Working collaboratively within multidisciplinary teams we shape innovative, creative, and strategic responses to projects. We are part of The LDN Collective whose members bring a range of built environment expertise and we partner with different associates to tackle every projects' unique requirements.
Urban Development & Design
Social Impact & Wellbeing
Design Briefs & Guidelines
Social & Cultural Anthropology
Ethnographic Research
Shira de Bourbon Parme DPhil
Co-Founding Director
Integrated Urban Development
Human Wellbeing
Blue/Green Infrastructure
Housing & Regeneration
Social Return on Investment
Nikos Karadimitriou PhD
Co-Founding Director
Shira is an urban designer and social anthropologist. She specialises in understanding diverse social conditions, experiences, and behaviours, translating her research into evidence-based, actionable targets for positive impact. Shira has experience collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to deliver masterplans with a focus on integrated and inclusive coordination between spatial and social development. As co-director of ForeGrounds, she combines her practical and academic knowledge to deliver bespoke measurement frameworks and implementation strategies embedding social sensitivity in projects across their life spans.
Shira’s work spans across different scales of urban development internationally, including mixed-use city districts, neighbourhood regeneration and resettlement projects. She has designed residential, commercial and public realm projects, and has advised on design guidelines for new cities, inclusive public green spaces, sensitive heritage developments and healthy environments. She holds a doctorate from the Future of Cities programme at the University of Oxford and is a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the International Association for Impact Assessment.
Nikos specialises in urban planning and integrated urban development, focusing on urban regeneration, human wellbeing and urban infrastructure in the context of climate change. He specialises in multi-dimensional analysis of an area in order to identify the main intervention priorities and impact pathways. Following the area analysis Nikos can advise on selecting suitable projects and on streamlining the project maturity process (ie., amending the legal and planning context, refining the project specifications, identifying planning & other constraints etc.) with a particular specialism in providing guidance for institutional/process reform.
With over 18 years of international public and private sector experience, Nikos has significant expertise in dealing with complex spatial planning and development issues such as those occasioned by major urban investment programmes and projects. He has advised several local and central governments in Europe and Africa but also in the Middle East and Asia, on integrated urban development and human wellbeing mostly via technical assistance projects funded from IFIs (EIB, World Bank) or national resources. He has also advised the EU, urban regeneration investors and the RICS on measuring the impact of urban development. Nikos holds a PhD in Town Planning from UCL and he is an associate professor at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL.