Future of Cities & Regions
Understanding and improving the long-term conditions that shape life across cities and regions.
Decisions made now settle how people live for decades.
Where housing is built, which industries are backed through transition, when infrastructure arrives and where services are placed. These choices decide whether a growing population finds opportunity within reach, or spends years commuting past it.
We work with the governments and institutions responsible for those choices. The starting point is always the same: what is actually changing in this city or region, whom does it affect, and where can intervention make the greatest difference to how people live, work and access opportunity.
five services, one practice
Where a regional economy is actually heading: which industries are growing or exposed, what carries employment through transition, and what growth asks of land, housing, skills and infrastructure.
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What a city, centre or public place is worth to the people who use it and to the economy around it. So investment decisions can weigh amenity, access and belonging alongside cost.
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How a changing climate and the energy transition reshape communities and local economies: where the pressures fall hardest, which industries and places are exposed, and where new investment can take root.
Population, household and demand forecasts built from observed change so plans rest on how a place is actually growing.
CityCompass keeps these forecasts current →Work in this service →
Where a larger, older or faster-growing population will need schools, health care, open space and community services, and when provision must arrive to keep pace with daily life.
CityCompass keeps demand visible →Work in this service →
- 01Can essential services keep pace with growth?
- 02Which industries can carry the region through transition?
- 03Where will a larger, older population need schools, health care and community services?
- 04Is employment land actually serviced, available and connected to the industries expected to use it?
- 05Who gains (and who bears the costs) of a major development or investment?
The conditions this practice studies keep changing after the report is delivered.
CityCompass keeps population, workforce and economic change visible between commissions, so a strategy's assumptions can be checked against what actually happened.
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