In one month, Frazer, Sophie, Benjamin and Mark will be heading to Cannes for MIPIM 2019. Four days, 260,000 people, 360 speakers,100 countries. Incredible in its scale and breadth.
We think MIPIM is all about catching up with old friends and making new ones. It’s about good conversations, big ideas and shared goals – during the conference and for the months that follow.
Meet up with our Gang of Four if you can. There’s no time to waste.
About Frazer
Frazer heads up LDA Design’s work in the development and regeneration market. He is an authority on housing delivery, infrastructure design and community development.
A creative and thoughtful designer, Frazer is determined to make things happen, favouring action over endless procrastination. He believes we need to rethink how we do things, finding better ways to achieve positive social, environmental and economic outcomes. Frazer links planning and design processes with funding and delivery realities. He believes every project has a ‘win-win’ ensuring clients, communities and the environment benefit equally from change.
Frazer enjoys communicating big ideas, building consensus and creating momentum towards the delivery of a vision. These skills are helping to accelerate the delivery of 6,000 new homes in Welborne Garden Village and to embed placemaking at the heart of the scheme. His work for the CEO of Exeter City Council has recently been published as an innovative 20-year good-growth vision for the city. He is influential in the Garden Communities programme and is an advisor to major developers, local authorities and Homes England on issues of strategic growth and delivery.
Frazer has 28 years’ experience in the industry, and is an LDA Design Board Director.
About Sophie
Sophie is a landscape architect and director at LDA Design with over twenty years’ experience in the design and delivery of great places, streets and open spaces. She is currently leading the £35m West End Project, one of the most ambitious transformations of public realm in central London. This scheme removes general traffic and sections of highway, to create cycle lanes, healthy streets and beautiful public spaces in and around Tottenham Court Road and Shaftesbury Avenue.
Sophie has taken part in numerous design review panels, is an examiner for the Landscape Institute and recently contributed to ‘The Design Companion’, a book published by RIBA championing design excellence. A spirited and creative designer, Sophie stands back to understand the bigger picture. She couples this with extensive experience of delivery on the ground.
Sophie is committed to developing solutions that address some of the major issues society faces, including air pollution, population growth and health and wellbeing concerns such as obesity and loneliness.. Finished projects include a city park in Moscow, an award-winning flood-resilient waterfront in West Sussex and Sheaf Square in Sheffield, named ‘Great Place of the Year’ by the Academy of Urbanism. At the heart of every one of Sophie’s projects is an approach that connects people and place through landscape.
About Benjamin
Benjamin is a director at LDA Design and public realm design lead for some of the practice’s most exciting and challenging projects, including the international competition-winning stadium regeneration in Kaliningrad, Russia and the regeneration of Battersea Power Station, which he has led for over seven years.
Ben believes design should be inclusive. He starts a project by thinking creatively about how people will use a new space and how they will be affected by change. It’s important to him that detailed design and delivery matches original intent and stays true to the burst of energy of first drawings and early design concepts. He helps clients and stakeholders to understand that landscape is about creating places where people belong, that it can add value and result in extraordinary places. He sees collaboration as a key driver of good design, and has enjoyed working with some of the world’s most creative architects, engineers and product designers.
About Mark
Mark leads LDA Design’s highly creative urban design team in London. An exciting and experienced designer, he is equally at home transforming neglected inner-city housing estates into welcoming, equitable places to live as he is creating enterprising, well-linked new settlements that are closely connected to nature.
Mark believes that if we are to create healthier, more sustainable new models of living, we must start with what people want and need. He has found an appetite for this people-first approach in Russia. Most recently, Mark’s team won an international competition to create a new piece of city in Kaliningrad with a vision for a car-free cultural quarter that has water and active lifestyles at its heart. This success exemplifies Mark’s approach: to disrupt the norm, we need to focus on big ideas, but the process should be fun too.
2019 is Mark’s first visit to MIPIM.
