Submission by AP Design and Management Ltd.
Being a good ancestor
Practice
1. Do you have a clearly stated purpose aligned with the planetary emergency? We’re looking for a bold ambition here, and a culture which recognises the need for long-term thinking.
Regenerative architecture responds directly to the planetary emergency by re‑imagining the built environment as a force for ecological repair rather than extraction. In the face of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and social instability, it moves beyond minimising damage to actively restoring the systems that sustain life. Buildings become contributors to carbon reduction, water regeneration, habitat creation, and community resilience. To be a good ancestor in this context is to design with urgency and responsibility, recognising that today’s choices shape the conditions future generations will inherit. It requires long‑term thinking, ethical restraint, and a commitment to working within planetary boundaries. Regenerative architecture asks us to align human activity with natural cycles, to design for adaptability in an uncertain future, and to leave places healthier than we found them. In doing so, it reframes architecture as an act of care, stewardship, and intergenerational justice in a time of crisis.
2. Do you have a clearly stated purpose aligned with the planetary emergency? We’re looking for a bold ambition here, and a culture which recognises the need for long-term thinking.
This succession plan sets out a clear approach to ensuring continuity, resilience, and long‑term stewardship within the organisation. It identifies critical roles essential to vision, delivery, and operations, and commits to preparing successors who are aligned with core values as well as capable of leadership. Succession is treated as an ongoing process rather than a single event, supported through mentoring, shared leadership, and progressive responsibility. Key knowledge, relationships, and decision‑making processes are documented and actively transferred to reduce risk and dependency on individuals. Development opportunities, including project leadership and professional learning, are used to build confidence and capability over time. Clear transition triggers and handover principles are established to enable smooth change when required. The plan is reviewed regularly to reflect evolving organisational needs, ensuring leadership continuity while allowing space for adaptation, renewal, and future growth.
3. Do you share research and knowledge for the benefit of society and the wider world?
We research and share knowledge as a public good, guided by the belief that learning should contribute positively to society, the environment, and future generations. Our research is grounded in evidence, lived experience, and collaboration across disciplines, drawing insight from practice, place, and people. We actively test ideas through projects, reflection, and dialogue, treating learning as an ongoing and adaptive process. Knowledge is shared openly through teaching, publications, events, and partnerships, with an emphasis on clarity, accessibility, and real‑world impact. We prioritise transparency and ethical responsibility, recognising that information carries influence and consequence. By sharing both successes and failures, we aim to support collective learning and accelerate positive change. Our approach values curiosity, humility, and generosity, ensuring that research does not remain isolated, but helps build capacity, resilience, and understanding for the wider benefit of society.
Project
1. Do you advocate for long-term thinking at the outset of work? Do you initiate work with long-term thinking and challenge clients? Also, can the organisation demonstrate that this approach has worked?
Our long‑term thinking strategy is grounded in designing beyond immediate project outcomes to consider cumulative social, environmental, and economic impact over time. We work with clients to frame each project as part of a wider system, shaped by planetary limits, future users, and long‑term stewardship. From project to project, we actively challenge briefs through evidence‑based questioning, scenario testing, and whole‑life thinking, encouraging clients to move beyond minimum compliance toward regenerative outcomes. Lessons learned are captured, reviewed, and carried forward, allowing each project to build on the last. This iterative approach strengthens decision‑making, raises ambition, and embeds continuous improvement. By clearly demonstrating how early choices affect long‑term performance, resilience, and value, we help clients understand risk, opportunity, and responsibility. In this way, long‑term thinking becomes a practical, shared process that evolves through collaboration, reflection, and accountability over time.
2. Does your work take account of the future climate and the need for resilience?
We design with a clear understanding that the future climate will be more volatile, uncertain, and demanding than the past. Our approach integrates climate projections, whole‑life performance, and adaptive capacity from the earliest stages of every project. We prioritise passive design, low‑carbon materials, water sensitivity, and nature‑based solutions to reduce vulnerability to heat, flooding, resource scarcity, and energy instability. Resilience is treated as both an environmental and social concern, ensuring buildings can continue to support health, comfort, and community under changing conditions. We test design decisions against multiple future scenarios, allowing flexibility and adaptation over time rather than fixed, short‑term solutions. By embedding robustness, repairability, and long‑term stewardship into our work, we help clients invest in places that can endure and evolve. In doing so, we respond responsibly to climate risk while creating environments that remain safe, useful, and life‑supporting for future generations.
3. Does the majority of your work go beyond mitigating negatives and towards optimising positives?
Our work moves deliberately beyond mitigating negative impacts toward actively optimising positive outcomes for people, place, and planet. Rather than focusing solely on reducing carbon, waste, or harm, we seek opportunities for projects to restore ecosystems, strengthen communities, and generate long‑term value. Each design decision is tested for its potential to contribute positively—through enhanced biodiversity, improved health and wellbeing, social resilience, and circular use of resources. We treat buildings as living systems, capable of giving back more than they take over time. By reframing constraints as opportunities, we challenge conventional briefs and collaborate with clients to raise ambition beyond compliance. Success is measured not only by what is avoided, but by what is created, regenerated, and sustained. In this way, our work supports a shift from extractive models toward regenerative practice, where architecture becomes an agent of positive change within wider ecological and social systems.
Co-evolving with nature
Practice
1. Do you use biophilia within your premises and/or do you regularly gather in natural settings?
We embed biophilic principles into our premises to strengthen everyday connections between people and nature. Natural light, views, materials, planting, and sensory variation are intentionally integrated to support wellbeing, focus, and creativity. These elements help create calm, healthy environments that reflect our belief that human and ecological health are deeply connected. Beyond the workplace, we regularly gather, meet, and reflect in natural settings, recognising the value of landscapes, weather, and seasonal change in shaping perspective and decision‑making. Working outdoors and in nature‑rich environments encourages slower, more thoughtful conversations and reinforces our relationship with place. These practices are not symbolic; they actively inform how we design. By experiencing biophilia directly—both indoors and outdoors—we ground our work in lived understanding, ensuring that the benefits of nature connection are embedded authentically into our projects for clients, users, and communities alike.
2. Can you share examples of where you have considered nature in decision making?
An example of how we consider nature in decision‑making is through early site analysis that treats natural systems as active stakeholders in the design process. Before formal design begins, we study sun paths, prevailing winds, water movement, existing vegetation, soil conditions, and biodiversity patterns to understand how the site already functions ecologically. These findings directly influence layout, orientation, massing, and material choices. For instance, buildings may be positioned to preserve habitat corridors, manage rainfall naturally, or maximise passive comfort while reducing energy demand. Where possible, we prioritise nature‑based solutions over engineered ones, allowing landscapes to manage water, shade, and cooling. Decisions are tested against their impact on ecological health as well as human use, ensuring that design responses support both resilience and regeneration. By letting natural systems guide choices, we create outcomes that work with nature rather than against it.
3. Are you supporting nature locally and nationally?
We support nature locally by taking practical, visible action alongside longer‑term thinking. Through community initiatives such as litter picking in rural and coastal areas, we help care for the landscapes we live and work within, recognising that small, consistent actions contribute to healthier ecosystems and shared stewardship. These activities also strengthen relationships with local communities and build awareness of the everyday pressures facing natural environments. Beyond immediate action, we carry these values into future projects by designing with nature in mind from the outset. This includes protecting existing habitats, enhancing biodiversity, and creating opportunities for people to reconnect with local landscapes. Community engagement helps inform these decisions, grounding our work in real places rather than abstract principles. By combining hands‑on care with forward‑looking design, we aim to support nature both now and in the long term, contributing positively to local environmental resilience and collective responsibility.
Project
1. Can you demonstrate work that strives to match the performance of a mature ecosystem?
No.
2. Are you working on material stewardship?
We approach material stewardship as a long‑term responsibility rather than a short‑term specification exercise. Materials are selected with careful consideration of their origin, embodied impact, durability, and potential for reuse or recovery at the end of their life. Wherever possible, we prioritise low‑carbon, responsibly sourced, and locally available materials that support circular systems and reduce extraction. Design decisions favour simplicity, adaptability, and repairability, allowing buildings to evolve without unnecessary waste. We actively challenge default material choices, encouraging clients to consider whole‑life value rather than upfront cost alone. Knowledge gained from each project is documented and shared, improving material decisions over time. By treating materials as finite resources held in trust rather than consumables, we aim to reduce environmental impact, support resilient supply chains, and contribute to a built environment that respects ecological limits while delivering lasting social and environmental benefit.
3. Does the majority of your work demonstrate the use of biologically-inspired approaches such as Bioregionalism, Biophilia or Biomimicry?
Our work demonstrates biologically inspired thinking by grounding design decisions in bioregionalism, biophilia, and biomimicry. We respond to bioregional context by understanding local climate, ecology, materials, and culture, allowing each project to emerge from its place rather than impose a generic solution. Biophilic principles shape how spaces support wellbeing, connection to nature, and sensory richness, informed by lived experience as well as design intent. Biomimicry influences how we approach performance and resilience, learning from natural systems that are efficient, adaptive, and regenerative. Together, these approaches encourage buildings and places to behave more like living systems—responsive, resource‑aware, and interconnected. Rather than treating nature as an aesthetic layer, we use it as a guide for decision‑making, helping us create environments that support ecological health, human wellbeing, and long‑term resilience while working within the limits and opportunities of their local context.
Creating a just space for people
Practice
1. Do you have a progressive EDI policy and can you evidence many forms of diversity, which are welcomed and acknowledged, within your company/organisation?
No.
2. Do you operate a no overtime culture, meet the living wage consistently, and stipulate a fair salary ratio between staff of all levels?
We are committed to creating a healthy, fair, and sustainable working culture. We operate a no‑overtime approach, recognising that long hours are neither productive nor equitable, and that rest, balance, and personal time are essential to wellbeing and good decision‑making. All roles are paid at or above the Living Wage, reflecting our belief that work should provide financial security and dignity. Beyond this, we maintain a transparent and fair salary ratio across the organisation, ensuring that pay differences between roles remain proportionate and justifiable. This approach supports trust, shared responsibility, and collective success rather than hierarchy or burnout. By valuing people’s time, fairly rewarding their contribution, and embedding equity into how we operate, we aim to demonstrate that ethical employment practices are fundamental to long‑term resilience, staff retention, and the creation of meaningful, high‑quality work at every level.
3. Do you support charities, community groups, social enterprises, action groups and others through pro-bono work, charitable giving or in-kind donations?
We actively support charities and community groups that align with our values, recognising the importance of collective action in addressing social and environmental challenges. Our involvement includes offering time, skills, and advocacy to organisations such as ACAN, helping to amplify calls for positive change within the built environment. By engaging with grassroots movements and local initiatives, we remain connected to wider conversations about climate responsibility, social justice, and ethical practice. This engagement informs our work, challenges our thinking, and keeps us accountable beyond individual projects. Where possible, we contribute through participation in events, sharing knowledge, and supporting campaigns that promote systemic change. We also prioritise collaboration with local community groups, understanding that meaningful impact is built through relationships and shared effort. Supporting charities and networks is an extension of our practice, reinforcing our commitment to working for the public good and contributing to a more just and resilient future.
4. Do you use an ethical framework to assess opportunities and/or supply chain partners and is them team consulted on these decisions?
We use an ethical framework to assess opportunities and relationships across our supply chain, ensuring alignment with our social, environmental, and professional values. This framework considers factors such as environmental responsibility, fair labour practices, transparency, long‑term resilience, and shared commitment to positive impact. Rather than treating procurement as a purely commercial decision, we view it as an extension of our wider responsibility. Potential partners and suppliers are reviewed against these principles, with risks and opportunities openly discussed. The framework is consulted collaboratively, allowing team members to contribute insight from project experience, research, and lived knowledge. This collective approach encourages accountability and shared ownership of decisions, while avoiding single‑point judgement. By embedding ethical assessment into everyday practice and keeping it open to challenge and review, we ensure supply‑chain choices support integrity, trust, and long‑term value for people, communities, and the environment.
Project
1. Does your work demonstrate deep engagement with local stakeholders and end users?
Our work is shaped through meaningful, ongoing engagement with local stakeholders and end users, recognising that those closest to a place hold essential knowledge. We engage early in the design process to understand lived experience, local priorities, and social as well as environmental context. This dialogue informs key decisions around layout, access, use, and long‑term stewardship, ensuring outcomes respond to real needs rather than assumptions. Engagement continues throughout projects through feedback, testing ideas, and refining proposals collaboratively. We value transparency and active listening, creating space for challenge and shared ownership of outcomes. By embedding stakeholder and user insight into decision‑making, we strengthen trust and relevance while reducing risk. This approach helps ensure that projects are not only technically sound, but socially rooted, widely supported, and capable of delivering lasting benefit to the communities they serve.
2. Does your work create connected and resilient communities which positively contribute to neighbourhoods and allow equality of access?
Our work creates connection by placing communities at the centre of design and treating neighbourhoods as living social systems. We engage with local stakeholders and end users to understand how places are used, valued, and experienced, ensuring proposals respond to everyday life rather than abstract assumptions. Designs prioritise shared spaces, clear access, and adaptable environments that encourage interaction, safety, and belonging. Resilience is embedded by supporting social as well as environmental capacity, allowing communities to adapt to change while maintaining identity and cohesion. Equality of access is fundamental, guiding decisions around layout, movement, inclusivity, and long‑term affordability so that places can be used by people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. By strengthening social connections and reducing barriers, our work contributes positively to neighbourhood life, helping create environments that are welcoming, durable, and capable of supporting healthy, inclusive communities over time.
3. Does the majority of your work promote equity in society, and consider all people, not only building inhabitants
Our regenerative approach recognises that humans are only one part of a wider living system, and that all species have a role in creating healthy, resilient places. We consider non‑human life as a stakeholder in every project, beginning with an understanding of existing ecosystems, habitats, and species relationships. Design decisions are shaped to protect and enhance biodiversity through habitat retention, creation, and connectivity, allowing plants, insects, birds, and other species to thrive alongside human use. Nature‑based solutions are prioritised to support soil health, water cycles, and ecological balance, while reducing pressure on engineered systems. By working with local ecologies rather than overriding them, buildings and landscapes become contributors to environmental repair. This multi‑species perspective informs layout, material choice, and long‑term stewardship, ensuring projects support life beyond their boundaries. In doing so, our work helps create places where human activity strengthens, rather than diminishes, the wider web of life.