Services
Architecture & Urbanism
We are a team of award-winning architects and urban designers working across the built environment, from heritage, residential and estate renewal to town centre regeneration, mixed-use places, leisure, and commercial development. We bring a wealth of insight and experience to all our work. Every project is an opportunity to achieve something unique and inspiring, while deliverable, grounded in commercial reality, and sensitive to changing social, environmental and economic conditions.
Place Visioning
We help places to define and articulate their story, their identity and purpose. Vibrant and attractive places should benefit the communities that live and work there, as well as the organisations who manage and care for them. We work with clients to identify local strengths and opportunities, address challenges and overcome obstacles, to deliver, manage and sustain better places for residents, businesses, and visitors.
Community Engagement
Community engagement and consultation is a vital part of any major project. But equally important, is the way you do it. We design bespoke engagement programmes that bring stakeholders into the project from the outset building a mutually beneficial relationship and establishing a continuous, open dialogue throughout the project lifecycle. Academically rigourous, our approach marries technology with human interaction to generate the insights we need to inform our work, and create platforms for the exchange of ideas and information.
We love a challenge at MCAU and we work to create positive, sustainable value for even the most complex, forgotten, unloved, and challenging places and buildings.
We continually seek to enhance and bring communities together whilst moving towards cleaner, more energy efficient solutions.
We appreciate that creating better places encourages more active and healthy lifestyles that build community cohesion.
However, MCAU has a level of commercial understanding that differentiates us from other design consultancies.
Our knowledge of public funding and private finance, and our understanding of partnership and joint venture arrangements, ensures that we can be central to delivering sustainable development solutions.
Our approach
Design is a shared and collaborative process. At MCAU we encourage an open exchange of a diverse range of ideas and opinions from within and outside, whilst always appreciating our client’s requirement.
As a result the following principles sit at the heart of every project that we work on:
- We are committed to the highest quality design that enhances the urban environment and builds sustainable communities.
- No place is forgotten – we see the potential in every estate, neighbourhood, town centre or building.
- We listen; to our clients’ aspiration and ambition, to local people’s needs, to interested stakeholders expectations in finding the optimal solution.
- We recognise the value of history and heritage and seek to build the future rooted in the values of the past.
- We create places that people can enjoy, and which bring fulfilment in their lives facilitating health, wellbeing and sustainability.
- We are committed to innovation that enables progress and sustainability.