Publica designs public spaces that celebrate civic dignity and enhance everyday life. We connect strategy, planning, architecture, and public realm design, shaping how projects are conceived, developed, and delivered.

We work across three scales: city-wide, neighbourhood, and streets and spaces - designing and delivering built environment projects from RIBA Stage 0 through to Stage 6. Since the completion of early projects in the West End, Publica has built a strong portfolio of realised work, with the scale, complexity, and ambition of our urban design continuing to grow.

Video courtesy of WSP.

Our research is precise, creative and impactful because it is grounded in direct experience of the places we study. Observing the city through on-site fieldwork and detailed desk-based research, we generate evidence and insights that support informed and meaningful change. We examine the social, cultural and spatial conditions that shape a place, ensuring our work amplifies community voices and supports a more inclusive and collaborative approach to city-making.

By integrating urban research throughout the planning process, we design and deliver projects that respond to local context and produce tangible outcomes. Research and analysis are not ends in themselves, but practical tools to guide decisions, build trust, and advocate for better long-term results.

Publica engages deeply with every place we work, undertaking in-depth site work across all our UK and international projects. We want to listen to as many people as we can – residents, people working in and running businesses in area, community organisers - and we like to bring diverse groups of people together to discuss ideas for the future. We also love to organise walks – the most effective way to understand how a place is lived in, used, and valued is to explore it together.

We develop bold proposals that reflect lived experience - rooted in their historic, social, and cultural contexts and responding thoughtfully to place.

All our work is research based and rooted in our survey methodology – that starts from the question ‘how can we know what to put in, if we don’t know what’s already there’. We gather, develop and analyse evidence to understand how places are used and occupied, across 24 hours. We use our maps as the basis for discussion – the documentation of what’s happening in a place now, and how it will likely change, the foundation for agreeing principles for its future.

Our commissioned survey research includes detailed community facilities audits across whole boroughs, visiting and mapping every facility, building population models and assessing gaps in current in future provision.

We have defined a research-based field of urban practice that emphasises an integrated approach to planning and development. We test radical ideas on civic urbanism through strategic design.

Engagement with communities is fundamental to our approach - a city should be shaped by the lived experiences of all of its people. An inclusive and collaborative city-making process, where citizens can participate freely and fully in urban life is crucial in achieving this.

To this end we strongly believe in the power of drawings – from the shared working drawing, the site sketch, a map recording experiences, to complex suites of drawings illustrating policies and their likely impacts – as our most powerful tools.

Great places and projects start with the right brief.

We bring our evidence and analysis together with examples of best practice from around the world to set out the principles for a place, testing and refining throughout with our clients, collaborators, and stakeholders to agree a shared direction. This is often developed into detailed briefs and spatial guidance – which can be visual (drawn briefs), a brief for a project or specialist, or a design code for the future.

We make projects happen.

We specialise in complex multi-stakeholder projects, often working in places where there have been previous projects or strategies which have stalled. We always build from the work that has already been done, bringing our principle-led approach to each project and working from strategy to delivery. We see gaps and opportunities and find the right clients, stakeholders and collaborators to make real change.

Everything we do is collaborative - we work together with our network of engineers, architects, landscape architects, economists, arboriculturists, planning consultants and contractors (and many others) to achieve innovative and high-quality design and delivery for civic spaces. We both lead projects and work as part of design teams.

We specialise in convening multiple perspectives on a place, seeking diverse views to inform and test ideas. Bringing divergent and sometimes competing interests within large project teams and multi-stakeholder groups helps to secure successful, resilient public places for the long-term.

We advocate for our clients, help to set up the governance structures and processes required for complex projects, and create powerful visual communications to describe the ambition of a project or an idea.