Heat Maps
An evidence-based approach to mapping for social use and play on housing developments
ZCD Architects have spent over 10 years developing a mapping system that can help you predict and plan successful places that meet your social impact objectives, places that are sustainable and can support healthy communities.
Our unique heat mapping system, is grounded in years of rigorous and published research. We apply it to large scale as well as infill projects, new or existing, working with developers, housing associations and local authorities.
Each space is scored according to four principles. When a space scores well across all four, it appears as ‘warm’ colour on a map. You can be reassured these spaces will work well for social interaction and play. They will be spaces that the community will enjoy spending time in and can support healthy lives.
Heat mapping can be used to tweak and improve good designs and set benchmarks for local plans, development plans and masterplans.
Heat Map
Aspern Seestadt Vienna
The mapping system can underpin briefing, setting benchmarks before design or development teams are procured.
It can also help set the brief for community engagement, shifting the conversation away from parking into an outcomes approach that allows geniune conversations and buy in from the community.
We have extensive experience facilitating intergenerational and inclusive community engagement, where we build trust around shared values.
Your project will benefit from this approach. Our mapping provides the basis for a common language for interrogating layouts, engaging with your community and meeting planning objectives. We can further support you as your proposals develop, up to a planning submission and beyond.
Your team will feel supported in their design development.
Put simply, you can’t afford not to: National policy and guidance has embedded our research into policy and design guidance.
The NPPF and the Design and Placemaking PPG now requires external spaces on housing developments to support play and social interaction. The mapping system is the clearest way to demonstrate compliance.
But it’s about more than policy, we work with development and design teams that want to achieve good social outcomes on their projects, who want to make places that people choose to live in and stay. Our job is to help them do that.
Heat maps score spaces based on four criteria.
Here we apply the four criteria to Goldsmith Street by Mikhail Riches Architects.