Supporting innovation in public spaces—helping to create places that are more inclusive, sustainable, and commercially successful.
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What is the Public Realm Innovation Initiative?
High-quality public spaces can drive economic growth, improve wellbeing and boost climate resilience. They attract investment, raise property values and deliver social benefits – but more work is needed to unlock their full potential, understand what works, and develop new, effective solutions.
Through this new initiative we will work with landowners, developers, joint ventures, design teams and operators to collaborate on shaping the future of public spaces. We’re focusing on health and wellbeing, exploring how design, data and policy can create better places.
What do we know so far?
Preliminary research by the Catapult identified three main challenges for public realm schemes:
Lack of evidence to understand social and environmental outcomes and inform investment decisions
Fragmented policies leading to delays and inconsistent outcomes
Insufficient community engagement that builds trust and allows real influence
These challenges create investment uncertainty and hinder the success of public realm projects. While these issues extend beyond technology, digital tools play a key role in overcoming them. They can improve engagement, support evidence-based design, and strengthen collaboration.
To address these, the Catapult plans to launch a “Test & Learn” intervention to support innovators tackling these challenges, from using data to inform investment to trialling green strategies that make policy goals, like biodiversity and climate resilience, achievable.
What is a Test & Learn intervention?
A Test & Learn intervention is a structured, evidence-based approach that enables organisations and end-users to trial innovative solutions in real-world settings. This process allows stakeholders to explore, refine, and validate new ideas before wider implementation, ensuring they are practical and scalable.
The five-stage process is key to identifying the right challenges, designing tailored solutions, testing them in real-world settings, measuring impact, and embedding lasting innovation in public spaces to.
01
Understand the challenge
We’ll work with place partners to identify high-priority public realm issues, starting with health and wellbeing. Through targeted research and engagement, we’ll map out local needs, existing capabilities and key barriers to change.
02
Design the intervention
Working with partners and communities, we’ll co-design tailored test-and-learn pilots for place-based innovation opportunities, develop appropriate governance and delivery models, and match challenges with promising solutions.
03
Deploy real-world solutions
We’ll support the delivery of co-designed, data-driven innovations in real-world settings, using digital tools to build evidence, engage communities, and demonstrate measurable impacts.
04
Measure what works
Each pilot will be underpinned by rigorous evaluation. We’ll capture robust data on the outcomes to assess what’s scalable, what’s not and why.
05
Build long-term capacity
We’ll help our partners embed innovation into everyday practice, sharing tools, insights and case studies to support wider adoption and policy change across the UK.
Looking past year one: our long-term goals
Enabling smarter decision-making
Creating a stronger evidence base to inform better investment practice in public space.
Impact for people, planet and prosperity
Delivering public realm projects that are inclusive, sustainable and rooted in community needs.
Building better systems
Working to enable more joined-up planning and delivery across public, private and third sectors
Building trust in new solutions
Collaborating to provide de-risked, tested solutions ready to scale, helping grow market confidence.
Creating future-proofed, equitable places
Helping to bring to life public spaces that improve wellbeing, advance climate goals and deliver lasting value.
Research shaping the initiative
To support the development of the initiative, the Catapult has commissioned research to explore how innovation in urban real estate can enhance public spaces, focusing on areas including technology integration, flexible use models, inclusivity, and climate resilience. The aim is to inform strategies that address current urban challenges and improve social, environmental, and economic outcomes for all.
Pathways to an outcomes-based public realm
This report, developed by Connected Places Catapult and TreesAI, explores how to embed public space outcomes across every stage of the commercial real estate process. It highlights gaps in current practice and calls for new tools, models and partnerships to better value, fund and manage public space as essential urban infrastructure.
