A building's profit value depends on its neighbourhood, and great public space makes great neighbourhoods. Enhancing public spaces on private properties can bring new value to the property, fill streets with activity, and generate growth for local businesses and the community.

We find opportunities to use privately owned public space to drive value for our building owners. With creative programming and design, we leverage the full potential of overlooked urban spaces, like courtyards in perimeter blocks or the areas surrounding buildings, to make sites more desirable and valuable. By adding bicycle parking, car charging stations, rideshare pickup/dropoff points, landscaping and greenspace, we have transformed left-over spaces into places that enrich the neighborhood and where people want to hang out, like playgrounds, pocket parks, and plazas. These places also create a transitional buffer between the building and the street, improving the tenant experience.

At Windsor, for example, what started as a restoration of an underground garage and landscape resurfacing to redirect water runoff became an opportunity to integrate a building off the main pedestrian street with the surrounding city and increase foot traffic for ground-floor shops. The project renovates a shopping building on Knokke’s Kustlaan, a commercial boulevard that opens onto one of the largest natural reserves on this coastline.

By integrating a series of dune landscapes into a new plaza on the private lot, we seamlessly extend the existing sidewalk into a pocket park. The park connects the site to the surrounding city and landscape, brings pedestrians to the storefronts, and creates a new centre of activity in the area.