Artecology

Artecology is the innovative interdisciplinary research and development department of Arc Biodiversity & Climate. We are based in Sandown Bay in the southeast corner of the Isle of Wight UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. Our clients typically come from, industry, corporate, NGO, and regulator settings. Our work features in current IGGI policy guidelines issued by the UK Environment Agency.

Our design team works tirelessly on bringing new eco-engineering ideas to life through product design, prototyping, and testing processes. We also collaborate with research partners and universities to test prototypes before making fully-fledged bioreceptive products ready for use with engineered infrastructure and urban landscapes in marine, freshwater, and land-based developments.

Artecology shapes green lifecycle solutions from new build, to retrofit and repair, from city to sea. Using Nature Based Solutions we are here to help you get to grips with Biodiversity Net Gain and build Natural Capital in line with recommendations and regulations outlined in forthcoming policy linked to the Environment Bill & the U.K Government’s 25-Year Environmental Plan.

Our tried and tested products and services include artificial rockpools (award-winning Vertipools) for the marine environment, Eel Tiles, BioTotem living sculptural way-markers, designed-in habitats, functional public green spaces and wildlife-friendly urban landscapes. Our ongoing work to bring wildlife to urban spaces and places is being used today for climate-change adaptation, tackling coastal squeeze on defended coasts; retrofit urban ecosystem enhancement; in master-planning design guidance for new developments; as a tool for stakeholder engagement, and increasingly, for rethinking public health strategy using our own ‘Shaping Better Places™’ design tool.

We combine the design and build of beautiful installations with ecologically functional planting schemes and habitat creation. By doing this we create hot spots of wildlife activity that provide life-cycle resources for birds, mammals, invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and marine life. Working this way means we enriched environments for wildlife and people alike.

Via our parent company Arc Biodiversity & Climate (AB&C.), Artecology advises on national infrastructure projects and is part of the Integrated Green-Grey Infrastructure network. We aremembers of The Cluster for Sustainable Cities, initiators of Building Biodiversity in the Solent administered by The Solent Forum and we are on the judging panel for the Construction Industry Research & Information Association’s Big Biodiversity Award.

So to conclude, our palette of skills and knowledge is unusually wide-ranging, and as such we are uniquely placed to offer specialist advice on policy and practice in green-grey infrastructure, net gain, natural capital, social capital, and community resilience using tried and tested consultancy and delivery methods.

This leads on nicely to…

Shaping Better Places™

Our unique project delivery service.

Shaping Better Places™ is our unique project delivery service developed to help our clients and partners acquire full Environmental Social Governance value from all their projects with us. By seamlessly knitting together bespoke and meaningful stakeholder/community engagement with life-supporting gains for nature and people, our experienced and highly skilled mixed-discipline team is able to take a tried and tested Shaping Better Places™ approach to building the best, most meaningful outreach you have ever seen!

Our Shaping Better Places framework, developed through decades of combined experience, is a unique service in its combination of ecological and human health, even more clearly a global priority in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Shaping Better Places provides also exactly the support to government and business that is required by current and emerging environmental regulations.

How does it work?

Shaping Better Places provides a methodology for local regeneration based on the three foundation capitals.  It provides 9 actions for place-based regeneration, helping communities, environments, and economies to prosper. Each action has been researched, tried, tested, and delivered by the team here through our combined body of work.

Building Natural Capital

1. Revive built environments, blue infrastructure, and managed greenspaces by installing life-cycle resources for wildlife (room to breed, feed, roost and hibernate); maintain to deliver boosted biodiversity and enriched ecosystem services.

2. Act vertically as well as horizontally, from subterranean to high-rise, punctuating the urban environment with biologically favourable spaces for natural colonisation, fostering ecological resilience and adaptive capacity.

3. Construct new ecological networks by spacing actions for wildlife to match the distances of animal and plant dispersal, building rapid landscape change from repeated, small-scale interventions.

Building Social Capital

1. Create a public realm that improves the quantity and diversity of human interactions and everyday meetings, building reciprocity, good faith, and the likelihood of future positive events.

2. Combine and connect public spaces to make coherent networks for healthy communal living, creating new traditions of civic engagement by understanding the range and meaning of everyday social activity.

3. Increase social cohesion and resilience by making it easy for a shared activity to happen in a public context, encouraging meaningful participation, and adding value to public spaces.

Building Cultural Capital

1. Ensure that no asset, idea, or person is wasted; invest in the skills, enterprise, and capacity for action already in place, building expectations for the future and sustaining the value of the past.

2. Create and extend learning networks that connect people and projects; freely share information in a growing body of local knowledge that breaks down paywalls and protects common assets.

3. Let the distinctive character of a place express itself; celebrate its ordinary, everyday solace, charm, wonder, and richness, and whatever is the imprint of human and natural personality upon it.

See Case Study - Wild Glades for LaSalle Investment Management

Contact us about Shaping Better Places.