Masterplan #3: Between the Buildings: From Public Realm to Living System

This is the third and final of three thought pieces, exploring the evolution of masterplanning and public realm design in the education sector, with a focus on the emergent practice of regenerative design.

In 2022, we were commissioned by LSE to develop a Public Realm Strategy for their Aldwych campus — a ten-year framework for transforming the spaces between buildings into something as considered, as purposeful, and complementing the pedagogical richness of the buildings themselves.

The central finding was not surprising to us, but it was clarifying. The single most significant intervention available to LSE was Portugal Street — the road that currently bisects the campus, separating the northern and southern halves of the university quarter and subordinating pedestrian life to through-traffic, leaving an unsafe street level environment, through its ambiguity. Pedestrianise it, and the campus becomes coherent, better, safer. Leave it as it is, and no amount of incremental landscape improvement will overcome the fundamental dysfunction at its heart.

Earlier this year, LSE appointed Gustafson Porter + Bowman (GPB) to deliver exactly that — a redesigned, pedestrianised Portugal Street, creating a new civic connector for the university quarter. It is a genuinely exciting appointment, we enjoued looking at the shortlisted entries on public display in the Mashall Building. Seeing the strategy move from document to commission is deeply satisfying. But it also prompts a question we have been sitting with since we completed that work.

Because what the LSE strategy described was, ultimately, about the spaces between buildings becoming as purposeful as the buildings themselves. What if the ambition went further still?

The limits of public realm

It is worth pausing on what LSE actually is — because the word “campus” carries assumptions that don't quite fit. University estates in the UK come in many forms: the traditional collegiate model, the Victorian civic red-brick, the post-war plate-glass university, the Robbins-era campus, the urban multi-site institution. LSE belongs to none of these categories comfortably. It is a dense, permeable, urban institution — very much of its city, woven into the fabric of Aldwych and the Strand, without the boundary fence or the green setting that “campus” implies. Its public realm is, in the most literal sense, public: shared with Londoners, tourists, legal professionals from the Inns of Court, and the daily life of central London.

That condition makes the public realm question both harder and more interesting. There is no campus edge to design, no arrival sequence to choreograph. The university quarter bleeds into the city at every threshold. The design challenge is not separation but coherence — creating a legible sense of place within the continuous fabric of the city. Our propositions for LSE were framed around the organising ideas of threshold, street and urban room.

Public realm thinking, as a discipline, has achieved a great deal in addressing exactly this kind of condition. The transformation of British cities over the past two decades — the reclaimed waterfronts, the pedestrianised high streets, the redesigned civic squares — owes much to the quality of thinking about external space that has developed since the Urban Task Force first put public realm at the centre of the agenda. Universities have been part of that story.

But public realm thinking, at its core, remains a spatial discipline. It asks how external space can be designed to support human activity — movement, gathering, rest, encounter. It treats the landscape as a setting: beautifully composed, carefully detailed, but ultimately in service of the people who move through it. The ecological dimension — when it appears at all — tends to arrive as an enhancement, added to an already-formed design.

Regenerative landscape thinking begins from a different premise. The external spaces of the campus are not just a setting for human activity. They are a living system — one that can be designed to function ecologically, not just spatially. Water, soils, habitat, microclimate, carbon: these are not enhancements to the design. They are the design.

This is the distance between public realm and what we are now trying to do. Not a rejection of the discipline — the spatial and human dimensions remain essential — but an expansion of it, into territory that public realm alone cannot reach.

What the spaces between buildings can do

The external spaces of a university estate, when considered together, cover a considerable area of land. At most institutions, they represent a significant proportion of the total footprint — often more than the built area. They are, in other words, a substantial ecological resource, currently managed primarily for amenity and maintenance efficiency, or worse considered a burden and drain on financial resources.

Managed differently, they can do far more. Surface water that currently runs off hard landscaping into combined sewers can be slowed, filtered and infiltrated through permeable surfaces, rain gardens and constructed wetlands — reducing flood risk, improving water quality, and recharging local groundwater. Mown grass maintained at scale for visual tidiness can give way to diverse meadow planting that supports pollinators, sequesters carbon in the soil, reduces maintenance costs and creates genuine habitat value. Tree canopy, strategically positioned, can reduce the urban heat island effect, improve air quality, intercept rainfall and provide the connective tissue for habitat corridors that extend beyond the institution's footprint.

None of this is speculative. The ecological science is well established. What is less established — and where we believe the most interesting design work lies — is how to integrate these ecological functions with the spatial and human qualities that make a place people want to be in. The risk in purely ecological approaches is a landscape that performs well by measurement but feels austere or alienating to the people who use it daily. The risk in purely spatial approaches is a landscape that looks beautiful but functions poorly — ecologically inert, high-maintenance, disconnected from the living systems around it.

The design challenge is to hold both. And it is, in our experience, a genuinely rich one.

The LSE strategy as a case in point

The Portugal Street intervention is the centrepiece of the LSE strategy, but it is not the whole of it. The wider framework identified a series of incremental moves — changes to planting regimes — green walls and roofs, additional street trees, improvements to surface water management, the creation of new social spaces at the junctions between buildings — that, taken together, begin to shift the estate from amenity towards ecology.

What made the work interesting was precisely the constraint. LSE's Aldwych estate is dense, urban, hemmed in on all sides by listed buildings, active roads and the complex land ownership patterns of central London. There is no room for sweeping landscape gestures. Every intervention has to work hard — spatially, ecologically, and institutionally — within tight boundaries.

That constraint is, we would argue, representative rather than exceptional. Most university estates in the UK face similar conditions: dense, built-up, historically complex, financially pressured. The question is not how to create ideal regenerative landscapes from scratch, but how to move incrementally towards ecological health within real conditions of constraint. The LSE strategy is, in that sense, a model for how regenerative landscape thinking can be applied not just to greenfield masterplanning but to the dense, complicated, already-built estates that constitute the majority of the UK higher education sector.

The dispersed estate as ecological opportunity

The challenge takes a different form entirely when the institution is not a single consolidated estate but a network of sites distributed across a city. Working with a large multi-site further education college across eleven campuses in north and east London raised exactly this question — and suggested an interesting possibility.

When sites are spread across a city, the temptation is to treat each one independently: a landscape strategy responsive to its particular conditions, its immediate neighbourhood, its own constraints. But the more generative possibility is to ask what a coordinated approach across the network might achieve. Eleven sites could, in principle, share a common ecological ambition — a coherent approach to planting, water management and habitat creation — that makes each site legible as part of a larger whole, whilst remaining distinctive in its own setting.

This remains more aspiration than delivered reality in most multi-site contexts — the institutional, financial and governance complexity of coordinating ecological strategy across dispersed ownership and management is considerable. But it points toward a genuinely new way of thinking about what a multi-site estate is for: not merely a management challenge to be efficiently administered, but a potential ecological network, contributing to the resilience of the city at a scale no single site could achieve alone.

From strategy to stewardship

The LSE Public Realm Strategy will be delivered incrementally, over many years, by many different hands. The GPB appointment is the first significant move — Portugal Street — but the wider framework extends well beyond it. This is, we think, the right model: a clear strategic direction, held consistently over time, delivered through a succession of individual projects each of which advances the whole. The whole, as the strategy itself recognised, is greater than the sum of its parts.

What sustains that kind of long-term consistency is not the strategy document itself — however good it is — but the institution's relationship to the place it occupies. Universities that think of their estates as assets to be managed will always be tempted to make short-term decisions that compromise long-term ecological ambition: to resurface rather than restore, to plant for visual effect rather than ecological function, to prioritise maintenance efficiency over biodiversity value.

Universities that think of their estates as places held in stewardship — for their communities, for the species that share the land with them, for the students and staff who will arrive long after the current generation of decision-makers has moved on — make different decisions. Not always more expensive ones. Often, in fact, less expensive ones: meadow planting costs less to maintain than mown grass; permeable surfaces reduce long-term drainage costs; diverse tree canopy is more resilient to climate stress than monoculture amenity planting.

The shift from asset management to ecological stewardship is, in the end, less a technical challenge than a cultural one. It requires institutions to extend their sense of responsibility beyond their immediate needs and their immediate horizons — to ask not just what the estate needs from the landscape, but what the landscape, and the bio-region it belongs to, needs from the institution.

That is the question that regenerative masterplanning exists to answer. And it is, we believe, one of the most important questions in university public realm design today.

The LSE Public Realm Strategy was developed by Miltiadou Cook Mitzman in 2022. Portugal Street is being redesigned by Gustafson Porter + Bowman following an invited competition.