Place/cultural strategy
Lucy Bullivant & Associates (LB&A) is a leading strategic consultancy firm of globally influential place and cultural strategists, advocates and champions.
Inhabited places need to engender a sense of belonging, comfort, safety and opportunity made possible through first rate, sustainable coherent urban design, placemaking, governance and cultural strategies driven by a long term vision and local agency.
Lucy’s mission is to consistently evolve promising opportunities by creating, leading and delivering the most bespoke solutions of maximum social value for and with our clients. We actively support the achievement of higher standards in architecture, urban design, planning and culture-led placemaking through all our projects, high level strategic and almost always event-based, and via related publications and the media.
Her clients are cultural organisations/exhibiting bodies, Business Improvement Districts (BIDS), local authorities, charities and academic bodies globally of the highest calibre.
She works globally, most recently in the UK, Norway, Colombia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and over the last decade in Brazil, China, France, Italy, Spain and the USA.
Please get in touch to find out more and obtain client references.
Lucy Bullivant, Founder of LB&A, is an inclusive place/cultural strategist and built environment expert for clients including Central District Alliance, the Centre for London think-tank, Building Centre, D-Arch – ETH Zurich, Lambeth Council, Enfield Council and Brent Council. She is an award-winning author for Routledge, Merrell and Thames & Hudson, a competition jury member for market leaders including Inspire Future Generations Awards, the AJ Architecture Awards and ArchMarathon, and an expert witness for developers such as Caledonian Properties.
In 2010 Lucy was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), a lifetime honour conferred to her for her creative leadership of architecture and the building of sustainable communities.
Lucy is a chair of the Design Review Panel led by Lambeth Council and a member of the Place Quality and Design Panel led by Enfield Council. She is Trustee of the architectural education charity Temple Bar Trust.
Lucy’s expert knowledge of her field and 30 years of leadership experience gives her the senior level decision making skills needed to devise and deliver cultural placemaking strategies in the context of specific socio-economic conditions and needs for a range of organisations in the UK and internationally.
Place tools need to be intelligently sharp, not blunt, to be of most use! Depending on your priorities, she carries out original research for you responding to your needs in a relevant and precise way, leads on stakeholder/community buy in, and pinpoints the inspiration of specific successful examplars of quality – built environment and cultural projects, the challenges and adaptive ways in which these can be mitigated.
Where applicable, Lucy brings in a bespoke team of specialists to ensure the best quality results, and provides mentoring.
Services
– place/cultural visions and strategies.
– scenario planning.
– social value analysis – impact assessment frameworks.
– socio-economic research, analysis & strategy – cultural industries, mixed use, ground floor activation.
– stakeholder engagement and evaluation – curating and leading hybrid strategies & outputs – in-person & digital – plans, events, networks, focus groups and workshops. Bespoke tactics to leverage the intelligence and lived experiences of communities to support social value and lasting positive change.
– specialist writing – place strategies, reports, books, advertorial, copywriting, advocacy (i.e. expert witness etc) – based on rigorous analysis. and driven by a vivid storytelling approach.
– cultural infrastructure mapping.
– design review panel chairing – see below for details.
– mentoring.
Lucy is always ready to play an active creative role in successfully advancing high quality, engaging solutions and strategies for place vision. International bodies she has helped include the AIA Center for Architecture, NYC, ANCB Berlin (Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory), Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement, Paris (inclusive urban mobility specialists), FRAC Centre, OrlĂ©ans (expert purchasing decisions for the organisation’s art and architecture collection) and Strelka Institute, Moscow (curating a seminar exploring urban interactive design ‘soft spaces’).
Lucy has successfully championed new methods and projects, and built understanding and consensus about the value of design quality across cultures, walks of life and socio-economic contexts through her books, talks, exhibitions (see below) and published features.
She has given over 300 public talks at prestigious venues across the world, in-person and online, to audiences of up to 2,500 people, and chaired numerous professional events internationally on topical issues.Â
Curating and artistic direction
Curating, artistic directionA successful exhibition is a blend of the experiential and the educational – seducing, entertaining and drawing you into an alternative, inspirational world. We devise cultural strategies and curate and direct successful and innovative exhibitions of public value at different scales engaging with architectural, urban design and visual arts narratives for international clients, cultural organisations, academia, art and medical charities, meeting goals on time and on budget.
Lucy has curated and delivered more than 30 popular and groundbreaking exhibitions, and six international conferences.
She has scouted out and managed the successful participation of many original global creative talents in architecture, design, art and film in the numerous cultural events she has staged internationally.
Her most recently curated exhibition, Retrofit 23: Towards Deep Retrofit of Homes at Scale, for the Building Centre (10 May-12 October 2023) attracted very strong attendance figures across a diverse audience of specialists and the wider public.
A number of her exhibitions, for example, Fronteira Livre (working with the SĂ£o Paulo Metro and the CAMI migrants group), Remake – We make: frameworks for social and cultural exchange (working with a fashion manufacturing workshop in Baishizhou, Shenzhen) and Dugnad Days (with the community group of Sletteløkka, Oslo) are urban social ‘acupuncture’ projects. While relatively small in scale these support community self-determination and enable members of a community to build a legacy of design, construction and conceptual skills.
Through these initiatives generating personal credibility with stakeholders, Lucy has influenced and proactively led transformative changes to many international programmes and initiatives. She has developed strong cross-cultural relationships and forged viable new strategies for future public activities involving a range of communities.
She doesn’t churn out her outputs! The artistic products she conceives, shapes and delivers – including publications, exhibitions, videos and workshops – are born of effective partnerships with exceptional, tried and tested clients and collaborators. She works with:
• curatorial and project director collaborators Arthur Kay, urban designer, award-winning entrepreneur (BioBean, Skyroom, Fast Forward 2030), Board member, author and public speaker.
• architect Alex Furunes, founder, Eriksson Furunes, an award-winning participatory placemaking specialist.
• architect and planner Roudaina Alkhani, director and founder, Platforms.
• graphic designers including John McGill, &&& and Kirstin HelgadottĂr, CHK Design, Melanie Mues/Mues Design and Alexandre Coco.
• exhibition designers Julia Feix, partner, Feix & Merlin Architects, Urban Salon (now Mowat & Company, and Diana Cochrane), Guarnieri Architects, and dot Architects (Beijing and Shenzhen).
• film directors including Paul McHale, Pal.tv and Helena Bullivant.
• participatory placemaking engagement facilitators Alex Furunes, Mattias F. Josefsson, Maria Ă…rthun and Sudarshan V. Khadka.
• her co-author on Recoded City: Co-creating Urban Futures (Routledge, 2016) Thomas Ermacora, award-winning city futurist, impact investor and open innovation thinker; founder, Clear Village, a charity that helps communities build a better future through regeneration.
• copy editor Marion Moisy.
Complex topics call for publications that are crisp and expressive, elegant, thought-provoking and engaging. Lucy creates beautifully designed illustrated publications on architecture, urban design and technology for global readership, including 4D Hyperlocal: A Cultural Tool Kit for the Open-source City, AD/Wiley, Jan/Feb 2017 (see below), Sustainable Urbanism New Directions, Qatar University, 2017 (see below), and bioTallinn, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, Estonian Centre of Architecture (2017).
Public speaking
• Keynotes
Keynotes are public assets. Lucy creates and presents engaging and original public keynote talks at venues around the world on topical polemics concerning architecture and urban design based on her ongoing international research, advocating and illuminating best practice. She customises all her presentations to match your audience’s specific needs.
Lucy can custom-design an authoritative keynote for your conference based on her research, and if desired, in tandem devise successful participatory design workshops, brainstorming sessions enabling everyone to develop stronger strategies for liveable urbanism. Check out her webzine Urbanista.org for inspiration and the Selected Projects pages of this website for examples of her successfully delivered projects. Here’s Lucy talking about her exhibition, Urbanistas: women innovators in architecture, landscape and urban design, staged at Roca London Gallery.
See her entry in The Speakers’ Handbook (Speakers Associates).
Lucy’s speaking engagements are handled by:
Dubai Keynote Speakers – the professional speaking agency serving the Middle East and North Africa for over 15 years. See her profile page here.
Contact Helen Deen, Client Engagement Manager, enquiries@dubaikeynotespeakers.com
Speakers Associates, one of the leading speaking agencies in the world
Contact Patrick Nelson, Director, +44 (0)115 9713173 patrick@speakersassociates.com
For Lucy’s speaking testimonials see the Testimonials page.
Lucy’s public speaking clients have included:
London Metropolitan University (2024 Research conference), the EcoCity World Summit 2023, the Barbican, the Architectural Association (2020- guest lectures), Sletteløkka/Oslo Architecture Triennale (2022), London Design Biennale 2018 (Latvia Day); 3rd Nordic Urban Lab, Helsinki/Espoo, Finland, 2018 (see above); Qatar University, Sustainable Urbanism New Directions Workshop 2016; World Cities Culture Shanghai Symposium 2016; AIA NYC Center for Architecture; ANCB Berlin; Moscow Urban Forum 2016; Strelka Institute, Moscow; Smart City Forum, Barcelona and Casablanca; COAC and IAAC, Barcelona; Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership; Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam, and de Baak (Dutch public sector management organisation); Venice Architecture Biennale; TEDx Vienna; Royal Society of Arts; V&A, London; Barbican Centre, London; Lime Wharf cultural innovation hub, London; RIBA, London; Royal College of Art; University of Westminster; UCL London; University of Plymouth; Yorkshire Forward; Syracuse University, NY; UCLA, Los Angeles; University of Houston; ETH Zurich (Territorial Encounters, Future Cities Laboratory); University of Rome; Swedish Association of Architects; University of Tampere; National Council of Architecture, Turku, and the Institute of Malaysian Architects, Kuala Lumpur.
She chairs her own monthly curated public talks programme at Temple Bar, Paternoster Square, City of London, run by Temple Bar Trust, in her capacity as Trustee.
Below: Oculus magazine Book Talk, Sept 2016, AIA Center for Architecture, NYC. Lucy Bullivant discussed Recoded City: Co-curating urban futures (Routledge, 2016), which she co-authored with Thomas Ermacora. Panel moderated by Bill Menking, Editor-in-chief, The Architect’s Newspaper, with Adam Lubinsky, Managing Principal, WXY architecture and urban designer, and Alex Alaimo, founder, ORLI (Operation Resilient Long Island).
• Chairing conferences and seminars, facilitating brainstorming workshops
Chairing events well is about opening up insightful debate, supporting the ‘orchestra to play their best tunes’ and fully engaging the audience. Lucy chairs talks and roundtable events for public and private sector clients internationally, facilitating debate and reflection on many aspects of liveable urbanism to motivate and activate audiences. She leads brainstorming workshops in a range of formats to get people thinking more creatively.
Lucy has chaired events for clients including Sletteløkka/Oslo Architecture Triennale, AIA Center for Architecture, NYC; Architectural League, NYC; V&A, London (Talking Architecture, see below); Tate Modern, London (Softspace, 2007, see above); ICA, London; Roca London Gallery; ReWork conference, The Crystal, London; Titanic Foundation/Belfast City Council; Science Museum, London; Museum of Docklands, London; Napier University, Edinburgh; Architectural Association, and Royal College of Art, London; Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017; and Strelka Institute, Moscow.
The goal of a successful brainstorming workshop is always to spur enthusiastic interaction and inspire further actions. Lucy has advanced inclusive, sustainable placemaking visions and strategies though workshops facilitated for clients including Enfield Council (Meridian Water Place Vision, 2016), and Qatar University (Sustainable Urbanism New Directions conference supported by the Qatar National Research Fund, 2016).
Chairing competition juries
Lucy has judged a number of prestigious architectural competitions, including the AJ Architecture Awards and Archmarathon, and chaired the LEAF Architectural Awards.
Design Review – Chairing and panel membership
Panel Member, Enfield Design Review Panel, 2018-
Over the next twenty years, Enfield Council’s regeneration plans will transform some of the most deprived areas of London, including Meridian Water, a £6 billion development delivering 10,000 new homes and creating 6,700 new jobs. The Council set up a Design Review Panel in 2018 to support its vision to make Enfield a better place to live and work; promote high quality design and sustainable development and protect the borough’s unique character.
The Enfield Design Review Panel is made up of industry experts, including Lucy Bullivant, who provide expert advice on the placemaking, urban design quality and sustainable design approaches of major new developments, regeneration programmes, policies, briefs and guidance within Enfield. It reviews projects and proposals, including pre-application schemes, and encourages applicants and promoters to bring proposals for review at their earliest stages of development. The Panel strives to secure design excellence in the built environment for both public and private sectors and guides the formulation and delivery of a Design Framework for the borough.
Chair, Lambeth Design Review Panel, 2019-
Lucy was selected to be a Chair of the new Lambeth Design Review Panel from June 2019 onwards. See the illustrated guide here.
Lambeth is a varied and dynamic borough, comprising Waterloo in the north, home to London’s Southbank cultural hub, Brixton, with its vibrant markets, and the leafy suburbs of Streatham and West Norwood in the south. The borough has a rich historic environment and upholds its duty to preserve and/or enhance the setting of its 62 conservation areas and to protect over 2000 statutory listed buildings.
At the same time Lambeth offers great development opportunities across the borough, particularly in the Waterloo Opportunity Area and Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea (VNEB) Opportunity Area. The delivery of jobs and housing growth through the creation of sustainable new places and buildings that positively respond to Lambeth’s character is central to the borough’s design aspirations.
As part of Lambeth’s commitment to design excellence, the Design Review Panel (DRP) provides an additional service as an integral part of the planning process in line with the National Planning Framework (NPPF) and the London Plan. The Lambeth DRP is made up of a pool of independent built environment professionals who provide design advice on new development and public realm proposals. The pool has twenty-nine members (including three chairs) with expertise in urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, placemaking and associated professions.
Panel member, Brent Design Advice Panel (Brent DAP)– 2017-20.
Brent DAP is managed on behalf of the London Borough of Brent by Design Council Cabe, and is made up of an interdisciplinary panel of 20 individuals, including Lucy Bullivant, chosen from the Design Council’s network of 400 Built Environment Experts (BEEs).
The panel provides regular Design Review services, reviewing development proposals and masterplans, as well as design support services such as early stage procurement support and planning policy review, and training as required by the borough. These services exist to assist everyone involve in the planning and development process in the borough to ensure that design quality is at the heart of new development coming forward.
The London Borough of Brent is undergoing significant change and growth, to which the borough is responding through the production of masterplans and area actions plans. There is a strong focus on the Wembley area, where high density mixed use development is now being delivered at pace including a substantial amount of build to rent housing. The Brent Design Advice Panel (Brent DAP) has been established to provide independent, expert design advice to support the borough in achieving its objectives and securing the best outcomes and quality of life for residents, workers and visitors through development, regeneration and renewal in the borough.
