There is no one size fits all approach to sustainability. Whether it is planning cities or designing buildings to attract and retain our best and brightest, the HASSELL process responds to the particular natural, cultural and economic circumstances and the specific opportunities and challenges each situation presents. .

For more than 30 years, HASSELL has been a multidisciplinary planning and design practice employing professionals with a diversity of skills.

Like healthy ecosystems, diversity is a key ingredient in the success, strength and resilience of the practice. What makes our team different is that we can draw skills from diverse areas to inform our planning and design to achieve results that are sustainable across a spectrum of measures.

Our people are trained to collaboratively analyse and integrate data from a variety of sources and disciplines then apply their skills to deliver inventive sustainable solutions.

For the next generation sustainable development and the responsible use of resources will be focused on urban areas. This is because the impact of climate change will be most felt in cities where most people live, the greatest economic productive capacity lies and where there is the highest level of investment. Cities and their buildings also have a significant effect on the pace and extent of climate change. While they only occupy some 2% of the world’s land surface they consume about 75% of its resources and generate about the same level of waste. Buildings contribute some 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and up to 80% of total greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas. So to sustain our planet, urban development and its component parts must be sustainable.

This is the challenge HASSELL is helping to address on behalf of our communities and our clients.

Ours is the generation that can end extreme poverty, turn the tide against climate change and head off a massive and thoughtless extinction of other species. Ours is the generation that can grapple with, and solve, the conundrum of combining economic well being with environmental sustainability.’ Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth, 2008