What we do

Urban planning

Cities can be designed to make it easy for everyone to live a healthy life. We craft urban plans and policies that maximize health, happiness, and inclusion in new and existing neighbourhoods. Our planning process combines best practice with deep engagement, ensuring that outcomes support wellbeing for diverse community members.

Crowd walking through an outdoor festival with colorful hanging decorations, food cart, and umbrella, conveying a vibrant community atmosphere.

  • We harness evidence, engagement, and design excellence to create communities that maximize human health and wellbeing.

  • We help clients craft plans and strategies that prioritize wellbeing to create lasting change in their communities—including accessibility, plans, arts and culture plans, public space policy, and more.

  • Our community assessment tool measures the capacity of a neighbourhood’s design to support wellbeing. We identify recommendations and design strategies to boost long-term health and happiness for diverse residents.

Urban design

Streets and public spaces can inspire human connection. We specialize in designing joyful, inclusive, and accessible streets and public spaces. Our innovative research, design guidelines, public life studies, and co-creative placemaking approaches ensure that everyone feels safe and welcome in urban spaces.

Students paint street art beside the curb in front of their middle school. A young girl is smiling and looking out of the window of a car driving by in the background.

  • We combine urban design with deep engagement to co-create placemaking initiatives that bring public spaces to life.

  • We leverage more than 15 years of research on the relationship between community design and human wellbeing. Our metrics, guidelines and tools help clients become leaders in happy community design.

  • Our award-winning public life studies reveal how people move, feel and behave in public realms. Our innovative experiments generate unique insights and impactful stories. We use these tools to boost wellbeing, equity and place value.

Housing policy and research

The crises of social isolation and housing affordability can be solved together. We work with municipalities, developers, health authorities, and non-profit housing providers to enable housing that boosts social connection, health, and resilience for people of all ages, incomes, and backgrounds.

Aerial view of a three-storey, modern mult-unit housing in a residential neighbourhood. One of the building facades is green, and lined with exterior walkways and winding stairs that connect units to a courtyard below

  • We work collaboratively with design teams and community members to foster social wellbeing in multi-unit housing. We help clients overcome design, policy, and social barriers to ensure that happier homes can become a reality.

  • Happy Homes is the world’s most comprehensive investigation into the effect of housing design and programming on social relationships. We translate this evidence to help clients design happier, healthier and more resilient multi-family housing.

  • We work with municipalities, developers, architects, and non-profit housing providers to create new policies and identify the most effective strategies for enhancing social wellbeing in housing.

  • We offer design principles and implementation strategies that maximize the value of your land for the community. From the visioning stage to implementation, we help clients build housing that boosts wellbeing for everyone.

Community engagement

Too many people have been left out of planning decisions for too long. Our team specializes in inclusive community engagement that respects, welcomes, and amplifies less-heard voices. We offer a mix of traditional and innovative engagement activities, including community pop-ups, co-creation, open houses, surveys, focus groups, and more.

  • We create unique engagement activities that reward people for their participation. We identify less-heard communities and meet them where they’re at. And we share the stories that matter through video, text and other media.

  • Through research and deep listening, we help clarify your community’s wellbeing vision. Then we work with your team to craft inclusive, meaningful engagement strategies.

  • We never stop learning about how cities can improve wellbeing and equity. We share insights from our research and experimentation through presentations, workshops, and publications and help you apply these tools in your own work.

  • We craft eye-catching graphics, clear messaging, and compelling stories that illuminate the connections between wellbeing and urban design. We help clients engage local residents in the changes happening in their communities, translating complex policy and research into formats that are easy to understand.