Embedding social and economic value into design

Dr Kelly Watson and Andrew Caruso both advise developers, investors, councils, and business improvement districts on how best to embed social and economic value into development projects, but they come at it from different perspectives.

Together, their work highlights two key insights that are critical to delivering genuinely impactful social value across the built environment:

• Social value is more than procurement. It’s about redefining what’s possible and raising ambition for a development site.
• To do that effectively, it needs to be considered much earlier in the placemaking process and be grounded in evidence from the outset.

So how do they do it? We asked them to unpack their approach, explaining how their work is creating meaningful, long-term impact through regeneration.

What does Hatch do differently when it comes to social value advisory services?

Kelly:

Our approach is holistic; rather than focusing solely on programmatic interventions we also look at the physical environment and opportunities to determine what drivers should influence design. Andrew’s architectural background is invaluable here. By exploring the implications of the socioeconomic evidence on spatial design decisions, we help clients align project opportunities with evidenced local need. 

What is key to this process

Andrew:

To avoid social value interventions becoming a procurement-focused “tick box”, we encourage clients to use socio-economic considerations to meaningfully shape the design approach of a regeneration project.

We gather evidence about the structure and performance of the local economy to identify unique opportunities for growth and how to connect this growth back to the needs of the local population. Then we work in an integrated way to guide the design process, helping the design team explore implications of the evidence on spatial design decisions. It’s a more strategic way of shaping designs and is more likely to bring about lasting benefits that genuinely meet needs and differentiate high-performing places.

Kelly:

A good example of this is our work on the masterplan for London Waterloo Station. We advised on how public realm design could help deliver specific social outcomes and meet identified needs of the existing communities, particularly those requiring additional focus, such as women and girls, as well as frontline healthcare workers active in the area’s life sciences cluster.

What sort of interventions might that look like?

Kelly:

The aim is to match development interventions with identified needs—rather than default to obvious commercial uses. At Waterloo we highlighted the opportunity to connect a demonstrated need for more religious and community gathering space with elements of the existing station and surrounding area.

For me, the most meaningful benefits come when the design of spaces allow a wider set of demographic groups to use and access a space—and without requiring them to spend money to be there.

London Waterloo Station has received numerous award recognitions, most notably winning the 2024 World Architecture Festival for Smart Cities. Why has the project resonated so strongly within the industry?

Andrew:

Based on the jury’s comments, the masterplan stood out as innovative because it was driven by empirical research and focused on people-based outcomes. Our investigations gave us a fuller picture of the area’s stakeholders, for example frontline health workers and students with unique public realm access requirements throughout a 24-hour cycle.

What challenges do you face?

Andrew:

Alternative community or cultural uses identified through this process can sometimes generate lower revenues than typical commercial uses. That’s always going to be an important consideration for developers, yet is an important part of activating places and aligning with local economic and social ambitions. And, we believe meeting real needs can make spaces easier to let, reduce vacancies and create more active, thriving places—which ultimately brings economic benefits to the local area.

Kelly:

Often, we find that the public realm within a scheme is expected to do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to a scheme’s social value offer in a spatial sense. But a best practice approach to public realm can genuinely create a huge amount of impact. At Mayfield Park in Manchester, we helped the client think through key principles for the masterplan overall and embedded this as a holistic sustainability strategy. Developer LandsecU+I had understood that thoughtfully programming in the public realm earlier and proactively seeking funding to support this ambition would pay dividends (both economically and socially). This has translated into a thriving and talked about place being created, ahead of any actual phase delivery on site, delivering a combination of commercial and socio-economic benefits. But we also encourage clients to look beyond the public realm and at Mayfield the holistic sustainability strategy includes a wide array of priority themes and actions—a coordinating document used to align project teams and other stakeholders toward shared social value objectives— to ensure that local needs are being considered and responded to throughout design, delivery and operation, and now we’re helping translate that strategy across the individual development phases.

Where can you have the most impact for your efforts?

Kelly:

For me, it’s the business-level strategic frameworks. We’ve developed frameworks for several institutional investors looking to genuinely partner with the public sector, developers and invest funds in transformational regeneration. With a top-level framework in place, this helps to bring the consistency in mission and process that’s critical to affecting change across a whole portfolio of activity, but in a way that allows for context specificity. An off-the-shelf solution will never work as every place, its needs and opportunities, looks different, and so a framework is key to having the flexibility to respond to this but in a consistent and robust way.

Andrew:

I agree. Embedding social value thinking within the decision-making process of these large institutions can align funding and delivery incentives.

Ultimately, social value must be far more than a procurement exercise. It’s about meaningfully impacting the way we shape places. And the only way to do this effectively is by embedding a social value mindset earlier on in the place making process and using socioeconomic evidence to sharpen design and delivery decision-making.