Master planning & urban design

A masterplan is a sequence of decisions about ground: what stays open, what gets built on, where people arrive and how they leave. Get that order wrong and no amount of architecture recovers it, because every building afterwards inherits a plan that was never tested.

So the work starts with the site rather than the programme. Slopes, water, existing routes, what the surrounding blocks already do, where the sun is at four in the afternoon in August. Those constraints decide density and phasing before anyone draws a facade.

Phasing matters more than the final image. A plan that only works when every phase is complete is a plan that fails in year three, when the first phase has to stand on its own and pay for itself. Each phase is drawn as though it might be the last one built.