Making room for placemaking in industrial schemes

Industrial doesn’t have to mean big grey sheds that sit on the edge of town, writes Alan Lamb of AEW Architects. With proper placemaking we can deliver commercially viable schemes that are celebrated hubs of employment.

In the past, industrial developments were often placed close to motorway networks and well away from major retail or residential areas. In many ways this gave them a kind of practical invisibility.

Today, the context of industrial schemes is changing. Demand remains strong, but the buffers may be thinner, the sites are trickier and industrial development is more visible, more urban and, in some cases, more politically sensitive.

In response, placemaking in industrial schemes has to be taken seriously. When done properly, it strengthens both the planning and the commercial case for industrial developments.

Industrial placemaking and masterplanning

One of the clearest shifts in modern industrial architecture is that placemaking is no longer treated as something you bolt on at the end. It’s increasingly part of the masterplanning conversation from the start, especially on strategic employment sites.

Industrial placemaking is often a site planning discipline before it is an architectural one. The plot structure, the movement hierarchy, the landscape framework, and the way you treat edges do more to create ’place’ than any elevation treatment will.

The questions to ask are typically

• Can a site accommodate the required floorspace?
• Can the wider environment support it in terms of drainage and biodiversity?
• Are movement patterns workable for all?
• Are there amenities for staff?
• Does the estate stitch into its surroundings rather than operating like a sealed compound?

Handled properly, this early thinking improves the occupier offer and helps developments sit more comfortably within the wider area.

The rise of the campus

Project Halo Campus

Framing large industrial schemes as campuses reflects a genuine shift in what occupiers and employees now need.

As an industry, we’ve thought about industrial projects in terms of location, location, location for a long time. The question was how far from the motorway junction is the site? But that’s not the only driver now. Labour and skills availability, power availability and viability pressures are all big considerations when designing a scheme.

Take distribution and the way it’s shifted as an example. Places that aren’t textbook optimal for the motorway network can become better choices overall because they can supply the workforce and the supporting services, and because the place works for staff and operators. It’s a much more holistic picture than it used to be.

Designing schemes as coherent campuses, with legible routes, safe pedestrian movement, usable landscape and considered amenity, helps occupiers attract and retain staff and creates environments that function more effectively day to day.

BNG and SuDS as a framework

Crewe Basford

Biodiversity Net Gain and SuDS have changed how sites are planned. With both, you often have to prove why you can’t achieve them on site rather than pushing them offsite or underground. On top of that, the cost of exporting material from site can be eye-watering. Off-site BNG can be expensive and is often discouraged compared to on-site solutions. Some schemes now have to ‘wash their face’ on plot. Simply put, they must stand up commercially and technically on their own land. That can feel like a constraint until you recognise the opportunity it creates. If you have to allocate land for BNG and SuDS anyway, the question becomes where you put it and what else it can do.

When you do BNG and SuDs well, you can use the landscape structure to define edges, shape views, create staff amenity, support active routes, and provide a softer interface between industrial form and its surroundings.

Above ground, SuDS become a visible part of the environment that can be designed to contribute to experience, legibility and identity. It also reduces the embodied carbon of schemes by having fewer underground tanks and crates with the civil engineering that they require.

That is placemaking. Not in the abstract, but in a very literal, plan-led sense.

Greenfield and brownfield can have different problems

Industrial placemaking is context-sensitive and changes depending on the land type and the story of the site.

Greenfield land

The greenfield conversation centres on the on-plot requirements that shape the plan. Material retention, BNG, SuDS, and wider environmental considerations are all organising elements that affect placemaking. They’re also the things you can place strategically to produce collateral benefits, like better edges and better staff amenity, without undermining viability.

Brownfield land

The challenge with brownfield is often less about buffers getting thinner and more about explaining change. New buildings may be taller or larger, or simply different in position. But they’re also likely to perform more optimally. They’re better insulated, better sealed, more controlled, and often cleaner operationally than what came before.

Placemaking here becomes partly about acknowledging what existed, describing what is changing, and showing how the modern scheme is responding to a different set of standards and expectations than the old one ever did.

A more mature industrial sector

Manchester Business Park Mature

Location will always matter.

But it’s absolutely imperative to give equal footing to place in modern industrial development. Labour markets, power, staffing, staff experience, relationships with local communities, environmental performance and landscape — these are all vital aspects that govern whether a scheme can be successful or not.

By treating these things as core design inputs, schemes should move through consent more smoothly, be easier to let, and easier to construct. When treated as an afterthought, you’ll find yourself trying to explain your way out of a problem that could’ve been solved with the proper up-front work.

Ultimately, good industrial placemaking is about making schemes more integrated with the environments they sit within.

• Alan Lamb is director at AEW Architects