urban environments
Creating better places for everyone
Our multi-disciplinary team of designers, environmental consultants, planners and landscape architects use their skills to bring together ideas from developers, local communities, architects, planners, and many others, to resolve problems and conflicts in order to create better places for everyone.
We create and deliver urban designs that improve the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and establish frameworks and procedures that will deliver successful, sustainable and futureproof developments by different people over time.
Urban design is about a great variety of places: whether town and city centres, residential neighbourhoods and suburbs, grassy fields on the edge of villages, industrial estates, or unloved and overlooked areas around train stations, rivers and canals. Our aim is that our urban design inspires, illustrates and defines how a place could be improved or protected to bring benefits to investors, developers and wider society.
areas of expertise
Building and land renovation and reuse
Site investigation forms a basic element of all our services for the built environment. With government planning policy promoting and supporting the redevelopment of ‘Brownfield’ sites; hence the assessment of potential hazards posed by the presence of ground gases and the design of appropriate mitigation measures (if required) are routine requirements in the planning and construction process.
Our engineers and consultants are technical specialists in the investigation, assessment and regeneration of brownfield and contaminated sites ranging from single development plots to some of the larger, more complex redevelopment schemes. We have a proven track record of developing pragmatic solutions to manage the historical legacy of land and groundwater contamination, unlocking the value of problematic sites and facilitating sustainable development.
We provide advice and design solutions on a broad range of ground-related issues, working directly with site developers or their design and construction teams.
Green building design
A ‘green’ building is a building that, in its design, construction or operation, reduces or eliminates negative impacts, and can create positive impacts, on our natural environment. Green buildings preserve precious natural resources and improve our quality of life. STRI works alongside architects, developers and builders to design and implement green infrastructure into a renovation or new build project.
Our engineers will review the building or precinct’s efficiency in energy use, water and other resources, providing the best way to integrate sustainable water management solutions, water harvesting and waste water removal. Our landscape architects will consider the environment within the design, recommending materials and designs that are ethical and sustainable, positively contributing to the bio-diversity and carbon footprint of the development. Our planners consider the quality of life of occupants in design, construction and operation process whilst collectively providing designs that futureproof the development, enabling adaptation to the ever changing environment.
Urban greening
As our cities grow, it’s important to consider the impact these spaces have on nature. As we continue to see the effect our actions are having on the earth, changing the climate of our planet and affecting the animals, plants, and people who live on it, we must now ensure that green spaces are being featured more prominently in urban planning.
While urban greening might have once meant nothing more than parks and tree-lined streets, it now includes a wide variety of beautiful and creative installations. Projects like retro-fit SuDS, living walls and blue/green roofs are becoming increasingly popular and are featured in more businesses, public buildings and residential areas.
By linking together green and blue infrastructure, STRI allows more cost effective and efficient designs which deliver maximum stormwater, irrigation and green benefits to a design.
our specialist services
our projects
Liverpool Rain Garden
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Bruntwood Blue-Green Roof
Bruntwood Works aim is to make their stylish office buildings as sustainable as possible, both inside and out. Therefore, the blue-green roof was retrofitted onto an existing roof and utilised Polypipe’s Polysync and Permavoid systems.
Northern Roots
EPG, part of STRI Group, were commissioned to undertake a feasibility assessment that would detail the possibility of reopening a park on the site of a 16-acre disused site in Oldham. The area was split between landfill and heavy machinery storage and had been left to overgrow for 100 years.
let’s start our conversation today
If you’ve got a question, or would like us to help you with a project, we’d love to hear from you. Complete the form, give us a call or come and see us.