Zibi, Ottawa credit: Zibi

Our sustainability consultancy using the One Planet Living framework, developed from our experiences with BedZED, ensures complete, triple-tier sustainability.

We embed One Planet Living into your vision, strategy, master plan and design, ensuring your development supports people to live sustainable, healthy and happy lives. We help you focus on people and outcomes rather than looking at how many credits you can score.

It has been fantastic working with the team at Bioregional on some of our most recent projects. They dive in to provide holistic support on all sustainability aspects of a project from energy strategy to food growing, bringing with them the One Planet Living framework, which provides a uniquely simple and tangible way to embed and communicate with local residents and stakeholders.

Doug Higgins, Project Director of First Base
  • A unique strategy

    We investigate and understand the local, regional and global context of each project, and use this as the basis for establishing key sustainability considerations. We then set high-level goals for the scheme. Using the One Planet Living framework, we cover issues like wellbeing, community and economic impact as well as environmental objectives for cutting carbon, waste and so on.

  • User-centred design

    We create a set of ‘user personas’ – examples of people who will be living in, shopping at or visiting a development. We understand what their needs and aspirations are and model a series of user-experience scenarios based on these needs.

  • Setting meaningful outcomes, targets and KPIs

    Equipped with our user-experience scenarios we set stretching but achievable outcomes and targets that are bespoke to each scheme. They stand up to scrutiny because:

    • They are grounded in the real world because we base them on our context work
    • They are user-centric. For example, rather than defining how many metres away from a bus stop a house should be placed, your target might be ‘90% of residents use public transport as their primary mode of transport’
    • They are based on ecological footprint analysis. We show how decisions taken in design can affect people’s behaviour
    • The targets cover the whole lifecycle of the development, not just design and build, bringing long-lasting benefits.

Photo credit: Zibi in Ottawa has used One Planet Living to shape its plans for a mixed-use, vibrant sustainable community.