What We Do
We are place creatives, who believe that every neighbourhood deserves to be the subject of big thinking at a human scale. Envisioning new and regenerating existing communities is a long and complex process, so we have honed our skills as designer/facilitators to keep development on track from inception to completion.
Urban Place Lab work with some of the most significant players in UK property and construction industry including landed estates, major home builders, institutional land owners, local authorities and progressive, smaller developers.
Why We Are Different
We think that creating places which embed a strong social and cultural context is both an art and a science. The natural and organic evolution of communities, evident in historic townscape and integrated with local landscapes, has been largely lost in a UK planning process driven by opportunism rather than common sense.
Our approach to urban design involves close collaboration between our clients, professional teams and the local community, to arrive at a unified vision for place-making that emphasises quality and well-being. This involves being frank about what makes great places succeed.
We want to work with clients keen on making a difference and building better.
Who We Are
Collaborating for almost two decades, the leadership of Urban Place Lab is comprised of directors James and Katarina Gross, Tina Spires, working alongside consultant architectural director Alex Dutton and associate landscape architect, Claire Michellis.
We set up Urban Place Lab in response to industry interest in our approach to understanding towns and landscapes, how places expand, and our track record of designing places for and with local people.
We are designers who live and breathe the ‘big picture’ but who can also focus on the small details that make a difference to delivering believable change and great places.
The Team
Beginning his career as an apprentice landscape gardener on a country estate, James became a chartered landscape architect and then graduated from Oxford Brookes University in 1997 with an M.A. in Urban Design.
Ten years’ experience in property and development eventually led to a masterplanning director role at Barton Willmore, a career shifting secondment to the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, and success in reaching the shortlist for the Wolfson Economic Prize for Garden Cities Competition in 2014.
Leaving Barton Willmore to found Urban Place Lab with Tina Spires, James combines design and business development functions. An Academician at the Academy of Urbanism, he is a regular contributor to Here and Now journal, lectures on Sustainable Urbanism at the University of Oxford (Kellogg College) and has made appearances on the BBC on housing growth and Green Belt issues.
Architecturally trained in Germany, and a postgraduate of the Joint Centre for Urban Design (JCUD) at Oxford Brookes University, Tina is passionate about creating places that people aspire to live, and grow old in. She is a highly experienced urban designer and placemaker with strong technical knowledge to create workable solutions.
Having worked for Barton Willmore for 13 years, Tina was part of the team behind the industry standard setting applications at Filton Airfield and Whittlesford Hospital, that became the new norm for Design and Access Statements, and were singled out as best practice by (what is now) Homes England.
With a particular eye and appreciation for European best-practice, and familiarity with some of the best in European development models, Tina is a regular advocate of pushing design boundaries to achieve better places.
With responsibility for business communications and administration, Katarina keeps the business on the straight and narrow. An eye for financial detail and a rare ability to communicate with just about anyone, irrespective of language or cultural barriers, Katarina works alongside clients, the public and the consumer facing side of Urban Place Lab, to communicate design intent, practice ideals and place ambition, creating support for place-change in the process.
Katarina graduated in film and television from NYU. Her background working for Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures, coupled with a role in the US Government facilitating post-conflict regeneration in her native Yugoslavia, have given her a unique insight into communication networks. Added to this experience of setting up pan-European supply chains in a multi-language environment, Katarina advises on achieving meaningful dialogue in complex situations.
Alex joined Urban Place Lab, a year following our inception in 2016. Having developed an affinity working with James on projects delivered alongside the Prince’s Foundation including the first phases of RAF Upper Heyford (Heyford Park) and the Welsh House Types Portfolio (a test series of houses based upon Welsh vernacular/traditional homes for Coed Darcy), Alex approached Urban Place Lab about joining in a consultant architectural director capacity.
Alex has helped develop Urban Place Lab’s architectural capacity, including reserved matters applications up to 100 homes, house-typology design and design review roles, alongside mixed use designs for buildings as diverse as nurseries, churches, shops as well as housing layouts.
Working with a strong sense of human scale and proportion, Alex is one of a limited cadre of architects with an ability to immediately identify what may be wrong with a design, and make the improvements that lead to a building in harmony with place and the environment.
Alex has a particularly strong knowledge-base of self and custom build, and alongside his role with Urban Place Lab, is a Director of Maak Architecture Ltd and is progressing live projects in Bristol and elsewhere that will make larger-scale community-build housing projects become a reality.
UPL’s landscape work is led by associate landscape architect Claire Michellis.
Claire is a highly creative and experienced landscape architect, with excellent graphic skills and a strong focus on multi-functional public realm design integrating playful elements and public art. She works with other disciplines to carry design concepts through from initial ideas to detailed design.
She has worked on a huge variety of design projects, from landscape strategies for new development to regeneration of intimate public spaces. Claire led the detailed landscape and product design on UPLs award-winning wayfinding work and was a key member of the design and delivery team for major brownfield regeneration on former factory sites around Birmingham including a new 2ha civic park design.
Before working with UPL, Claire was part of the landscape teams at Barton Willmore and LDA design where she gained experience of working closely with ecologists to ensure her landscape designs deliver strong biodiversity.
Continuing this work at UPL, Claire regularly works alongside engineers and ecologists to help integrate the design of open space, sustainable drainage and biodiversity net gain into proposals, making the most of space available and pushing the boundaries of quality landscape design.
Working with us
Working with Urban Place Lab is about experiencing a different approach to achieve meaningful outcomes. Our wholesome philosophy means we are interested in the full development timeline, not just a small niche part of it. In this, we are different from the
standard consultancy approach – architects, planners, highway engineers etc. in the built environment, who tend towards a silo mentality enforced by the blinkers of their profession.
Large scale community planning can be blighted by established and hard to break processes in which the design concept is passed from hand to hand in a way that does no service to the built outcome. Resisting this status quo, we try instead to anticipate the many pitfalls the delivery of development over many years can experience, and embed some core principles that will safeguard a scheme’s quality throughout its long gestation.