How buildings make us feel: reflections on the first IGP Studio

“This doesn’t feel like a place for me”

In almost twenty years of research in east London and Camden, I’ve heard that sentence many times. Around the Olympic Park, I watched residents look at new towers in Stratford and decide they were luxury flats for other people. Few knew who would actually live there. The buildings’ colours, materials and shape had already answered for them.

What tells us we belong somewhere, or that a place is meant for somebody else? That question shaped our first IGP Studio.

What is an IGP Studio?

IGP Studios are a new format at UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity: compact, hands-on sessions that bring external partners and IGP researchers together around one complex question. They are built for real-world problem solving, using human-centred design to turn evidence and ideas into practical policy, planning and regulatory outcomes.

Mixing people is a deliberate design choice. Every Studio brings together researchers, students, policymakers, community groups, businesses and international partners, because hard questions about prosperity are best explored from different angles.

Our pilot with the Humanise campaign, held in London in October 2026, brought together citizen scientists, researchers, designers, architects, developers and local authority representatives. The challenge: how can citizens be brought into conversations about belonging and design, in ways that can be embedded in everyday design and planning practice?

Buildings tell stories

Community isn’t only about shared culture or background. It grows from shared use of places and shared experiences of everyday life: walking the same streets, seeing the same faces. This matters especially in super-diverse places like London, where shared places often hold a community together.

When those places change, people can feel out of place without moving house. Displacement is being pushed out; dislocation is staying while the neighbourhood stops feeling like yours. In Hackney Wick, in the first stages of regeneration after the 2012 Games, residents asked where they could still get a cup of tea (not an expensive coffee).

Change can also bring possibility. Younger people saw East Bank’s new cultural institutions as opportunities once out of reach. Materials matter too, but there is nothing inherently comforting about brick: context is everything.

Feelings are evidence

Experiences like these rarely count in the decisions that shape our neighbourhoods. Citizen social science can change that. At IGP, residents are trained and paid to frame research questions and gather evidence about where they live, from mapping a street by smell to recording the noise and vibration of HS2 construction. Much of this work runs through the UCL Citizen Science Academy, which IGP hosts and runs. The Academy trains members of the public to carry out community-based research, and every graduate receives a UCL Citizen Science Certificate.

The message from the day was clear. People want to be involved early, to see how their input shapes what gets built, and to hear back afterwards, including why some ideas weren’t taken forward.

The day also produced something concrete: Humanise drew on the discussions for a submission to the London Plan consultation. This first Studio was a start. The question we’ll keep asking is how the meanings people attach to places can become part of the evidence that shapes their future.

Saffron Woodcraft is Professorial Research Fellow and Director of Social Policy at the Institute for Global Prosperity, where she is Bartlett Faculty Lead for Public Policy.