The Developer podcast

The Developer

How do we make places where people want to live, …

  • 52 minutes 47 seconds
    Participatory building: How community construction takes engagement to a new level

    You've heard of co-design and of course, community engagement, but what about participatory building? That's when people are invited on site to help build, fostering teamwork, imparting skills and empowering a neighbourhood. Working in collaboration with charity Global Generation, Dr Jan Kattein has been building community spaces with volunteers aged 6 to 76 on site – and redefining the role of the architect in shaping places.


    On these sites, the process – not the final project – is the core purpose. That's a different kind of design challenge. And these are no ordinary construction sites – Global Generation has a mission to connect youth with nature, so they have used traditional techniques with natural materials such as cordwood, and volunteers have been busy making bricks, shakes and rammed earth walls, while youth apprentices have also been training on site.


    “For two years, we’ve been making bricks out of clay… we’ve been making wooden shakes out of Sweet Chestnut… we’ve been building with earth…” says Kattein. “It’s a very inclusive process. All ages can participate,” says Kattein.


    Kattein talks about the shifting role of the architect in participatory processes, the need to reduce carbon and embrace natural materials and the transformative power of construction: The moment when a child drags their parent to a building and says, "Mum, I helped build that part of the wall."

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    18 December 2025, 1:36 pm
  • 43 minutes 52 seconds
    Neuroarchitecture: The impact of design on the unconscious mind

    Get on a crowded train, and your brain may not like it. With strangers around you, cortisol levels shoot up to prepare you for fight or flight, stimulating the liver to produce and release glucose into your blood stream, just in case. Unless you run screaming from the train, your blood sugar levels won’t go down for a few hours – just in time for you to take the train again.


    “You’re dosing yourself with almost pure glucose twice a day for your working life,” says Nick Tyler, a professor who investigates the ways in which people interact with the built environment. Tyler believes we need to design the built environment not solely for the conscious mind, but for brain and the body impacts taking place out of sight. As Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering, Tyler works with a transdisciplinary team to study what that means for design – collaborating with psychologists, neuroscientists, architects and others to research the health and safety impacts of the built environment.


    Learn about his immense laboratory in East London, PEARL, and his large-scale experiments with bus stops, zebra crossings, urban parks, supermarkets and e-scooters that have revealed safety gaps and failings.


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    8 December 2025, 12:30 pm
  • 38 minutes 43 seconds
    Design by AI: Why we need to hack the algorithm

    Wait five minutes and someone will tell you the latest thing they’ve outsourced to AI; How it’s taking minutes of meetings or summarising reports they haven’t read. If you point out that the work of AI isn't exceptional, they say 'Just wait, it will get smarter'. But will it?


    According to Professor Jutta Treviranus, director and founder of the Inclusive Design Research Centre in Toronto, the answer is, well, concerning: Unless we do something fundamental about how it works, the output of AI will continue to be just average. 


    “When we’re using statistical replicators, they are making decisions based on statistics, so they look for the statistical average and use predictive analytics to decide the best thing to do.” 


    Of all the possible dystopian predictions, the fact that AI tends towards the typical, standard and normative doesn’t sound so bad – except that when applied to systems including the built environment, it’s dangerous. 


    “What people don’t seem to recognise is that for people who are outliers, the systems will always decide against them.” And who is an outlier? All of us at some point.





    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    26 September 2025, 3:25 am
  • 30 minutes 21 seconds
    Trauma and place: Avoiding triggers in design and engagement
    If we want to create inclusive, supportive and safe places, we can't ignore trauma. At least half of all people will experience a trauma at some point in their lives and may be triggered by sights, sounds, questions or spaces that remind them of a past traumatic event. Olaide Oboh, a director at the developer Socius and managing director of Populate, speaks about how she learned about trauma-informed practice and why as a developer they are adopting trauma-informed practice at scale on the London Cancer Hub, a £1bn development to create a leading centre for research and treatment in Sutton.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    8 September 2025, 11:37 am
  • 42 minutes 11 seconds
    Purple pounds: Designing for the deaf and disabled
    The spending power of disabled people, known as the purple pound, is worth £300bn: "Hello, does that not tell you something?" says Amanprit Arnold, a deaf city urban strategist passionate about creating an accessible city for everyone. "It's not charity. There's a commercial return to inclusive design." Born deaf, Amanprit Arnold is a visionary built environment changemaker renowned for her expertise and commitment to inclusivity. In this interview, Arnold speaks about belonging, the growing role for technology and AI in enabling greater participation, the increasing awareness of neurodiversity and her work to create a Deaf City Hub for the deaf community – a cultural hub for the deaf in the city. A video of this interview with Arnold signing in BSL and captions is also available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/4ueuJ9Vr0o0 with a transcript on www.thedeveloper.live

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    2 August 2025, 2:00 pm
  • 40 minutes 32 seconds
    Fighting for a Feminist City in Glasgow
    How do we change policy to create gender equal cities? This story starts with a book: Feminist City by Leslie Kern. Read during lockdown, Holly Bruce, Scottish Greens councillor for Langside in Glasgow said it opened her eyes to the ways in which design can limit a women's participation in city life. The book was “the catalyst” for a political movement that would see Bruce move from reflection to action in short order, first joining a women’s collective and eventually leading a political movement. In 2022, Bruce led a successful motion for feminist town planning to be written into policy, which saw Glasgow become the first “Feminist City” in the UK. Bruce describes her “relentless” effort to get feminist urban planning into policy with Christine Murray.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    18 July 2025, 11:15 am
  • 53 minutes 56 seconds
    The civic role of a new town hall
    How do you develop a new town hall and civic hub in a community with a longstanding mistrust of its local authority? “You’ve got to listen,” says James Stockdale, Development Director at Muse. Your New Town Hall in Brixton, the project to restore the Grade II-listed Lambeth town hall was never going to be easy. According to a 2013 resident’s survey, the council was not held in high regard. The report said residents felt “policymakers have stopped listening to them, and their culture and identity is gradually being lost.” Not a great starting point for a major development project. “Regeneration is always going to be contentious. Buildings will get knocked down,” says Stockdale. “You’ve got to listen. And by doing that hopefully more people will be happier than not.”

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    12 April 2024, 3:13 pm
  • 53 minutes 39 seconds
    Is this the year of the landscape architect?
    As regulations on biodiversity net gain and sustainable drainage become mandatory, Carolin Göhler, president-elect of the Landscape Institute, explains why the role of the landscape architect is as vital as it is misunderstood. In areas prone to overheating, flooding or drought, having a lead designer focused on land use makes sense. The increase in social impact measurement, social prescribing and ESG investment also highlights the role of green spaces in improving health and wellbeing. But if the discipline is to take its place at the head of the table, people need to understand exactly what they do. A wide ranging discussion on urban trees, future-proofing heritage planting and the electrification of maintenance.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    14 March 2024, 12:19 pm
  • 51 minutes 55 seconds
    How local councils are leading on net zero in spite of central government
    Local authorities are moving head with net zero and climate resilience plans, installing solar panels and heat pumps. But a recent report from Key Cities, a group of 27 UK cities, concludes that "progress is being hindered by central government through a lack of powers, clarity, capacity and funding". Gina Dowding Lancaster County Counsellor and Richard Cook, Leader of Gloucester City Council, discuss the recommendations from the report, Levelling Up, Emissions Down, which captures the palpable frustration at the lack of clear direction and mandate for action on climate change.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    22 January 2024, 7:01 pm
  • 57 minutes 39 seconds
    We need to talk about SLOAPs: Sites Leftover After Planning
    We need to talk about SLOAPs, aka Sites Leftover After Planning. We've all seen them, corridors of tarmac or patches of grass with no purpose or social life. Could we put these fragmented spaces to better use as sites of biodiversity, food growing, play or connection? Soham De from EcoResponsive Environments and Valerie Beirne from Where Pathways Meet have been adding up the potential of this multitude of tiny sites, and want to spark an industry-wide conversation about the mapping and transformation of leftover spaces into sites of care, biodiversity and creativity.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    9 January 2024, 12:46 pm
  • 51 minutes 14 seconds
    Turds in the plaza: How do we fix public art?
    Art in public space has long been subject to hot debate. It was back in the 1970s that James Wines referred to Modernist sculptures as "turds in the plaza" and "Plop Art". The removal of sculptures associated with slavery as part of the Black Lives Matter are proof positive that public art matters deeply to people and places. So when seeking to commission public art, is community involvement the answer to question of relevance, appropriateness and permanence? Shiro Muchiri, founder of SoShiro art gallery and Hanna Afolabi, founder of Mood and Space, have teamed up to create Art in Architecture, a consultancy that believes public art can deliver social value – if you get the community involved from the very beginning. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of commissioning art for urban public spaces.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    15 December 2023, 5:01 am
  • More Episodes? Get the App