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.
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We harness evidence, engagement, and design excellence to create communities that maximize human health and wellbeing.
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We craft long-term plans and zoning that enable human-scaled, resilient, mixed-use places. We balance community priorities with technical analysis and best practices to develop practical guidelines for healthy, thriving communities.
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We help clients craft policies and strategies that prioritize wellbeing to create lasting change in their communities—including accessibility, plans, arts and culture plans, wellbeing strategies, and more.
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, and co-creative placemaking approaches ensure that everyone feels safe and welcome in urban spaces.
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From school street murals to international events, we work with cities, BIAs, community groups, and local residents to activate shared spaces and while strengthening community pride and ownership.
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We combine urban design with deep engagement to co-create design solutions that bring plazas, parks, streets, and other public spaces to life.
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Main streets are the social and economic heart of any community, but many have suffered through years of disinvestment and car-oriented planning. We work with municipalities to help transform main streets into vibrant destinations, through active transportation recommendations, public realm design, and suburban retrofit strategies.
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.
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We work with municipalities to craft actionable policies that harness the most effective strategies for enabling housing that strengthens community wellbeing and affordability.
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We leverage more than 15 years of research on how housing design and programming impact social wellbeing. We translate this evidence to help clients design and enable happier, healthier and more resilient multi-family housing.
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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 homes and community spaces that boost 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.