From transport infrastructure to new housing, public parks to healthcare facilities, projects across the built environment usually aim to strengthen communities and improve lives. But major, multi-year projects also cause inevitable disruption and require active engagement with communities, to ensure the benefits of a proposal are recognised and understood throughout the development process.
Public engagement isn’t just about ticking boxes and gaining approval – it’s also about improving a scheme, learning from community concerns, in order to refine the project. And with built environment projects needing to address a wider and more complex mix of social, commercial and sustainability goals, there’s an ever greater need to communicate effectively with the public about the benefits, the milestones and the true nature of a scheme.
We draw on our team’s expertise in communications, PR and public engagement, backed with Arup’s full lifecycle of built environment project knowledge. We work closely with our clients’ project directors and managers, to ensure a new development has a strong identity, understands the community it will join, and we develop creative ways to explain the project to public and media groups. Our goal is to ensure that project teams can anticipate issues, identify risks, develop the most relevant communication strategy and ensure that things run smoothly throughout the development cycle.