Our Difference
We see the connections, the poetic affiliations that bind places and people together. We understand the work of imagination, how it creates shared senses of belonging and underwrites investment of every kind. We are experts in mobilising metaphors to help communities narrate themselves with fresh hope.
We empathise telling. So we find it natural to work with dancers, animators, film-makers as well as landscape architects, architects and urban planners. In fact, one of our skills is to bring these different specialities together and to envision and deliver new forms of place design.
CULTURAL HERITAGE
Cultural heritage flows into cultural production when received stories are retold tellingly; and both materialize as patterns, arrangements and friendly places when they are brought into the common place of public planning. Telling: relating. Places that relate, internally and externally, are regions. We think the world is regions all the way down: inter-regional communication is about giving value to travel, about translation, trauma, hope and loss.
COMMUNITY
The old model of community, closed, ideologically consensual, defined by long residence, has to be abandoned – not to homelessness but to a new understanding of place that is built out of exchange rates, translations, meetings, passages and cycles. The new meeting place fuses physical communication and communications technologies; there is an intensification of sociability, but also responsibility. To be a global citizen is also to be a local knowledge citizen.
PEOPLE AND PLACE MAKING
We talk about the art of dynamically peopling place. Talking, walking – they are part of the choreography of place-making. But different places draw us in different directions, exercise their own subtle magnetic charge. Good places are composed of promising approaches. They are full of drama.
COLLABORATION
So we find it natural to work with dancers, animators, film-makers as well as landscape architects, architects and urban planners. In fact, one of our skills is to bring these different specialities together and to envision and deliver new forms of place design.
