PLP Architecture and PLP Labs have, as part of an Urban Land Institute (ULI)-led team, launched a new report ‘Zooming in on the “S” in ESG: A road map for social value in real estate’. The publication gives guidance to the industry on incorporating social value into corporate strategy, business practices and even investment theory.

PLP Labs designed ‘Know Your Health’— an online tool and downloadable guide—with Centric Lab and Comuzi. The guide helps people living in cities to identify how their environment is impacting their health, and then empower the public to improve their situation and long-term health resilience as individuals and a community.

PLP Labs’ conducted research on wearable technology for the British Council of Offices with Loughborough University, the University of Reading, and University College London. “Wearables in the Workplace” investigates the potential of wearable technologies to assess occupant health and wellbeing in offices. In an in-house pilot study, Labs and academics evaluated whether wearables are viable tools and assess whether certain environments are beneficial to their wellbeing, health and productivity.

PLP Labs’ published ‘This changes everything’ which explores the effect of the pandemic on fifteen different elements of the built environment, with each topic including an evaluation of key changes, suggestions on how to move forward, and a discussion with a leading voice in that field. The research is separated into three key chapters – ‘Overarching Themes’, ‘City Design’ and ‘Sectors’ – we investigate everything from Resilience, Construction, and Mobility, through to Open Space, Workplace and Homes.

PLP Labs in junction with University of Cambridge researchers and Smith and Wallwork Engineers proposed The Timer Towers and developed strategies for the use of timber in high-rise construction. ‘Oakwood Tower’ is a 300-meter timber tower in London’s Barbican Centre and ‘The Lodge’ is a 130-meter timber tower envisioned in The Netherlands. The team investigated the structural possibilities and the health and wellbeing benefits of a residential high-rises made of timber.

PLP Labs and the Urban Land Institute created the UK’s Urban Art Forum’s (UAF) first publication, “Including Culture in Development: A Step-by-Step Guide”. Aimed at developers, the guide sets out to help improve the creation and integration of quality public art and cultural infrastructure in schemes. The guide provides clear and concise direction along with effective methodology to help developers implement cultural placemaking that generates long-term economic and social return on capital investment.

Fair Cities Platform, a partnership between PLP Labs, Gehl and the Connected Places Catapult hosted Fair Cities: Race and Space event. The virtual roundtable brought together a group of key thinkers and decision makers from across the built environment sector, as well as experts on inequalities and race, to discuss the key issues around ethnicity, inequality and the urban environment and what the built environment community needs to be doing better.

Fair Cities Platform, a partnership between PLP Labs, Gehl and the Connected Places Catapult hosted Fair Cities: Measuring Social Value event. The open panel discussion tackled how to improve and measure social value within development. The platform prompts conversations about conceiving, delivering, operating and managing fair cities. It establishes an honest dialogue between stakeholders in the built environment to plug knowledge and policy gaps and create positive change in our cities.

PLP Labs engaged with Lionheart, a poet, BBC radio DJ, and spoken word performer for a series of poems titled ‘Emotional Inhabitancy’ which explore the relationship between spaces and emotion. Lionheat took up a residence position in PLP’s studios to engage with team members in one-on-one sessions. Through his therapeutic approach, he sought to bring to the surface subconscious connections between how an architect’s work can impact mental health and people’s experience within spaces.

PLP worked with UCL Design Computation Lab and digital artist Yiyun Kang to create an exhibition at the Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Shenzhen. The installation explored a possible future city underpinned by IUMO – a multi-dimensional urban mobility protocol developed by PLP Labs. The display imagined a not so distant world in which robots, powered by cities that are increasingly aware and intelligent, will solve mobility in increasingly automated ways.