At the heart of the Civic Engineers vision is the importance of our engineering enabling people to live happier and healthier lives. We believe the structures and places we help to design and engineer should have a positive impact on public health and wellbeing and it is crucial that this link is made and recognised. This may be achieved by designing schemes that give people the opportunity to walk and cycle more, by helping to reduce air pollution through green infrastructure or by creating a place that is greener where people are happy spending time outside with better access to amenity and biodiversity. Given our vision, we are delighted that our Founding Director, Stephen O’Malley will be joining the New London Architecture (NLA) Expert Panel 2020 for Wellbeing.

Stephen, alongside other built environment professionals, will contribute to this crucial agenda offering an engineering perspective as to how London’s built environment and its individual buildings can help promote and encourage a healthy population. Mass urbanisation and the rise of digitalisation are having a dramatic effect on our emotional, mental and physical health. With us permanently stimulated in an increasingly dense environment, it has never been more vital for us to rethink how we plan and build our city.

The expert panel on wellbeing will help to share thought-leadership on the relationship between the urban environment and mental health, physical wellbeing and social sustainability to support the NLA Wellbeing programme. Across the year, the programme will profile best practice across the capital and investigate the impact of new ideas, policies and research. The key themes include urban design and its influence on mental health, physical health improving air quality and outcomes for Londoners and social sustainability, which explores the impact of building quality and planning on the social needs of communities.