.

From a surf before school to a sunset swim, we know the beauty and freedom of waterside living. At The Place Bureau, many of us grew up this way — from the bracing south coast of England to the endless blue of the Greece’s Mediterranean shores. Swimming wasn’t just a hobby but a birthright. And from our very first project in London’s Silvertown, we’ve been championing play by the water as a way of life, and a mode of shaping the future of cities.

Reborn as a riviera

Silvertown, in London’s Royal Docks, boasts a body of water the size of New York’s Central Park. The team developing the site wanted to know how to work with such an amazing asset in a city that long aligned docks with industry and lacked confidence in being by the water. How could the site reinvent itself as a destination for leisure and waterside living?

We ran a three-day on-site charrette inviting hundreds of people to get closer to the water on a site that had never before been accessible to the public. We brought in brilliant water champions like Nathaniel Cole, founder of Swim Dem Crew, who understand how water can build community and confidence, inspiring the team to build a place where a culture of urban swimming could widen the appeal of a place for many more Londoners.

The result? Seven years on, a dedicated quarter, Pontoon Dock, designed by the team at Prior + Partners, will transform London’s relationship with its water through easy access to kayaking, paddle boarding, and swimming clubs. Unlocking watersports is core to adding value to a site with an estimated development value of around £5 billion. What was once the largest docks on the planet has been reborn as London’s Riviera, with watersports at its heart

Water can bring new life to a place. But we need to know how to handle it.

Life or death

Building confidence in the water can mean the difference between life or death.

In the record-breaking UK heatwave this May, at least 20 people died in the water in a single week — 14 of them children. Water safety experts called on the government to treat drowning as a public health disaster. As temperatures climb, people will head to the water whether we plan for it or not. The question is whether they arrive with the skills, the confidence and the infrastructure to survive it — and to love it.

The appetite is unmistakable. Regular open water swimming in the UK has more than doubled in under a decade — from around 266,000 people in 2016 to over 540,000 today — with more than four million adults taking to lakes, rivers and seas each year, a movement led overwhelmingly by women. What began as a lockdown lifeline has become a way of life: cold water as clarity, community and communion with the seasons.

And people aren’t only going to the water to cool down. They’re going to get well.

The big blue as medicine

Being in fresh or saltwater is brilliant for health — mental and physical. Working on the Isle of Wight’s Bay Area place plan, we came across the brilliant Swim the Wight, a social enterprise who aim to make swimming in the seas around the Isle of Wight as accessible, safe and enjoyable as possible. Among other events, they teamed up with the NHS to offer sea swimming to support cancer survivors — building community and solidarity, and finding respite in the big blue.

We’ve seen the same devotion in climates as cold as Snæfellsnes, Iceland, where we came across the wild swimming club of Stykkishólmur, slipping into Arctic waters as a matter of course. Wherever there is water and a way in, people will build a ritual around it — and then a community around the ritual.

This is where swimming goes bigger than sport: it starts a new civic infrastructure. Every swim spot generates its own gravity. In cold climates, saunas and changing huts, places to warm up and linger, coffee vans and clubhouses, the rituals of towelling off and talking. In warmer climes, spaces to shade, restaurants, cafes, and nightlife. These are third places in the truest sense: free-flowing, intergenerational, no membership required beyond the willingness to get in. The knock-on effects ripple outwards — better mental health, stronger social ties, safer waters watched over by the people who use them daily.

And where swimmers gather in numbers, the city around them starts to change.

The city learns to swim

Swimming has been the signal of transformation in Copenhagen’s harbourfront — a symbol of the city having cleaned up its act, and of the new role the harbour took in generating income and civic pride. Taking Danish design-eye to new harbour baths, brought an symbolism to the architecture of the everyday. In June, we returned to that harbour to run our Waterfront Worldbuilding workshop at Future Days Festival with The School of Critical Design — inviting people to tune into the waterside, explore future scenarios, and broadcast back from the futures they imagined. A little cold to swim on that day, but kayakers and sailors bobbed by.

What Copenhagen symbolises, Dublin is turning into a regional strategy. Alongside other watersports, wild swimming could be at the heart of an entire coastal economy, attracting visitors from all over the world to match fierce local pride. We’re working with Fáilte Ireland and Group Nao to reposition the city as Dublin’s Capital Coast — exploring how design can improve the existing sea swimming infrastructure, where hardy locals still jump in at the first sign of sun before a dark cloud reappears. The silver lining? A seascape redolent with rainbows.

Not every city has it so easy. In working harbours, swimming remains a genuine challenge: in Bristol’s Western Harbour we worked with local communities on the vision, including watersports champions — and while sailing and rowing are possible, safe swimming is still out of reach in such busy waters, even as the public lobby for it.

It’s perhaps fitting that staying fluid and flexible can be a great way to test new futures for waterside sites. Watersports can be a brilliant approach to meanwhile use — think of the King’s Cross Pond Club, a 40m natural pool that drew crowds to a now well-loved site while it was still under construction. We imagine something similar in central Southampton, where we worked on the Renaissance Masterplan with Prior + Partners. The city was once home to a huge, central much-loved lido, closed in the 1970s. Emblazoned with motto ‘SWIM TO BE FIT, BE FIT TO SWIM AND BATHE IN WATER FIT TO DRINK’, its memories offer an enormous opportunity to bring water, health, and leisure back again, to city centre.

The model is thriving elsewhere. Sea Lanes in Brighton — the UK’s first National Open Water Swimming Centre — has just brought its floating 50-metre pool to London’s Canary Wharf, opening this June in Eden Dock: natural water, year-round swimming, saunas on the boardwalk, skyscrapers overhead. Coined as London’s new oasis for open water swimming, sauna and social hangouts by the water, its proof that even the most corporate waterfront can learn to take the plunge.

Which raises the question sitting underneath all of this: who does the water belong to?

Sovereignty over seas

Sovereignty over our seas is a form of self-governance — and of community health. In Adur & Worthing, coastal towns on England’s south coast, our work with Ideas Alliance and local people to imagine their future surfaced a clear priority — not housing, not transport, but a clean sea, so that people can swim, surf and paddle again. Read more about that work here.

Swimmable water, it turns out, isn’t an amenity. It’s a right. And it’s a right that cities all over the world are beginning to reclaim — each in their own dialect.

Postcards from a swimmable planet

Barcelona wrote the founding myth. For the 1992 Olympics, the city tore down the industrial waterfront that had walled it off from the Mediterranean and built beaches where the barriers had been — turning the city to face the sea for the first time in a century, and rewriting its entire identity and economy in the process. Every waterfront regeneration since owes it a debt.

Paris just pulled off the sequel. After a €1.4 billion cleanup for the 2024 Olympics, the Seine reopened to public swimming in summer 2025 for the first time in a hundred years — around 100,000 people took the plunge in that first season, and this summer the three bathing sites are back, with more along the Marne. Paris’ canals went wild with swimmers in the latest heatwave, establishing this as a city that dived right into this new way of life.

New York is still mid-stroke. The + POOL, a plus-shaped floating pool designed to filter East River water through its own walls, has been fifteen years in the making: a saga of permits, protocols and sheer stubbornness. The pilot pool is in the water now, aiming to welcome swimmers by 2027. Floating river baths were common in New York until pollution closed them in 1938; + POOL is less an invention than a homecoming.

Seoul reveals the democratic version. Every summer, six open-air pools and water playgrounds open along the vast network of Han River parks — a couple of thousand won (under $5) to get in, night swimming under the city lights, as summer evenings are becoming prime swimming hours. Millions of citizens cooling off in the heart of a megacity.

And you? Where do you see the future of swimmable cities being written — the harbour bath, the river pool, the reclaimed dock, the campaign that hasn’t yet won? Tell us in the comments where we should go next, goggles in hand..

Swimmability is the new walkability

If you thought walkability was essential to urban futures, in a world that’s getting hotter — think swimmability.

That’s the conversation we’ll be diving into at the Swimmable Cities European Forum in Basel, 11–12 August, where The Place Bureau’s Partnerships Lead Sarah Farwell joins the Urban Strategy workshop alongside the City of Basel’s Head of Spatial Planning, Mideri Architects, Urban Agency and Flussbad. We’ll be sharing our research and live projects in waterfront cities and regions around the world.

Life in the city heating up? Come find your cool with us in Basel. Or if your city is ready to embrace the water, let’s dive in together. Get in touch and comment below

This summer, we’ve witnessed both, and felt their charge run through the city streets.

In London, as Arsenal seized the Premiership and fell agonisingly short in the Champions League — champions of England nonetheless — we heard car horns roar, flares rise and flags wave all over North London. Strangers turned in the street and whooped elated: “Arsenal have won you know!!!” as if to explain the sudden outpouring of joy swashing around the city. Girls, boys, friends, families, priests, policemen — as millions made it out to the parade to party hard, it seemed as though everyone was an Arsenal fan. North London Forever.

Weeks later, across the pond, outfits switched to blue and orange as the Knicks roared toward what became their first NBA championship in 53 years. No one celebrates like a New Yorker, and this week the city proved it: ticker tape over Broadway, an estimated two million fans lining the Canyon of Heroes. Down in the crowd, one fan’s now-viral cry — “My Mayor’s Still Muslim, My Bagels Still Jewish, The Pope’s on our side, Knicks in Five” — became the city’s accidental anthem: every faith, borough, closet, claiming the same team as theirs.

Imagine if we could bottle that passion and pride — the open sense of something that’s for all of us, that feeling of shared joy — and pour it back on our streets.
Not once in 22 or 53 years, but every single day?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani described that feeling taking hold in real time during the Knicks’ run: neighbours inviting neighbours over, strangers high-fiving each other on the subway platform, conductors singing out their stops, bus drivers dancing behind the wheel. That’s not a parade. That’s a city, for one electric stretch, working the way citymakers always promise it could. In London, and in New York, our streets have not felt this alive for years.

It’s easy to roll eyes at the eye-watering investments in club football or NBA teams that seem counter to the big social and economic problems we face right now, and the cash-strapped public sector. But what if our cities didn’t need to compromise? What if clubs found ways to design in civic pride, to contribute more to the communities and cities that they call home?

Those building cities often struggle to build community — chasing the quick win over the long, unglamorous investment. But Mikel Arteta’s “Trust the Process” was exactly that: years of patient, unglamorous building before a single trophy arrived. Same story at the Garden — Leon Rose signed Jalen Brunson in 2022 on a deal many people thought was an overpay; three years later it’s the bargain that bought New York a championship. Arsenal and the Knicks didn’t win overnight. They built grassroots fanbases slow and steady, long before either club lifted a trophy — and made sure supporters felt like the starting five, not passive spectators in the stands.

How can we design city spaces to inspire emotion? What can citymaking learn from sport to do so? How might we all win for our neighbourhood? When it comes to shaping that neighbourhood, who is our dream team?

Citymaking has always sold the endgame — the render, the ribbon-cutting, the finished building, unveiled like a trophy. Arteta never sold the trophy. He sold the process, for years, with a belief that it would take them to the top. That’s the real lesson for anyone shaping a neighbourhood, a high street, a regeneration site: stop designing the ending. Design the process. Trust people to believe in something before it’s finished — the way North London, and all five boroughs did this summer.

Because when the trophy finally comes, it was never just the team that wins. As Knicks legend Carmelo Anthony put it, watching it all unfold from a parade float:
“The whole city won.”

—

Liked this take on sports and cities? Stay close — more from the London-team @The Place Bureau and NYC-based Noble across the summer.

#Placemaking #Citymaking #UrbanDesign #CivicPride #DesignAsProcess #CityCulture #SportAndCity #UrbanLexicons #PlaceFutures #Sports #NYC #London
#ArsenalFC #Knicks

We are living through a significant reorganisation of social life. Families move more than they used to, typically for work, or affordability. The anchors that once held communities together, such as schools, places of worship, the union hall, and social associations have, for many people, faded or disappeared entirely. The traditional third spaces that structured daily belonging are no longer available..

In that gap, sports have filled a void.

It’s now more common than ever to have the morning run group, the HYROX circuit, or the pickleball ladder league. Across cities, we are watching sports grow as the dominant engine of new social connection. Endurance events, and group training and wellness formats are growing, and they are filling both physical and relational spaces.

These communities work because they’re designed, consciously or not, around the same principles that once made the social club function: regularity, low barriers to entry, and a group identity formed through participation.

Sport gives you somewhere to belong and a reason to show up.

What makes someone feel like a place was made for them? What keeps them coming back? What makes them bring someone else? At The Place Bureau and Noble, our work explores these questions as we search for opportunity for improvements.

These are empathy questions before they are insights and design solutions. Below are four cases where sport, space, and community intersect, each one illuminating something we’ve learned about how to design for belonging at the personal scale.

1. Designing for Confidence

The Place Bureau co-designed Gatti Park, a new sports facility in London’s King’s Cross, in partnership with Central Saint Martins and Creative Arts Organisation Wood Street Walls for landowner Related Argent.

The original brief was focused on creating a space that would welcome women and girls. As practitioners who play sport ourselves, we knew we had to push past this framing. The right question wasn’t ‘how do we design for a demographic?’ It was: what actually prevents people from feeling confident enough to use public space in the first place?

What our creative workshops revealed went beyond a list of gender-specific amenities. We noticed the invisible thresholds that signal to certain people that this space was made for someone else. The absence of seating that lets you pause before committing. Sightlines that put you on display before you’re ready. Programmes and dynamic signage that assume prior experience.

Remove those barriers, and you don’t only design a women’s space; You design a better space — a space one that gives everyone the confidence to show up and play.

WHAT IF… Public space didn’t demand confidence, but built it?

HOW WE THINK
Inclusive design isn't a demographic brief, it's an interrogation of invisible thresholds. We start by asking who feels permission to enter, and what the space is communicating before anyone steps inside.

WHAT YOU CAN APPLY
Audit your next project for its 'invitation', the moment before someone commits to participating. What signals does the space send? Who is implicitly centred? Removing a barrier is often more powerful than adding a feature.

2. Reclaiming Forgotten Space and Making it Safer

For those who grew up skateboarding in New York in the 1990s, the Brooklyn Banks wasn’t just a park. Tucked under the Brooklyn Bridge, the brick embankments, ledges and rails were a proving ground. No security chasing you away, no coaches, no entry fee.

When the city boarded it up in 2004 as a bridge construction storage area, it silenced a space that mattered to skateboarders and the wider community. A decade later, Rosa Chang, Steve Rodriquez and their partners formed a coalition to reopen the space. They took the time through workshops and community forums to learn from locals in Chinatown, the Seaport, and local NYCHA buildings about what the park meant to them and its potential. The plaza was a needed open space in a cluttered downtown and an efficient way to walk between a few adjacent neighborhoods. As skateboarders were always around, locals felt safer with a human presence under the dark plaza passageways of the bridge.

The output was re-imaging the nine-acre site as Gotham Park. A mixed-use public space designed to serve multiple local groups. This included open spaces for children, seating areas for students on lunch breaks, gardens for locals and of course the legendary skateboard elements.

The team from Noble contributed to workshops and taught students from the local UA Maker High School methods to research and design obstacles and park amenities. Improvements included flood-resilient plant beds that double as skatable obstacles. The restored Banks themselves, reopened in 2024 in phases.

The research backs what the community already knew: activated public space is safer public space. Skateboarding has always been an act of reading the built environment differently, finding flow in spaces that weren’t designed for it.

WHAT IF… Reclaiming a forgotten space could stitch a community together and make it safer in the process?

HOW WE THINK
Over time, the communities who use informal spaces understand a space in different ways from the original designers. Thinking through how a space may adapt and allowing for flexibility can help expand its potential.

WHAT YOU CAN APPLY
Before you brief a design team, map the direct and indirect users of a place. Who is already there? What are they doing? What trends might impact future conditions? That knowledge should shape the programme, in addition to the consultation process.

3. The Community Centre as a Prototype

Many of us remember the after-school recreation centres. Across the globe, decades of underfunding has minimized what planners now call the third space: not home, not work, but the informal infrastructure of community life.

In Amsterdam, the organisation OVER, initially built around after-school tutoring, has been tasked with reimagining the community centre. Under the leadership of Gijs Hieff, their model is instructive for how they connect with students and communities.

They applied similar methods that teachers and tutors use to better understand the needs in select neighborhoods. They met with families, community leaders, small business owners and elected officials. Along the way they gathered a range of perspectives from new immigrants to established locals.

What they found was that sport, particularly football, functions as one of the fastest social lubricants. A low-barrier, cross-cultural language that works for longtime residents and newer arrivals alike. You learn your neighbours’ names on a pitch in a way you rarely do in other settings. These insights are helping shape strategies to get community approvals, raise funding to pilot new spaces and social programs.

The decline of recreational infrastructure reveals a question of social cohesion. These spaces were always about more than sport. They were about having somewhere to belong.

Most cities already know what these spaces are worth. The funding now needs to catch up.

WHAT IF… The community centre was a prototype?

HOW WE THINK
Sport is a delivery mechanism for something fundamental: the conditions for social trust. When we program a space around participation rather than performance, we’re designing for the relationships that form around the session and after consultants roll off the project.

WHAT YOU CAN APPLY
Consider the non-sport moments in your favorite sports facility. The changing room, the café, the car park, the waiting area, the stadium exits. These are where community forms. Program and design them with the same intention you bring to the field.

4. When Personal Movement Becomes Civic Infrastructure

Your morning run generates data. Aggregated with a billion others, that data tells a story and can become something totally new.

Strava Metro anonymises and aggregates activity from runners and cyclists worldwide into heat maps showing where people actually move through cities. Urban planners in Glasgow, Copenhagen, and Portland use this data to decide where to build bike lanes, improve lighting, and locate facilities. Personal optimisation offers a new way to shape how public funds are allocated.

This is one of the most consequential examples of civic-scale design emerging from personal behaviour. And it raises questions we can’t look away from.

Platforms like Strava make trackable what is also shareable: road running, road cycling, structured fitness, or even laps at the local pool. But pickup basketball in the park? Skateboarding? Zumba on the waterfront? Some data has been invisible to the algorithm and therefore absent from the data informing infrastructure decisions. Algorithmic place-making rewards certain bodies, certain activities, certain routes. Others are rendered illegible to the systems deciding where investment goes.

At The Place Bureau, we treat this as a design problem and not a technology critique.. If platforms selectively render certain movements visible and others not, what methods do we need to capture the full picture? How do we ensure that informal, community-led, and culturally specific forms of movement aren’t systematically excluded when infrastructure decisions are made?

Data is a powerful tool. But it only tells you about the people who were already counted.

When does your fitness routine stop being about you and start being civic infrastructure? Whose movement counts when platforms decide what gets built?

WHAT IF… The way you moved through a city said more about your identity than your zip code?

HOW WE THINK
Data reveals patterns among populations that are already visible to platforms. Our job is to ask who isn't in the dataset, and to design research methods that make invisible movement legible, before the brief is written and the budget is set.

WHAT YOU CAN APPLY
When using movement or behavioural data to inform a project, ask explicitly: which communities are underrepresented in this dataset? What forms of activity are structurally excluded? Commission supplementary research that is qualitative, ethnographic, and community-led to close that gap before it gets built in.

What’s Next

This post is the first in our series, exploring sport through three lenses, or layers, from the individual to the global. Each realm connects to the one before, with personal behaviours shaping neighbourhood design, and attracting investment and community involvement. In our next post, we’ll focus on neighborhood planning and stadium innovation opportunities.

We’re convening designers, planners, team operators, and practitioners for a virtual workshop in Spring 2026.

If you’re shaping cities through sport, or shaping sport through cities, this is your conversation.

Sign up at here to receive the full series and workshop details.

Brought to you by The Place Bureau and Noble.

Subscribe now

and it arrives unevenly, through heatwaves, habits, through regulations and workarounds, through things we plan for and things no one saw coming.

But can you really predict the future? Not really, no, but you can prepare. You can be ready so you don’t have to get ready.

And that’s where worldbuilding becomes useful. And what is worldbuilding? If you are curious, have a read of this to get a flavour.

When we were invited to write Athens 2040—an article for Henning Larsen’s SKALA Magazine, returning for a limited edition issue— we imagined this city fourteen years ahead. And we used worldbuilding to get there.

Fourteen years. Not too far. Not too near.

A middle ground between plausible and futuristic. The aim was never to design a future Athens, but to ask what conditions might shape daily life if current tensions are allowed to play out? And what happens when climate pressure, ingenuity, global capital and local culture collide?

This is a look inside the making of that world.

The fragments, images and ideas that didn’t fit in the magazine. What rules we set early on. What assumptions we argued over. Moments where we intentionally didn’t polish the story. Think of it as the scaffolding of the article. And what is possible when imagination is allowed to do real work.

Setting the stage.

We began with observation. Patterns already present. Signals hiding in plain sight. With the future clash of West vs South we didn’t want to simplify Athens. We wanted to boost it into 4K, sharp, clear, precise, heat on concrete, shade on balconies, noise, friction, life in motion.

We started by choosing a lens. We picked a tension. And we exaggerated that.

Working class area vs seaside affluence. And before we start to imagine, we went back to the city, we photographed it, we listened to it. Balconies, rooftops, workshops, parks, the old airport, the stroll at the seaside, the everyday things. Things that usually never make the renderings. A real immersion.

During that time, we produced Field Notes — A West Side Story, a separate piece rooted entirely in our walks through West Athens—a way of paying attention before drawing conclusions.

And then we began to speculate.

Following our Worldbuilding methodology, we tried to cover the 4 blocks of the future world:

• Protagonists—Who is it for?

• Places—What does it look and feel like?

• Practices—What happens here?

• Props—What is essential in this world?

And center them around a provocation. A What if…

2040 West Side

What if the absence of architects didn’t kill design—and instead liberated it? Who will design then?
What if craft outlives optimisation? Will today’s craftsmen thrive?
What if AI didn’t erase creativity, but amplified those already improvising?
What would their workshops look like?
What if the most future-ready city was the one that never waited for permission? How would people adapt?
What if the future doesn’t belong to the most elegant design, but to the most hacked one? Would functionality be the new aesthetic?
If architecture is meant to last millennia, what happens when the city must adapt weekly? Would the absence of “designers“ make adaptation easier?

DIY jet-fueled by AI, workshops working 24/7, 3D printers are the new airfryers, they are everywhere, heat doesn’t allow direct skin contact with the sun, DIY heat repellent clothing must be worn, balconies become green labs, craftmanship is priceless in the era of AI, people in the West are flush with cash now, the wealth stack simply changed the menu, not the method.

2040 South Side

What if luxury is not aspiration, but insulation? What if the real privilege is staying untouched?
What happens when calm, cool, and clean become exclusive assets?
Is there any room for self expression?
What if the future of comfort depends less on innovation and more on ownership? Is Loro Piana the answer?
What if sustainability becomes a premium buffer, not a shared condition?
Will nature become another service?
Is the future shaped more by those who adapt—or those who can afford to wait? Which future would you pick?

Global capital residents, wealth is designed to slow things down, heat is engineered away, parks work as climate buffers, high fashion boutiques, glass towers, lush parks, no-friction, long horizons, evenings along the marina, systems are visible here, real estate deals come with security and peace of mind.

We don’t see worldbuilding as fantasy.

With worldbuilding we train our ability to deal with complexity, to notice signals early and to argue about futures when there’s still room to change them. Athens 2040 is one example of how we work. We build worlds to think through places, not escape them. To surface assumptions. To pressure-test ideas. To make futures discussable.

If you’re interested in using worldbuilding as a tool—for strategy, workshops, or place-led projects—get in touch.

The future don’t wait.

If this sparked something, leave a comment. We read every one.

Leave a comment

Where was most memorable?

We travelled, imagined, presented, workshopped, and shaped projects across different geographies and contexts. Our thinking stretched, our tools matured and evolved, and our methodologies deepened with a renewed commitment to design
as a strategic, imaginative act.

In Parma, Italy, we were thrilled to see the Ospedale Vecchio brought to life, a civic space with contemporary art at its heart, reimagined for tomorrow. A roundtable with some of the world’s most respected museum directors and artists launched the open call for a cultural manager to lead the first phase of ParCO, the city’s new institute for contemporary art. This continues our partnership with Nebbia, and our work on reimagining museums and art institutions as positive spaces of co-creation and civic imagination, helping cities to navigate the future in the face of the climate crisis.

This was the year we took the Collaborative Place Toolkit to the max (at least for 2025). From capturing dreams, wishes and aspirations on the UK’s South Coast in Adur & Worthing with Ideas Alliance, to exploring what neighbourhoods designed for disappearance might look like at the Bodies of Water symposium at Liverpool Biennale for UP Projects; from imagining how people might live and work along the coastlines of the Isle of Wight through the Forever Island project (longlisted for the Davidson prize 2025), to speculating on what Athens could become by 2040 for the relaunch of Henning Larsen’s SKALA magazine after 30 years.

Fondation USM Futures Lab 2025 took us to Sharjah, UAE, exploring the region as a place with a clear vision for the future, an appetite for prototyping tomorrow, and an incredible balance of rooted tradition and leading-edge technology. It’s a part of the world we’ll be partnering more with in 2026, as a place that is building the future on their terms. This is our second year of partnership with For Everyday Life, build out future worlds and define briefs for design partners to respond to. This year, our design partners were PlayLab Inc, Imagination of Things and IDK—exploring futures based on a radical reset in the city driven by a moratorium on buildings; learning reinvented with play at is heart in response to a hard reset of the job market; and a new model for reimagining personal meaning as AI drives new ways of working and rewires our lives.

And most importantly, we tapped deeper into the idea of love for place.
Research that has been forming over more than twenty years—also the basis of the talk we were commissioned to give in Cannes, for BOND Emea—is now manifesting into a book. Rosanna is shaping up The Love Language of Place—expect more in 2026.

What themes marked your year?

Some themes and ideas followed us all year long—returning in different places, through different projects.
Futures thinking became a way of noticing fundamental shifts: where abundance is emerging, where scarcity is felt, and how both are reshaping everyday life.
Coastal communities taught us about adaptation, fragility and resilience.
Designing for confidence asked how space can go beyond safety to empower rather than instruct or just visually please. We spent time exploring the impact of sport to shape places—not just as activity or spectacle, but as culture, ritual, social infrastructure, community-building, identity-shaping, and collective energy. When people gather, train, compete, belong. We don’t see these as themes we “covered“ but rather practices we trained—slowly and repeatedly.
Designing for love asked how places can hold care, belonging and meaning — and hold us. And how important these will become in this world of upheaval and transformation.

What did you workshop?
Who did you speak to?
What did you share?

This was a year shaped by gatherings—moments where people came together to think, question, discuss, disagree, test and reframe what place can be.
We applied our worldbuilding methodology to hundreds of people worldwide.

For this year’s Liverpool Biennale, at the Bodies of Water Symposium we explored how regenerative public art can help us envision and build the future, asking questions like:
🖼️ What if public artworks were prototypes for new ways of living?
🌊 What if migration followed rivers instead of borders?

At the London School of Architecture, we worked with 50 masters students pushing futures past the familiar horizon, training them in futures literacy and worldbuilding, and asking:
📐What if architecture wasn’t made just by architects anymore?

In Chicago we were invited to speak at SEGD Xlab Offsite, where we brought together designers, artists, and creative practitioners to explore how experience shapes belonging, and how creativity behaves under conditions of control and chaos.

New York opened conversations on urban futures with the NYC Department of Urban Design and Civic Engagement during New York Climate Week. London invited us to apply Urban Lexicons methodologies with the Calthorpe community garden during a festive session; and at Gatti Park, working along Wood Street Walls, we co-designed the skate / basketball court with Central Saint Martins students and young people for Argent Related—ideas that didn’t just inform the work, but actively shaped the space itself.

Along the way we were invited on podcasts about Shaping Places and Engaging Communities with the Future of Places and Nature.

This year we also hosted our first Regenerative Roundtable in the studio with Dr. Charles Curtin—over from New Mexico, USA—an open, generous discussion between friends of The Place Bureau from different backgrounds, exploring regeneration as a shared practice rooted in care, listening, and long-term thinking in the face of landscapes in crisis.

All this reminded us that collaboration is always a stance, never just a moment. And that creativity grows strongest when it moves between people, places and practices—connecting our network in the Isle of Wight to New Mexico to Rajasthan and beyond.

Where did you travel? What did you learn?

From Chicago to New York, Parma to Torino, Cannes to Nice, Athens to Edinburgh, Venice to A Guarda, Liverpool to Sharjah, Copenhagen to Bournemouth, Plymouth to Bern, Zürich, Milan and back again—this was a year shaped by movement, and places. Many places.

Travel always widens our perspective. Each city taught us something different about belonging, ambition, resilience, and the quiet or loud ways people shape the places they inhabit.

These journeys are our second studio—a moving classroom that keeps reshaping how we think, listen, and imagine.

What did you research?
What did you create?
What did you author?

Alongside projects and travel, we continued to build a body of work that lives beyond a single brief.

Writing, research and publishing is our way to pause, reflect, and make sense of what we were encountering on the ground. Field Notes continued as a space for observation capturing fragments, signals and stories that don’t always fit neatly into a project, but shape how we think and work. Articles and essays—including MEANDER and SKALA magazine—allowed us to test ideas in public and share evolving thinking.
We don’t treat these outputs as side projects, they are part of our practice.

Who did you value?
Who did you miss?

Our thinking is shaped by people as much as by place.
And none has shaped it more profoundly than Marcus Willcocks.

Marcus was a force of connection, generosity and grounded practicality. An amazing collaborator and a wonderful friend.

Working with him reminded us that placemaking at its best is attentive, relational work: listening deeply, noticing what others overlook, and building spaces where people feel seen. His approach—humble, rigorous, creative and full of humanity—stays with us long after workshops end and sketches are packed away.

His influence runs, and will run, through our way of thinking, projects and in most of our 2025 moments. The way we co-designed with young people at Gatti Park, thats Marcus right there. How we thought about neighbourhood identities for Forever Island, there’s Marcus there too. In our commitment to communal authorship across projects, you’ll find Marcus there too.

Marcus taught us that transformation happens through care—one conversation, one gesture, one shared moment at a time.

His passing this year was a profound loss for many. But his way of working— generous, playful and people-first—continues to guide how we show up. Our notes from this year would not be complete without honouring him.

What will you carry forward?

A clearer sense of how we want to work— and why it matters. The world is changing, and at times it can feel unsettling. But drawing on our skills to anticipate the future, and our well of creativity, we know we have all it takes to dive into the years ahead.

This was the year we integrated more design thinking into everything we do.
In its simplest form: a way of understanding people, exploring possibilities, testing ideas, working visually and iteratively, and shaping change with intention. That helps us slow down when needed, zoom out when the picture is too small, and prototype futures before they arrive.

That was our 2025.

How was yours? Let us know in the comments!
Where was most memorable?
What themes marked your year?
Who did you speak to?
What did you share?
Where did you travel?
What did you learn?
Who did you value?
Who did you miss?

…and what will you carry forward in 2026?

Leave a comment

London, Liverpool, Parma, Venice, Chicago, NYC, Torino, Bern, Zurich, London

Just a few weeks, but so many textures, rhythms, ideas, thoughts and provocations for the future. Through conversations, worldbuilding workshops and some through simply being there.

Why worldbuilding?

Because every place carries multiple futures within it. Not just the one we plan for, but the ones we dream, fear, remember, and reinvent together.

At The Place Bureau, we use worldbuilding to unlock the collective imagination — to make space for many futures at the same time.

What is “worldbuilding”?

Worldbuilding is how we stretch the edges of what feels possible.
We always start with a provocation — a spark, a shift, a signal of change. A question. A “What if…?”
Then we build worlds not as abstract ideas but as lived places — with their own cultures, objects, characters, and atmospheres.
We don’t predict the future. We unlock our imagination and train for it.

Then we break the world down into four fundamental blocks to make it real, tangible, and shareable. A simple method that turns conversations into worlds.

Each block is a lens — and together they form our world.

Practices — What happens here?
Rituals, events, traditions, routines.

Protagonists — Who is it for?
Personalities, subcultures, social tribes.

Props — What is essential in this world?
Keepsakes, objects, commodities, talismans.

Places — What does it look and feel like?
Atmosphere, landscapes, spaces, lighting, textures.

Worldbuilding is a way to surface values, hopes, tensions — not blueprints.

3 Cities, Many Futures

Why Liverpool, Chicago and New York?

Liverpool for Bodies of Water Symposium: Regenerative Art Practice, where we explored design for disappearance.
Chicago for SEGD, where seamless control met creative chaos.
NYC for the NYC planning Department, and where water can become the City’s Architect.

Each city carries distinct urban textures, histories, and signals of change.

They’re not case studies. They’re worldbuilding laboratories — used in workshops to unlock new ways of seeing.

Meet the 8 Worlds, and the 8 Futures

Across workshops, conversations, and collages, participants generated eight worlds — some desired, some cautionary, all revealing something true about how we live and might live together.

1. 🌿 What if every neighbourhood was designed for disappearance — fading in favour of nature?

2. 🖼️ What if public artworks were prototypes for new ways of living?

3. 🌊 What if migration followed rivers instead of borders?

4. 🌀 What if the world valued experimentation through creative chaos?

5. 🧭 What if the world valued experimentation through seamless control?

6. 🤝 What if urban infrastructure was designed on trust?

7. 🧬 What if neighbourhoods were designed for adaptation?

8. 💧 What if water was NYC’s primary architect?

Each world was built through the World building Blueprint from the Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit:

We don’t build these worlds around current rules, ideas, planning, theory. We build them to see further, dream, speculate.

What we can learn from Worldbuilding

• It can bring to the surface invisible forces (power, joy, inequality, agency).

• It gives shape and a tangible feeling to futures that otherwise stay abstract.

• It invites unexpected protagonists into the story.

• It reminds us that cities are not fixed — they’re rehearsed, they’re lived.

• It makes us dream.

• It’s a way to prototype the futures we want to live in — and the ones we want to avoid.”

The Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit

Worldbuilding is one of the many tools within our Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit — a set of methods designed to enable anyone to get involved in collectively defining and designing places for tomorrow.

We’ve drawn together tools from filmmaking, trends forecasting, service design, community engagement and meditation to enable everyone to bring futures and foresight practices, greater empathy and creativity into the way we think about places.

“This is one of the community engagement tools that we teach students in the UCL postgraduate module ‘Civic Design: Community Participation and Co-production’. The tools proved to be easy to use, easy to adapt to different contexts and briefs, engaging and thought provoking.”

Dr Pablo Sendra
Associate Professor in Planning and Urban Design, The Bartlett UCL

Join the Conversation

Because Worlds aren’t built alone. The more voices, the richer the map.

Comment below: Which world did you identified the most with?
What would be your provocation, your “What If…?”
Unlock your imagination for the future.

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Peristeri — a place that doesn't try to be anything that it’s not. It is what it is — flashy, trashy, loud, real, beautiful, intense, quiet, fun, raw. An Athenian suburb that’s all heart and no filters. It’s one of the biggest municipalities in Greece — and one with serious character.

Don't look at this journal as a tourist guide. Think of it more as a hometown tale.

As a portrait of its people, a moodboard of colors and textures, a field diary from the west side of Athens — a joyride through its streets and a glimpse of the life lived there.

Peristeri in English means pigeon.

But it also means: Anthoupoli, Nea Zoi - Aspra Chomata, Lofos Axiomatikon, Tsalavouta, Nea Kolokinthous, Viamax, Chrisoupoli, Ano Lofos, Bournazi, Agios Ioannis Theologos, Agios Antonios, Agios Ierotheos, Agia Triada, Zoodohos Pigi, Kipoupoli. The neighborhoods.

It’s car culture, it’s playful, DIY postmodern, match day, nature, hangouts, and everyday rituals.
It’s the people

And it’s so much more..

Stay tuned for the release.

Ever been to Peristeri?
If not, tell us what kind of picture it paints in your head.

We’re not just here to map the well-known. We’re after the places that surprise you — the ones hiding in plain sight. Uncovering place identity, we’re passionately curious about the world: we find fascination in what’s mundane to many. We don’t know where our curiosity will lead — and frankly, that’s the point.

Wherever we go, we look for like-minded locals: playful, inquisitive, open to the wonderful and weird.

We’re always on the lookout for new hometown tales through the Field Notes series —
so if there’s a place you think we should explore next, drop us a line in the comments.

We’re listening.

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The Mediterranean.
Il Mediterraneo.
La Méditerranée.
Η Μεσόγειος.
البحر الأبيض المتوسط.

A place that isn’t just a location, but a feeling. Sounds, scents, lights. But also its people—their languages, traditions, shared cuisines, shaded conversations, and the rhythms of life that run from markets to coastlines.

This sea shaped our DNA at The Place Bureau. It’s how we think about place—as layered, lively, full of exchanges and quite often contradictions.

So we decided to make a bag to hold all of that. Three colors pulled from its coastlines:
Azure like deep water.
Amber like sun-warmed stone.
Terracotta like the earth underfoot.

“Mediterranean” in the many languages spoken along its shores. Arabic. French. Catalan. Greek. Italian. Turkish. And more. Imagine the words warped, as though seen through water.

This isn’t just a bag—it’s a small gesture. A reminder of the call of cultures shaped by this great sea.

And a reminder of summer too: the heat, the sea salt, the sound of cicadas.

🌊 Limited edition. 50 bags. Available now.
👜 Grab your tan here

And if you read Heatmap 4, you know the Mediterranean is where we first started mapping heat, place, and feeling without even realising it. Maybe this bag is a little heatmap too.

If you could carry one piece of the Mediterranean home with you, what would it be?
In the spirit of conversation, share below in the comments.

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If Marcus were Mayor, your streets would be full of soul, colour, and life. They’d offer you places to hang out, meet others, and build trust on your doorstep. Most importantly, they’d feel like our streets — spaces we could fall in love with, where we could express our identities and truly belong. Or as we liked to call them: spaces to speak back.

I first got to know Marcus through my college professor at Central Saint Martins, Maziar Raein, when I was planning to move to Barcelona to study. “I’ve met someone on the Master’s you’re applying for,” he said. “You should have a chat with him.” After a couple of phone calls, we’d not only found a shared passion for public space — I’d also found a new flatmate.

So began a twenty-year friendship and creative partnership, of the most generative kind. Marcus dove into everything with enthusiasm and was seemingly scared of nothing. For 25 years he worked as a Research Fellow with the Design Against Crime research team at Central Saint Martins, and took us to the tougher corners of the city that others overlooked. He signed up for a Masters course taught in Spanish before he could speak it — confident he’d figure it out. He came from an industrial design background, and was a master-maker: always tinkering, building, fixing. He could knock up a new object, prototype an idea, or mend almost anything with uncanny flair. We often talked about experimentation as a mode of celebration and his talent for testing and iterating made him a brilliant research partner. With a small amount of funding, together we launched Urban Lexicons in 2006 as a research project between friends. Over the next 18 years, we developed and evolved it through many cities and collaborations around the world.

Marcus adored Barcelona and the Catalan way of life. He was drawn to the city’s sociability and streetlife, its expressive identity, and the care and design embedded in its public realm. It was also where he met Marta — his extraordinary wife, whose energy and smile he fell head over heels for. Their beautiful marriage became a beautiful family, with two wonderful boys, Joel and Ruben. We had many great times with them, returning to Barcelona for projects, friends, and fresh inspiration. There was always a reason to go back.

Marcus’s courage was balanced by immense kindness and deep care for others. From the first moment you met him, you felt it — which is why he drew so many lifelong collaborators and friends. He was always on the move, most alive on two wheels. He found kinship with the sports anthropologists who taught us in Barcelona, especially Gaspar Maza and Xavi Camino, and their connection lasted for decades.

He believed in action over theory. He wanted ideas to become real — and he made sure they did. Through his work as a Senior Urban Designer with Sustrans, as an expert with the Design Council, and through countless projects across the UK and abroad, he helped shape public space with and for communities.

Marcus designed with the public — not for them. He was a firm believer in asking: “Whose voice is included? And who is missing?” He opened doors for people who were rarely invited in, and gave them the confidence to shape spaces that felt representational and reciprocal — places you could love, and that could love you back. And he did it playfully. Whether it was commissioning street art with communities through My Mural at Central Saint Martins; creating Storytrails in Regent’s Park Estate with his friend and colleague Professor Adam Thorpe; or building connections through the Bristol-to-Bath cycle path — Marcus made design joyful, inclusive, and profound.

Our Urban Lexicons journey took us far beyond Barcelona — to Bristol, Bilbao, Toronto, Austin, Adelaide, Sydney, and countless city streets. Through action research, we explored how the city speaks to us and how we can speak back as active citizens. We gave talks, published essays and chapters, and shared thinking across sectors and disciplines. But most importantly, we took that work to the streets. We ran workshops around the world, sharing skills and tools with designers, researchers and communities — and had a ball along the way. We challenged and inspired each other, with very different voices and perspectives. Marcus believed in agonism — the concept that disagreement can be creative — and this divergence was one of the most fruitful aspects of our work.

The sheer range of Marcus’s projects spoke to his fizzy energy and boundless curiosity. He wore many hats in a life cut far too short. Alongside his roles with Central Saint Martins, Sustrans, and the Design Council, he collaborated with us many times at The Place Bureau on projects that will shape the future of entire cities. He had a big impact on Bristol — the city he called home. Together we designed new modes of creative co-design and engagement for Bristol’s Western Harbour. We worked with residents, teams at Play Disrupt and Turner Works, and creative ambassadors from across the city — from city poet to portrait photographers — to reveal new sides of the spaces people loved. He was instrumental in creating the Vision for Place for Bristol's Temple Quarter that will welcome millions of people to the city, working alongside hundreds of community representatives and students at local film school Screenology. And that boundless energy went back to his beloved Barcelona, travelling with us to Catalunya to help set up a new co-design programme in Sant Joan Despí. Marcus did so much — and always with such heart.

Marcus passed away this month after a long battle with leukaemia. We write this to celebrate his energy, his joy, his fearless spirit. Because he was an explorer — of places, ideas, and people — I don’t think he’d be afraid of what comes next. He was always buoyed by those he worked with, and I’m sure he’s got to work making friends and reimagining public spaces on the other side.

Marcus was one of a kind. An epic friend whose energy I miss every day. To me, he was the UK’s foremost expert on equitable public space — not just in knowledge, but in ethos. He showed what real expertise looks like: deep empathy, fierce listening, and a passion for elevating voices too often ignored. He stood up again and again for the public’s right to belong in the places we share.

If you believe cities should be for all of us — should reflect our stories, invite joy, and help us all feel at home, then take the inspiration from Marcus forward. Read what he wrote. Try out his workshops and tools. Share your space, share your voice. And face the speculators, the cynics, and the bland public spaces with creativity, courage, and colour.

Because Marcus taught us something simple but profound:
Life’s too short for cities to be boring.
Make your streets amazing again.
—

To hear more about Marcus and his work, check out three of our favourite videos below. Find out more about Urban Lexicons or his research with Central Saint Martins.

At The Place Bureau, our masterclasses are about just that: empowering design teams, communities, and decision-makers to work with story, futures thinking, and creative clarity. They’re energetic, hands-on, and deeply tailored.

What is a Place Bureau Masterclass?

Our masterclasses come in two main forms. First, as a way to onboard teams at the end of a placemaking project – ensuring that all the strategic and creative work we’ve done together is not just handed over, but handed on. These sessions build confidence in delivering new visions, embedding narrative and strategy across teams so ideas don’t fade once the consultants leave.

Second, our stand-alone masterclasses are crafted to upskill teams in key areas like narrative design, storytelling, experience design and foresight. These courses can be tailored to support in-house teams, students, civic leaders – or entire communities. Whatever the setting, the aim is the same: giving people the tools to shape the places they care about with confidence.

Design Like a Storyteller

Designers who tell better stories, design better places.

One of our most popular courses, Design Like a Storyteller, helps design teams understand the power of narrative, and how to use it to influence, inspire and create. It’s perfect for urban designers, architects, masterplanners, and anyone looking to bring more character and coherence into their work.

You’ll learn how to uncover stories through site and cultural analysis, how to articulate compelling narratives for your design work, and how to use storytelling tools to pitch and present more effectively.

Structure

Run across two sessions

Session 1: Discovery & Definition

• Unearth hidden stories through deep cultural and site analysis

• Refine the brief through narrative thinking

• Define audiences and shape stories that resonate

• Distill complex ideas into simple, shareable narratives

Session 2: Design & Delivery

• Apply creative tools from poetry, photography, film and illustration

• Develop user personas to ensure relevance and empathy

• Translate story into public realm moves, spatial cues and programmatic ideas

• Learn how to pitch your story across platforms and evolve it over time

You’ll leave with:

• A toolkit of narrative techniques for live projects

• Cheat sheets to guide your process at each stage

• Reading and resources to continue the journey

“Rosanna’s workshops are fast-paced, fun and packed with useful tools. I thought I knew about placemaking, until I met her.”

Fraser Aitchinson, Urban Designer, JTP Architects

Place Futures

Designing for a world we don’t fully understand yet.

Futures literacy – the ability to imagine and work with multiple possible futures – is fast becoming one of the most important skills in place-based work. And yet, it’s rarely taught.

Our Place Futures masterclass changes that. Whether delivered as a CPD session, a half-day workshop, or at your own pace through our online course with the School of Critical Design, this class introduces core foresight concepts, why they matter now, and how to apply them to placemaking.

We draw on our Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit to show how global forces (climate change, AI, migration, housing crisis) intersect with local complexity, and how teams can design for places that aren’t just reactive, but resilient and future-fit.

Why is this so important now? Because places are long-term. What’s built today might not come into being for five, ten, or thirty years. We can’t afford to keep designing only for the now.

Who are these masterclasses for?

We’ve trained over 200 urban designers at JTP, delivered workshops for the Department for Levelling Up, and run creative learning sessions for communities across Iceland and Ireland.

Our audience is diverse – designers, local authorities, cultural organisations, communities, civic leaders – and so are our formats. Some are expert-level CPDs. Others are entry-level introductions to creativity and placemaking. All are shaped around real projects, real challenges, and real impact.

Whether we’re teaching communities how to turn a destination brand into visitor experiences, or helping in-house teams bring a place narrative to life through design, our sessions are always rooted in relevance and made to be used.

Why should we do this work?

Because placemaking is complex, the world is constantly changing, and we have to constantly upskill to stay in the game.

Place-based projects sit at the intersection of environment, economy, culture, technology and governance. They need trust, shared understanding, and alignment. Masterclasses help teams speak the same language, and work toward a shared future.

And crucially, they’re part of our commitment to a more responsible model of consulting. We don’t believe in parachuting in with the answers. We believe in building your capacity to ask better questions, and to keep adapting long after we’re gone.

It might mean we write ourselves out of future work. But we believe that’s the mark of a job well done.

“Professional and creative, their workshop was wonderfully received by staff at all levels. I look forward to working with them again.”

Lisa Taylor, Director, Coherent Cities

Ready to skill up?

Whether you’re preparing a team to take forward a new vision, or want to deepen your approach to storytelling and foresight, our masterclasses offer meaningful and useful tools.

Curious about what might work for your team?

Let’s start a conversation. We’d love to hear what you’re working on.

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WHAT is Concept Design at The Place Bureau?

Spatial concept design is our way of bridging the gap between strategic thinking and the physical-built environment. It's how we begin to define how a place vision and strategy might evolve physically and experientially, using tools like:

• Mapping

• Sketching

• Concept diagrams

• Illustrations

• Drawings

• Design visualisations

• Video production

This is the bridge between creative strategy and real-world design – where the seeds of programming, placemaking, and cultural strategy start to take shape. It helps clients, communities, investors and partners to really visualise how change could look and feel like in their destination.

WHAT is Experience Design and Why Does it Matter?

We don’t just create spaces – we design experiences. Whether through light, sound, texture, or movement, experience design considers how people feel, move, and connect in a space. It's about creating places that are emotionally resonant, intuitive, and human.

We’re designing not just for footfall, but for feeling.

WHY Does This Add Value to Our Placemaking Work?

Incorporating spatial concept design supercharges our ability to deliver projects that are not only visionary – but also deliverable, impactful, and immersive.

What it brings:

Expanded Services: We go beyond strategies and activations to offer long-term, tangible design interventions.

Deeper Impact: From research and programming to real-world design, we help guide the full transformation of place, shaping visionary ideas into buildable, spatial realities.

Stronger Storytelling: We translate narratives into physical form – spaces people can walk through, gather in, and remember.

Holistic Thinking: We connect short-term placemaking to long-term urban strategies. This builds a bridge between our strategic work, and the work that architects and designers will embark on once the project enters later stages.

Visual Firepower: From diagrams to full animations, from concept sketches to story-rich images we give stakeholders everything they need to see the future. Visual material is a great way to provoke dialogue and get people really engaged with an idea.

Making it real — Meet Christos

While we’ve worked with some of the best architects in the world, we longed to have architecture baked into our thinking from the very start. That’s why we’re thrilled to have Christos on our team.

Since joining us in January, Christos has already redefined the way we bring strategy to life in space. Having honed his craft with architectural legends like Zaha Hadid Architects and Fuksas. From Greece to China, Italy, and the UK, he’s been reimagining spaces and pushing creative boundaries at every scale.

HOW Have we been turning strategy into space at The Place Bureau?

Davidson Prize: Forever Island

Set in Sandown on the Isle of Wight, FOREVER ISLAND is a placemaking concept and masterplan for a community campus designed to counter the island’s demographic crisis. While the Isle of Wight – designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve – has long attracted retirees, it increasingly struggles to retain its younger generations, who face limited job opportunities, low wages, and unstable housing.

Drawing inspiration from the informal character of British caravan parks, our design reimagines this familiar typology into something regenerative, modular, and future-facing. The masterplan includes clusters of adaptable micro-apartments, co-living homes, and flexible community structures – everything from tech shacks and workshops to taco huts and performance spaces. The layout is responsive to both seasonal patterns and long-term resilience, encouraging shared resources and neighbourly interaction.

Led by our in-house architect Christos, the concept design was developed through an iterative process of sketching, modelling, and storytelling. Christos collaborated closely with illustrator Harry Tennant, whose vibrant, characterful visuals helped translate the architectural intent into an emotive and accessible vision – populated with real people, real joy, and a sense of place that feels lived-in and loved.

Developed with support from Artecology and the Isle of Wight Youth Trust, FOREVER ISLAND proposes not just housing – but a whole new way of integrating living and working for young islanders.

Are you looking for a spatially led vision or searching for a way to bring early placemaking concepts to life?

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The world’s best brands understand the value of creating a cultural experience.
Brick-and-mortar retail long ago shifted to experiential. Community collabs and pop-ups are everywhere.

Why?

Because niches are where taste is made. Communities drive true loyalty.
And in an age of digital overload, being somewhere specific cuts through.
But without a clear place strategy, even the most immersive brand experiences risk becoming wallpaper.
Too often, brand presence feels superficial, short-term—just another beat in the hype cycle, blanding out the genuine vibe of our favourite neighbourhoods.

The Shift

If brands want to make a real cultural connection, it's not just about what you activate — it's where, with who, and how.

Enter: Place Positioning.

Place Positioning links street-level resonance with global relevance.
It’s about knowing which neighbourhoods speak to your brand’s soul—and might just become friends for life.

It’s about showing up like a local and becoming a great neighbour—not another tourist.

Place Positioning helps brands tell the world an authentic story about the streets and communities that shaped them.

Because the best brands aren’t just in places—they’re of them.

How do we know? Our team draws experience of working with some of the world’s most recognised brands on defining that sense of place, and shaping up spaces that help them give back to the neighbourhoods, cities and landscapes that define them. From working with Lavazza in Turin, Lego in Billund, or Irish Distillers in Midelton, Cork, we’ve learnt that the brands that invest in place reap rewards in terms of brand equity: they are committed to developing talent, creating real relationships with their neighbourhood, and rooting their provenance. And this all adds up to help position their products and values as distinct in this global world.

Beyond the Storefront

Retail is only one opportunity to make an impact. Place Strategy invites so much more.

Think of a brand home that goes beyond. Lavazza, built a museum, HQ, event space and brand home in their home city of Turin, to support the revival of the Aurora neighbourhood. Even their canteen (called ‘to share’ in Italian) offers affordable Michelin-star lunch menus for locals and workers to mingle.

Now imagine, what if...

• your favourite wellness brand became your local sanctuary

• your run club became a mentoring platform?

• department stores turned into creative centres?

• toy stores became family maker spaces?

Where We Come In

Place Strategy brings together community, narrative, and impact into one vision.

At The Place Bureau and Common Strategies, we help brands shift:
→ from campaigns to coordinates
→ from global templates to local textures

This is the return to the real fantastic.

Because the future of brands isn’t just online — it’s on the street.
Let’s map your next move.

Where You Come In

We’d love to hear about places where brands have gone the extra mile to create reciprocal relationships with their neighbourhoods. Where should we be looking in the world?

And if you’re not sure, let’s map your next move together.

Need guidance on…?

• Cultural research & site-specific insight

• Community visioning & local stakeholder consultation

• Place-based brand strategy

• Narrative development into concept and experience design

• Localised partnership & impact activation

Drop a comment or Click here to book in a short 30 minute chat to tell us about your brand, its provenance, and your local ambitions.

Missed Part One?

Catch up here: The Return to Place →

Every place has a story. The question is: are you telling it – or letting others tell it for you?

In an era where destinations compete for attention, relevance, and investment, the way a place presents itself to the world can shape not only how it’s seen, but how it’s experienced. At The Place Bureau, destination branding is about more than tourism campaigns or visual identities – it’s the art of distilling a place’s truth and expressing it in a way that brings people together, builds pride, and resonates far beyond its borders.

What is destination branding, and how is it different?

Unlike branding a product or a service, destination branding isn’t about inventing something new. It’s about revealing what’s already there. A strong destination brand doesn’t impose an identity on a place – it uncovers it. It surfaces what’s distinctive, unspoken, and already loved. It connects the dots between lived experience, cultural value, and future potential.

Importantly, it’s not about building a community, the community already exists. It’s about weaving shared stories, anchoring local values, and creating the kind of emotional clarity that allows both locals and visitors to understand what the place stands for. Done well, it sets expectations, inspires investment, and invites the right kind of attention.

Destination branding can help define all sorts of things that happen in the space, from public art strategies, events programming or curation of the right F+B or retail businesses in the space. The brand helps to align the right personality and values for all these elements, giving the place coherence and a clear proposition.

So how do you tell the right story?

Destination branding begins long before a logo. At The Place Bureau, it builds on our work in collaborative visioning and place strategy, we’re able to seamlessly evolve a project from early concepts and aspirations, to a fully formed launch-phase brand. We begin by working closely with local communities to uncover universal truths – the emotional and cultural undercurrents that define a place.

From there, we move through three key phases:

1. Strategy

We define the narrative arc of the place – its promise, values, and personality. Often this is an evolution of a place vision already co-developed with stakeholders. We consider:

• What do people feel here?

• What do they hope for?

• How is the place perceived on the inside, and from the outside?

• What makes this place unlike anywhere else?

• What territory can we inhabit, and what does the competitive landscape look like?

• What is our promise to residents and guests?

2. Brand Identity

We give shape to those ideas through a visual and verbal identity system – colour palettes, typography, language, imagery. Sometimes we commission illustrations or photography to make sure the client has something ownable. The aim is not to decorate, but to communicate: to make the abstract essence of a place tangible and memorable.

3. Communications & Experience Assets

From websites and social media toolkits to signage and wayfinding, we design the tools that help places speak with clarity, confidence, and cohesion, whether they’re talking to tourists, residents, or investors.

Why does destination branding matter?

Because in the absence of a clear story, places get misunderstood or overlooked entirely.

A strong destination brand aligns stakeholders. It turns residents into ambassadors. It helps visitors arrive with the right expectations. It builds civic pride. It can even change the way people behave.

But more than that, a well-told story creates emotional stickiness. It’s the difference between a visit and a memory, between a stopover and a lifelong connection.

On the flip side, there are real risks to getting it wrong, or ignoring it altogether. A poorly crafted narrative can alienate local people or flatten complexity in the name of marketability. It can lead to gentrification, or worse, turn living culture into a consumable product. That’s why bringing communities into the process is essential. Branding shouldn’t overwrite – it should amplify.

Who is it for?

The answer: the right people.

Smart destination branding helps attract tourists who are curious and respectful, not extractive or indifferent. It draws in businesses and investors who value authenticity and cultural context. It inspires people who might one day live, work, or build a life in the place.

It helps everyone, from a weekend visitor to a global investor, understand what the place is, what it values, and how to be a part of it.

Two projects, two very different stories

Snæfellsnes, Iceland: Telling the story from within

In Iceland’s Snæfellsnes peninsula, we helped develop a destination brand rooted in citizen storytelling. Locals were invited to share their histories, traditions, and personal connections to the land. Instead of high-production campaigns, the brand emerged from lived voices – making the region feel not just visited, but inhabited. The result? A sense of welcome that introduced guests to the warmth and resilience of the local community.

Midleton Distillery, Ireland: Linking past, present and future

At the iconic Midleton Distillery, the branding challenge was to bridge heritage with innovation. Through research, cultural narrative, and a modern visual language, we helped reposition the distillery as more than a tourist stop – it became a symbol of Irish storytelling itself. A place where tradition meets forward-thinking craft.

So, when shall we get started?

In a world of noise, clarity is powerful. If you’re not telling your story, someone else will and they might not get it right. Destination branding isn’t just about visibility. It’s about values. It’s about belonging. It’s about defining the emotional space your place holds in the world.

At The Place Bureau, we believe that branding is not the end of the journey, it’s a reflection of all the work that’s come before, and a springboard for everything that comes next.

Culture is what makes a place come alive. It’s the stories, traditions, creativity, and expressions that give places their character. Culture transforms spaces into destinations, bringing authenticity, vibrancy, and a magnetic appeal that draws people in. Without it, even the most functional places risk feeling sterile or forgettable.

What Role Does Culture Play in Shaping a Place’s Identity?

Culture is the heart of any place, giving it identity, grounding it in history, and shaping its future. It helps make a place memorable and meaningful, creating emotional connections for the people who experience it. Whether it’s residents, visitors, or investors, culture transforms a location into a destination that feels alive and special.

But culture in placemaking isn’t just about museums or concert halls. It’s found in everyday life – the murals that brighten a neighborhood wall, the local markets where people gather, the festivals that bring communities together, and the small parks or corners where stories unfold. These everyday moments and spaces reflect the unique energy of a place, making it authentic and distinct.

These cultural elements create a story that no other place can tell. They make a park, a street, or a neighborhood feel alive and connected to the people who live there.

How Do Cultural Strategies Enhance Placemaking?

Cultural strategies bring a community’s creative and social strengths into the planning and design process, ensuring that placemaking reflects the unique character and stories of the people who live there. By focusing on what makes a place distinctive – its artists, traditions, crafts, food, and festivals – these strategies make placemaking more meaningful and deeply rooted in local identity.

For example, identifying a neighborhood’s creative strengths can inspire new ideas for public spaces, events, or community programs. A local artist’s mural could transform an ordinary street corner into a landmark. A city’s culinary traditions might inspire food markets or festivals that draw both locals and visitors. Crafting events around these strengths doesn’t just highlight what’s special about the area – it also creates opportunities for economic growth and community pride. These efforts turn places into thriving cultural hubs where people come together to connect, explore, and celebrate.

The impact of cultural strategies is measurable. Cities that invest in their cultural identity see clear benefits. The World Cities Culture Forum reports that cities with robust cultural initiatives experience higher levels of tourism, greater social inclusion, and stronger economic growth. For example, London attributes 1 in 6 jobs to its cultural and creative sectors, underscoring how deeply culture drives its economy..

How Do We Identify and Leverage Cultural Assets?

At The Place Bureau, we see cultural assets as the unique fingerprints of a place. They’re the local art scenes, music traditions, food cultures, and gathering spots that give a place its energy and identity. To uncover these assets, we combine:

• Cultural Mapping: Identifying both formal and informal cultural spaces and activities.

• Community Engagement: Listening to local voices to discover untold stories and emerging cultural movements.

• Observation and Research: Exploring how people use spaces, from daytime markets to late-night performances.

What’s the Connection Between Culture and Economic or Social Outcomes?

Culture drives both economic vitality and social well-being. It creates environments that attract talent, businesses, and investment, while also fostering a sense of community pride and belonging.

• According to the UNESCO Creative Economy Report, cultural industries contribute to 3% of global GDP and employ nearly 30 million people worldwide.

• Cities with vibrant cultural scenes see 20-30% higher tourism revenues, with visitors staying longer and spending more (OECD).

On a social level, culture is a tool for unity and resilience. Events like festivals, exhibitions, and community performances bring people together, strengthening social ties. Residents, particularly renters, are more likely to stay longer and extend their tenancies when they have more social connections, so the economic benefits are there for landlords too.

How Can Culture Foster Belonging and Community Ownership?

Placemaking that prioritises culture fosters a sense of ownership and pride among communities. By celebrating local stories, traditions, and creativity, culture gives people a stake in their environment. It transforms places into spaces that people identify with and care about.

For example, incorporating public art created by local artists or programming community-led events helps ensure that developments feel inclusive and grounded in local identity. Research by Project for Public Spaces shows that communities actively engaged in cultural placemaking report a 25% increase in feelings of trust, belonging, and satisfaction with their neighborhoods.

Culture doesn’t just make places beautiful – it makes them personal. It creates environments where people feel seen, heard, and connected to something larger than themselves.

Why Culture Matters Now More Than Ever

In today’s globalised world, places compete for attention, investment, and relevance. Culture is what sets a place apart. It adds depth, meaning, and character, creating destinations that are vibrant, authentic, and resilient.

At a time when cities and towns face fast paced changes, culture is a tool for adaptation and unity. It fosters pride and connection, helping communities navigate uncertainty while building a shared future.

Without culture, placemaking risks creating generic spaces that lack soul.

HOW is The Place Bureau strengthening culture around the world?

Coopers Cross, Dublin

Dublin’s North Wall is a place where things have always been made. A place where the docks have acted as Ireland’s gateway to the world, but also a place where storytellers have made their names – with generations of playwrights, musicians, filmmakers and activists calling this place home.

Recent regeneration in the area has done little to honour this rich heritage of creativity and initiative, outspokenness and defiance – with the area needing a cultural heart to draw together existing residents and newcomers.

We worked with Kennedy Wilson to develop a cultural strategy for Coopers Cross. Drawing on the cultural heritage of the area, we uncovered timeless themes that have shaped the story of the area, and remain true today. We also helped to reveal a personality, based on defining local characters – allowing Kennedy Wilson to communicate with credibility.

We developed a series of projects to activate the development, taking the cultural strategy and weaving the stories and personality into play areas, interpretive artworks and a cultural space, finally securing an anchor tenant, Photo Ireland’s new International Centre for the Image that will help to put Coopers Cross on the cultural map of Dublin.

"We are delighted with the progress on cultural strategy and think Coopers Cross should set a great benchmark for future Kennedy Wilson developments. The Place Bureau's input and thought leadership has been invaluable." Peter Collins, Global Head of Sustainability, Kennedy Wilson

Haymarket, London

Nestled between the grandeur of Mayfair and the bright and brash Leicester Square, this corner of Central London is where high end boutiques and restaurants rub shoulders with beloved West End Theatres and tourist spots. But this in-between-ness has led to a lack of identity, an uninviting public realm dominated by big roads, and a place where culture is hidden behind closed doors. How could cultural assets be harnessed to bring life to Haymarkets public spaces and create a unique offer for tourists, locals and tenants?

We worked with The Crown Estate alongside Prior+Partners to develop a cultural strategy to help Haymarket break out of its current cultural constraints. Inspired by the raucous history of the West End, we proposed a cultural ecosystem that was more participatory, which nurtures a talent pipeline, and thrives off the collisions between high culture and popular culture. This approach to programme animates the public spaces, drawing life out of the surrounding buildings to create a lively destination of global renown.

Is your destination needing to connect more deeply with audiences, leverage cultural assets or shore up its cultural credibility? Speak to us about how a cultural strategy can uncover new avenues and opportunities.

But how do you create a narrative that feels authentic, aspirational, and actionable? Let’s break it down…

WHAT makes a great Place Vision?

At The Place Bureau, we have shaped hundreds of place visions, totalling over £40billion worth of GDV. A vision and good narrative is key that holds the place's proposition together and helps funders and stakeholders really ‘feel’ what this place is for and what it’ll be. So how do we take everything we’ve learned about a place through our research, foresight work, engagement and futures workshops, and boil that down into a concise and compelling vision?

Here’s how to transform a good vision statement into a truly great one, it needs to be:

• Concise: A powerful vision gets straight to the point, capturing the essence of the issue in just a few clear sentences.

• Authentic: It should feel unique — so specific to the place that even without its name, people would still recognise what it’s describing.

• Motivational: A great vision inspires action. It should leave people feeling energised, eager to contribute, and ready to make a difference.

• Credible: Ambition is essential, but it must feel achievable. A vision that’s too far-fetched risks losing people’s trust and engagement.

• Aligned: Places often involve many stakeholders with different goals. A strong vision bridges these differences, aligning diverse groups around a shared purpose.

• Memorable: This is your opportunity to spark emotion — surprise, delight, or even tug at the heartstrings. A touch of creativity can make your vision stick in people’s minds, leveraging the power of emotional decision-making.

Place Vision vs Place Narrative

A vision and a narrative can often be the same thing, but their style and purpose is also quite distinct. A vision defines the ambition, articulating the bold “what” and “where” a place wants to go. A narrative takes that ambition and weaves it into a story that resonates emotionally, making the vision feel real and tangible. Together, they align purpose with possibility, creating a powerful foundation for change.

How long is a Place Vision?

This depends on the project. A client might want a single, concise statement, just one sentence long, or a vision statement might form the introduction to an investment prospectus, and therefore there’s room to turn it into 2-3 paragraphs and build out some detail.

We may want to support the vision with a ‘playbook’ that brings together some of the research that informed the vision and some principles that break down the vision and show how it comes to life. Lastly, if we’re got a bit of creative license, we think that a vision works really well as a film, allowing us to bring in imagery and sound to support the story and set the tone.

WHY Is Narrative Essential to Shaping the Future?

A strong narrative is the emotional thread that ties a place’s vision to its people, making the future feel tangible and relatable.

Studies have shown that storytelling increases emotional engagement by up to 22 times more than facts alone (Harvard Business Review). Similarly, communities that feel connected to a vision are 30% more likely to actively support and participate in its realisation (Project for Public Spaces). Whether it’s residents imagining new possibilities or investors recognising untapped potential, a compelling narrative builds momentum for change.

In today’s rapidly changing world, where places compete for attention, investment, and relevance, a clear narrative has never been more important. As urbanisation accelerates — by 2050, nearly 68% of the world’s population will live in cities (United Nations) — places must stand out not only through their functionality but also through their emotional and cultural appeal. Places with strong, well-defined narratives experience 20-25% higher levels of tourism and investment because their stories resonate with both visitors and stakeholders (World Economic Forum). Without a clear story, even the most visionary plans risk feeling disconnected, vague, or unrelatable, losing the ability to inspire or align.

A well-defined narrative does more than inspire—it serves as a foundation for decision-making and action. It ensures consistency and alignment across design, branding, policy, and community engagement, uniting diverse efforts under a shared ambition. Research from McKinsey highlights that places with clearly articulated visions and narratives achieve 50% better stakeholder alignment, leading to more successful and sustainable outcomes. At The Place Bureau, we use narrative as a bridge between vision and reality, ensuring that every decision—whether large or small—contributes to a future that is cohesive, meaningful, and full of purpose.

HOW have we helped destinations to define their vision and narrative?

Silvertown Quays, London

Silvertown Quays lies at the heart of the Royal Docks, home to the infamous Millenium Mills heritage buildings and a body of water the size of Central Park. Left derelict and disused for around 40 years, how could this iconic site be restored to realise its cultural potential as the centrepiece of a new waterside community?

The Place Bureau led the vision, working with Lendlease, GLA Royal Docks and Starwood Capital, and the team at This Must Be The Place. The team curated and facilitated three high-energy design charrettes on-site with 22 placemaking provocateurs to inspire the development and investment teams and push the ambition.

This 50 acre site is now being redeveloped as the cultural heart of the Royal Docks, transforming into a district rich in venues, incubator workshops, dockside parklands, and 6000 homes.

Our work established a ʻPlace Platform’ that became the foundation for the masterplan and briefing of all architects and designers involved in the site, ultimately leading to a successful planning application to unlock this £3.5bn waterside district.

“Working with intuitive methods and imaginative minds, The Place Bureau team answer “why here?” and “what next?” as eloquent concepts and ideas for designers. They are also great fun to work with, finding the material and ideas that others didn’t see or couldn’t articulate.”

Jason Prior, Director, Prior + Partners

Bristol Temple Quarter, UK

The transformation of Bristol Temple Quarter is one of the UK’s largest regeneration projects. The project will transform over 135 hectares of brownfield land over the next 25 years into a series of thriving, well-connected mixed-use communities. Delivering 10,000 new homes, 22,000 new jobs alongside £1.6bn annual income to the city economy, this is an opportunity to tackle the challenges the city faces head on.

But what makes Bristol such a distinct city? The Place Bureau worked closely with the Bristol City Council team, masterplanners Prior + Partners, and hundreds of stakeholders and community members to define this sense of place. This unique city has a very distinctive attitude and outlook, and the aim was to craft a vision that is quintessentially Bristol.

Have you recently seen a great place vision out in the world? What was it that sets it apart? We’re always on the look out for the best (and the worst!) in visions across the UK and beyond.

We’ve hit peak presence.

Brands are everywhere – but in an era of endless scrolling, fragmented attention, and digital dislocation, people are craving something they can touch, trust, and belong to.

Being everywhere isn’t the same as being somewhere. Culture doesn’t live in brand channels. It lives in parks, cafés, schools, basketball courts and corner shops.

In an age of noise and continuous visibility, the question isn’t how wide your brand can go. It’s: How deep are your roots?

At The Place Bureau and Common Strategies, we help brands show up like a local. We work at the intersection of community, narrative, and impact – because that’s where the true power of place lives. We’re experts in brand and culture, but we’re also expert place-makers, and we can provide the glue between the two.

Let’s Start Here: Where Is Your Brand Actually From?

• What does it sound like when your brand speaks in a local accent?

• Which neighbourhoods speak to the soul of your brand?

• What would it mean to activate not just consumers, but neighbours?

• How can you mix provenance with progress?

• Where is your impact being felt?

Where are we making this happen?

Midleton, Ireland – From Provenance to Progress
Irish Distillers wanted to link heritage and the here and now. We worked to turn that into a living asset, as partners to world-leading exhibition designers Ralph Appelbaum Associates. Midleton’s landscape, people, and history weren’t just decorative, they became fundamental to the brand’s future. In a world of generic storytelling, and global tariffs, local specificity wins.

Snæfellsnes, Iceland – From Destination to Community
In this Icelandic Peninsula, we helped reframe tourism to attract not just visitors, but guests who want to stay longer and connect more deeply. Through workshops, place safaris, and storytelling masterclasses, we supported locals to define the region’s identity and share it with one voice – inviting travellers not just to see the landscape, but to be part of the culture.

Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain – Global Brand Meets Local Culture
In Barcelona, we worked with a global food brand to look beyond the office and connect to community in the surrounding neighbourhood. What would it take for a workplace to support the culture outside its walls, not just reflect its own? The result: a space that will be designed as much for collaboration and innovation with our neighbours to boost the company productivity. A win-win for all.

Moffett Park, California, USA – Tech Meets Place
A business park home to Google’s West Coast campus. But what did it give back to the area around it? We worked with masterplanners Prior + Partners to shape a shared vision and experience design strategy that helps employees and residents find their flow, linking global operations with local rhythms. The result: a more integrated and human environment for a digital powerhouse.

Bude Climate Partnership - Engaging our elders

In Bude the elderly community make up a large proportion of residents and spending power so their participation is vital in establishing this coastal town as a trailblazer in climate adaptive strategies and eco-tourism. We spoke with community elders and local influencers to understand the barriers to understanding, connection and behaviour change. The result: setting in motion a communication toolkit and set of initiatives which honour and actively engage elders in plans for future resilience.

So, What Do These Projects Have in Common?

They don’t look alike on the surface. But under the hood, they all run on the same engine: Community, Narrative, and Impact.

Community
Too often a buzzword, community is the original function of place. With young people lonelier than ever, and online spaces offering diminishing returns, brands that foster IRL connection are ahead of the curve. We bring deep community and cultural fluency to every place vision we craft.

Narrative
Places are full of stories. In a moment of media saturation, place-based storytelling cuts through. We help brands discover the surprising, specific, and deeply resonant stories that anchor them in both time and territory.

Impact
The impact of ESG efforts become real when they’re local. As the University of Plymouth’s work reveals, people connect more deeply when change is visible – think of funding grassroots creative venues or community gardens. For brands, this means shifting ESG from abstract and remote promises and impact reports to concrete, community-level action that audiences can really participate in. Local impact makes purpose felt, and trusted.

What We Offer

We’re strategists, storytellers, and spatial designers . Together, The Place Bureau and Common Strategies bring brands into the real world, we help you show up on a street corner with credibility, and speak to your audience as neighbours, not customers. Whether you’re a heritage house, a startup with soul, or a destination in transition – we help you map your next move.

Our services include:

• Cultural research & site-specific insight

• Community visioning & local stakeholder consultation

• Place-based brand strategy

• Developing narratives into concept and experience design

• Localised partnership & impact activation

Ready to Root?

Let’s talk about your coordinates and map out the road ahead.

Not just where your audience is, but where your brand could mean something.

Because in the end, posts fade.
But place? Place endures.

Are you ready to tap into the potential of place?

Click here to book in a short 30 minute chat to tell us about your brand, its provenance, and your local ambitions.

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A futures workshop is a collaborative, creative process designed to help diverse groups imagine, explore, and plan for the future of a place. These workshops allow us to move beyond the present, unlocking innovative, shared visions rooted in both creativity and pragmatism.

As we discussed in the previous article about Place Foresight, we believe the power to plan for the future is an essential and underutilised part of placemaking, where projects can take years or even decades to come to life, which is why we developed our Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit – a set of practical exercises for anyone who wants to design for the future collaboratively.

These tools take complex, abstract ideas about the future and make them tangible, accessible, and actionable. Participants imagine scenarios, create visual frameworks, and map out shared opportunities.

Most importantly, a Futures Workshop balances imagination with practicality. While creativity drives the process, the goal is to produce clear, actionable outcomes.

What kind of tools do we use in a futures workshop?

Our Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit draws together tools from filmmaking, trends forecasting, service design, community engagement and meditation to name a few. Some of our favourite tools include:

• Signal Spotting: We may ask participants to do a bit of homework, bringing along a signal of change that they’ve noticed that might impact the future of their place - this might be backed up by an article in the newspaper, an academic journal, a blog or a local messageboard.

• Futures Wheel: A tool that helps us to think about the consequences of a particular action and then the ripple effect of each of those consequences. It helps participants to see how big an impact a small change could have.

• Worldbuilding blueprint: Inspired by filmmaking, we ask participants to build out a ‘world’ based around a scenario, and populate it with imaginary characters, places, objects and rituals. It helps us to add colour and texture to abstract future scenarios.

WHY Futures Workshops Are Essential

In a world where immediate priorities often dominate decision-making, futures workshops offer space to step back, look ahead, and imagine new possibilities. They help teams move from a reactive mindset to a proactive one, identifying opportunities, addressing challenges, and planning with greater purpose. Building up ‘Futures Literacy’ is a core tenet of what we do at The Place Bureau — we aim to equip stakeholders and communities with the skills and confidence to anticipate what’s to come.

Breaking Down Silos Through Collaboration

Futures workshops are powerful tools for breaking down silos, encouraging diverse stakeholders—designers, community members, policymakers, and business leaders—to collaborate.

• According to the Brookings Institution, cross-sector collaboration in urban planning improves alignment and generates solutions that are 35% more effective in meeting community needs.

• A study by PwC found that organisations fostering collaborative problem-solving outperform their peers by 20% in developing innovative strategies.

Creating Shared Ambitions and Place Visions

One of the key strengths of futures workshops is their ability to build a shared vision for the future. They align the long-term aspirations of different groups, ensuring that everyone is moving in the same direction—whether designing a new neighborhood or reimagining a city square.

Why does this matter? Because alignment leads to more robust, resilient outcomes.

• Research from the OECD highlights that cities with long-term, shared visions are 40% more resilient in the face of economic or environmental challenges.

• A report from Nesta emphasises that shared visioning processes help reduce stakeholder conflict by up to 30%, fostering a stronger sense of ownership.

Moving Beyond Immediate Concerns

In today’s fast-paced world, immediate concerns and short-term priorities often dominate decision-making. Futures workshops offer an opportunity to step back, think ahead, and imagine transformative possibilities that might otherwise be missed.

This shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset helps teams identify opportunities, anticipate challenges, and make purpose-driven decisions that lead to long-term value.

• A study by Harvard Business Review revealed that organisations that plan for the future see a 33% increase in long-term growth and innovation.

• The World Economic Forum found that future-focused planning is crucial for adapting to societal and environmental disruptions, with 65% of leaders citing it as essential for success.

At The Place Bureau, we encourage participants to:

• Think big: What bold ideas could change the trajectory of this place?

• Explore possibilities: How might demographic shifts, technology, or climate change reshape this place?

• Plan for resilience: What will ensure this place thrives through uncertainty?

HOW are The Place Bureau helping to shape the future?

Place Futures Toolkit

The Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit, developed by The Place Bureau, enables anyone to get involved in collectively defining and designing places for tomorrow. The project was initiated as part of the Arts University Bournemouth’s Innovation Lab and builds upon years of collective experience, guiding communities to shape future visions.

The toolkit is a highly flexible kit of parts to allow teams to shape a process according to their project scope, community, aims and content, and is also supported by a fun and accessible card game.

The toolkit is broken down into 4 stages. Each leg of this journey has a unique part to play - from warming up, to gathering information, getting creative and putting ideas into action.

Since launching the Beta version of the Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit, we're proud to have seen it in use by educators, urbanists and communities around the world including:

○ The Bartlett: UCL postgraduate module and short course ‘Civic Design: Community Participation and Co-production’

○ Great Rivers Greenway, Missouri

○ Municipal Arts Society, NY

○ Diagol City EU

○ Fondazione Innovazione Urbana, Bologna

“I am convinced that we need to train teams more to think about the future, to find new solutions but alongside codesgin processes, alongside collective intelligence, we need planning ability to make things happen: your tools are going in this direction”

Michele Dalena, Fondazione Innovazione Urbana

Futures Lab

Swiss furniture brand USM, as we know it today, was established in the 1960’s by Paul Schärer Jr and Fritz Haller on a vision of future flexibility and innovation, designed to evolve with a rapidly developing business. In 2024 we are seeing rapid development across all aspects of our day to day lives, in everything from climate impact, to social impact, the economy, Artificial Intelligence and beyond. Fondation USM established 'Futures Lab' to explore, envision and advocate for solutions that will tackle the challenges we face today and help build a brighter and more resilient future.

The Place Bureau collaborated with design practice For Everyday Life to shape an innovation programme, informed by our Collaborative Place Futures Toolkit. The team assembled an advisory panel drawn from a global network of academics, founders, industry leaders, creatives, technologists and innovators and worked with them to shape up future world scenarios. These scenarios informed briefs for four design studios to explore. The programme culminated in an inspiring and collaborative event at the USM headquarters in Munsingen, Switzerland where the outcomes were shared with the advisory panel and plans for future funding and support were considered.

Where Imagination Meets Action

At their core, futures workshops are about imagining a better future – and then planning to make it real. They unlock innovation, bring people together, and align long-term goals, ensuring that ideas are both visionary and actionable. How are your organisation or community planning for the future? Do you have a shared vision, and how far into the future does it stretch? What methods are you using to stretch your imagination?

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There’s something beguiling about the British coastline. Windswept promenades, ramshackle beach huts, and the faded glamour of arcades and amusement parks — these places stir memories. But behind the romantic veneer, a quieter crisis is unfolding.

Coastal communities have, for too long, sat at the periphery — not only of geography, but of political and economic attention. The charm of the seaside conceals a harder truth: the UK’s edge lands have always been overlooked and still are, and young people are bearing the brunt.

The statistics tell a sobering story. Many of our coastal towns rank among the most deprived in the country. The Office for National Statistics notes that “employment rates in coastal towns are lower than in non-coastal towns,” with persistent disadvantages shaping lives across generations [ONS, 2020]. This is not a temporary dip, but the result of long-term neglect. The scaffolding of opportunity — transport, education, industry, health — has rusted or vanished altogether.

The most profound impact is on young people. A 2024 study by the University of Essex found that youth living in England’s most deprived coastal communities have the worst health outcomes in the country [Essex, 2024]. Worse than urban inner cities. Worse than rural poverty. This is not just about healthcare access — it’s about a lack of investment in futures.

We spoke with local people on the Isle of Wight as part of our research for the Davidson Prize 2025, and one particular theme came up that struck a chord with us: disconnection. As a recent study from University College London puts it, coastal youth often feel “cut off” — emotionally, economically, and socially [UCL, Coastal Youth]. The sea becomes both a horizon and a barrier. There is beauty, but little sense of belonging.

In the Isle of Wight, as in other coastal areas, the disparity between the old and young generations is like an ocean. Wealthy older people retire to the coast, living in relative comfort (with, of course, many exceptions), while younger cohorts are left with that rusting infrastructure and a lack of political will.

So what does it mean to design with coastal communities, rather than for them?

Our Davidson Prize submission, Forever Island, begins with this question. It's not a masterplan. It’s a plea for the time and space to do some listening. A spatial strategy hoping to upend the experience of young people who are too often invisible in planning processes and development agendas, especially in places like the Isle of Wight.

The proposal reimagines coastal living not as nostalgic retreat, but as generative ground for the future. We imagine youth-focused housing — affordable, adaptable, and dignified — built not on the margins, but in the centre of the community story. These aren’t token gestures or glossy new builds. They’re frameworks: places where young people can forge their own paths, stay local by choice (or even come here from the big city), and have access to the resources that support their ambitions. Aspiration is the factor that drives young people off the island, here it is the thing they stay for.

Place matters. As the government’s own Chief Medical Officer stated in his 2021 report, “the physical and economic isolation of coastal communities exacerbates deprivation,” impacting health, education, and life expectancy [CMO, 2021]. When we ignore the systems that shape places, we entrench inequity.

We’ve also seen how poorly managed regeneration can deepen these divides. In towns like Margate, as highlighted by the BBC, the influx of capital and creativity has paradoxically priced out many of the very people it was meant to uplift [BBC, 2021]. Coastal gentrification without inclusion is not revival — it’s replacement.

At The Place Bureau, we believe in a different model. One where regeneration is not just about aesthetics or investment returns, but about care, stewardship, and long-term rootedness. Our proposal weaves housing with skills development, public realm, and nature recovery. We see these places not as broken, but as brimming with untapped potential — if only we listen better.

“Coastal charm disguises deprivation,” as Wave Community Bank so aptly puts it [Wave, 2021]. We agree. But we also believe that design has the power to uncover — and to reimagine.

There is a tendency in national discourse to speak of ‘levelling up’ in abstract terms — to pit region against region, north against south. But the truth is more nuanced. As researchers at the University of Plymouth argue, coastal inequality is a distinct form of marginalisation that requires its own vocabulary and response [Plymouth, 2021].

This is not just a policy problem. It’s a cultural one. We need new stories about the edge — stories that don’t frame it as an end point, but as a beginning.

Forever Island is our contribution to that narrative shift — a call to rethink value, legacy, and what it means to belong on the coastline, especially for young people.

It draws on our growing body of work with coastal communities around the UK:

In Sandown, well, we’ve been here before! In 2023, we teamed up with Feria Urbanism and Støriie to create the Bay Area Place Plan — a shared vision for the parishes of Sandown, Lake and Shanklin. That work sparked Building The Bay, an active new steering group, and a summer programme of arts events set to animate the promenade.

In Southampton, we collaborated with Prior+Partners to shape a bold new vision for the city centre for the Renaissance Board. The plan reclaims underused spaces, reimagines neighbourhoods, and restores the iconic waterfront as a civic anchor. The vision is a rallying cry for innovators and changemakers to support and invest in this critical moment.

And in Adur and Worthing, we’ve just begun working with Ideas Alliance to explore a fresh vision in the context of devolution. Watch this space as we dive into what the future could hold for this diverse stretch of coastline.

We believe coastal places hold enormous untapped potential — and that with the right ideas, partnerships and momentum, that potential can be unlocked. Developing ambitious and collaborative visions is what we do best here at The Place Bureau, but it’s just the first step on the road to change.

If Forever Island sparks something for you — whether it’s a collaboration, a site, a funding idea or simply a conversation — let’s talk. While we’ve imagined this concept for Sandown, it’s a model that could work in many coastal communities. Could we bring our campus to your town?

And lastly, the easiest way for you to support, with just the click of a button, is to vote for our submission in the people’s choice awards: https://form.jotform.com/250892443342356

The tide is turning. Let’s build something lasting.

By blending interaction with imagination, we uncover the unspoken ideas, untapped knowledge, and unexpected insights that standard methods tend to miss.

So, WHAT does Creative Engagement look like with The Place Bureau?

We see the engagement process as an opportunity to innovate. Essentially, we’re just there to get people talking, but we’re always asking how we can draw out some more unusual insights, get people to think deeper about their answers, and create a bit of constructive debate.

A two-pronged approach is often the most successful. We might pursue one method of engagement to go ‘deep’ with a small cohort of people, and really dig into their thoughts and needs, and back this up with a ‘wider’ method to try and canvas some opinions from a wider population. When budgets are constrained, this gives us a good balance of detail and scope.

In terms of ‘deeper’ approaches to engagement, we might set up an advisory group, such as the Western Harbour advisory group in Bristol, with each member representing a cultural group. We may also commission artists, filmmakers or photographers to head out into a place and begin to capture stories from people on the ground, such as our ‘creative ambassadors’ did in Western Harbour, Bristol. Or perhaps we’ll work with local creative organisations, such as the theatre group 20 Stories High in Liverpool, to develop a mini festival that allows the community to test out ideas for the future of Canning Dock.

Why do artists make great Placemakers?

At the Place Bureau, we often work with artists, photographers, writers and poets to help us to understand place identity. They have the ability to scratch beneath the surface, overturning the stones that are often overlooked by urban planners and developers. When tasked with speaking to the community on the ground, they’ll ask the questions others might not think to ask, and they’ll point their cameras at the vistas most people might not deem valuable.

At its core — artists help us to shed a unique view on place. Their work helps to shape places that do things differently, and challenge the status quo.

How does Creative Engagement help to include diverse voices?

Activities like visual mapping, collaborative art projects, or participatory theater can draw out contributions from individuals who might feel intimidated or excluded by conventional approaches. These methods are particularly effective in amplifying voices often marginalised in traditional decision-making processes, such as youth, elders, or non-native speakers.

Beyond that however, we often see the same kinds of people turning up to engagement events - typically the wealthy, well-educated, and older demographic who have time to spare. By working in partnership with cultural organisations, it helps us tap into other demographics who may be less motivated to participate in traditional engagement activities - it makes the process enjoyable, and leaves people feeling like they’ve got something out of it themselves.

WHY is this kind of approach essential?

Creative engagement prioritises connection and imagination, turning passive participation into meaningful collaboration. People feel an enormous sense of ownership over places where they have had genuine input into, so creative engagement aims to create places that are successful, not just on day 1, but years down the line - due to the communities who care for it.

Surveys and public meetings often struggle to capture diverse voices. You end up with the loudest voices skewing the dialogue, and not everyone has the means or resources to attend public consultations. This approach invites people to actively contribute in ways that are accessible and meaningful, fostering deeper connections to the process.

We also believe that artists and creatives are able to shed light on the soul of places in unexpected ways, which result in unexpected insights, which shape unexpected places. We’re all about avoiding the ‘could-be-anywhere’ development that leaves our cities cold.

Good engagement can also be a way to build capacity among a community. We might work with young people and build skills in design or image making, or we might work with locals and leave them with the framework to establish and run their own advisory group to oversee what happens in their place. People are more likely to take these projects forward if they’re as valuable to them and their opinions are to the client.

Here’s HOW we do creative engagement at The Place Bureau

Bristol Western Harbour

Bristol’s Western Harbour lies at the heart of this major city. Set around working heritage docklands, with spaces people have made their own — including saxophonists and street artists who animate spaces under the flyover. In a city that punches above its weight creatively, Bristol City Council wanted to develop new creative methods of involving the community in shaping the vision for the future of a prominent area.

Harbour Hopes was a creative engagement programme that started a fresh conversation about the future of Bristol’s Western Harbour. We commissioned a cohort of Creative Ambassadors including the City Poet, Portrait and Documentary photographers, a Filmmaker and Illustrator. Each brought a skillset that contributed to the final vision: from poetry to articulate use of language and tone, through to portrait photography to reveal who makes Bristol’s Western Harbour today. This was backed with an online platform and social media campaign that gathered over 15,000 visits over 3 months, gathering thousands of comments and ideas.

Our approach in Western Harbour has been recognised by the Quality of Life Foundation as a best practice case study of Good Engagement.

“The Place Bureau listened and worked closely with the council’s culture team and regeneration colleagues to devise a fresh, creative approach to engagement and story-gathering that was deliverable on the ground and citywide, as required for a project of this significance. They created a strongly engaged and visual vision by including artists in the process.”

Jo Plimmer, Senior Arts Development Officer, Bristol City Council

Liverpool Canning Dock

The Canning Dock project is part of National Museums Liverpool‘s 10-year plan to transform the city’s waterfront. It intends to revitalise the complex site, which was used in the 18th century to serve and repair ships including those used in the transatlantic slave trade.

The Place Bureau were commissioned to unpack narrative and develop co-production strategies for Canning Dock, an opportunity to pull together the threads that make up the history of the transatlantic slave trade – from Africa, across the Atlantic to the US and back to Liverpool — while recognising that to live on, we need to create a place that the public can explore, enliven and firmly face towards the future. We worked with local cultural organisations; 20 Stories High, Writing on the Wall and Squash, to collectively understand what this site means to the people of Liverpool. The project culminated in a Sunrise to Sunset festival - a chance to prototype ideas and tell stories at the site.

“Our collaboration with The Place Bureau team was a dynamic and inspiring experience with community stakeholders, particularly in how we worked together with community partners. The workshops we conducted truly informed and enabled those involved, allowing both the museum team and participants to explore and rethink the project in exciting ways. It was a privilege to be part of a process that was as creative as it was collaborative.”

Paul Reid, Former Director of the International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool

Have you seen an unusual or unexpected method for engaging communities? How do you think it changed the outcome of community engagement?