“We see ourselves as social impact developers” Adam Higgins, Capital & Centric

“T here is a funny thing in property about trying to build everything as cheap as you can,” says Adam Higgins, co-founder of Capital & Centric.

 

“We’re not building buildings just because it stacks up on a spreadsheet. Really we’re trying to make a positive impact on the city, town or village where we’re developing.”

 

Higgins, who worked for Peel Holdings before co-founding Capital & Centric around a decade ago, says when they started out, they wanted to build award-winning architecture.

 

“Positive social impact was something we stumbled across,” he admits in this interview for The Developer Podcast. “You realise that architecture is brilliant… if it happens to be your home or office, but what about doing something for people who don’t live in that building?”

 

Listen to the interview

 

 

“We started thinking about how we could improve wider areas, about public realm and green space and trying to make things inclusive.”

 

Now Higgins describes Capital & Centric as a “social impact developer” – and in Manchester, that, for him, means incorporating new green public spaces into their developments, including at the heart of Kampus, their 450,000 sq ft “garden neighbourhood” which won a Pineapple award for Place in Progress.

 

“Manchester has relatively few green spaces because it was an industrialised city, and what we noticed over the years is that a lot of public squares tend to be big functional multi-use spaces where everything is about hard landscaping, granite sets and a desire line across the middle.

 

“It’s great for Christmas markets, but when it’s not December they can be a bit dull, because they are cold spaces in northern Europe.

 

“We had this idea… forget that, we should create a garden. But it shouldn’t be a garden just for people who live there, we wanted it to be a garden that was available to anybody.

 

“We had this idea that it should be like an abandoned old wartime relic completely overgrown, like a shooting tower taken over by nature, that was the inspiration. We wanted to bring in a wild landscape that will climb the buildings and make it look overgrown and that will happen over the next couple of years.