Policy Specialist: Built Environment

Salary: £75,000 – £100,000 depending on skills and experience

We are looking for candidates who can formulate practical policy and design concepts for the built environment. This includes developing frameworks that address housing, infrastructure, and urban systems in ways that are analytically grounded and operationally realistic.

The role involves working closely with analysts to translate insights about complex systems into policy and design proposals that could plausibly be implemented by institutions.

Candidates should be comfortable moving between system analysis, institutional reasoning, and spatial or urban design concepts.

• Diagnose structural problems in planning systems, land use regulation, and infrastructure development
   
• Articulate principled critiques of existing urban planning and design frameworks
   
• Develop policy and design concepts that address these problems in practical and deployable ways
   
• Translate insights from modelling or data analysis into institutional or spatial proposals
   
• Reason clearly about how regulatory systems shape the physical form and evolution of cities
   
• Communicate policy concepts clearly in written and conceptual form
   

• Experience in urban planning, architecture, infrastructure policy, housing policy, or urban economics
   
• A strong understanding of how planning systems and development incentives actually operate
   
• The ability to think across both institutional design and spatial or urban design questions
   
• Experience articulating system-level critiques and proposing alternative frameworks

Candidates should be able to articulate principled critiques of current planning and urban design systems, and to propose coherent alternatives.

Two traditions that strongly inform this work include:

• Christopher Alexander — A Pattern Language and the idea of generative design systems
   
• Léon Krier — critiques of modernist planning and principles of traditional urban form
   

Familiarity with these ideas is not required, but candidates should be comfortable reasoning about how design principles, planning systems, and institutions shape the physical form of cities.