Support a regenerative community-led housing scheme: Bowden Pillars Future 🏡✨
We have been continuing to work on the Bowden Pillars Future project together with Incremental, co-designing a 50-home community led housing scheme with a common house, shared infrastructure, and a regenerative farm in Totnes, Devon. You can read about the process to date here.
They are currently fundraising to meet their target of £150,000 to be able to complete the full planning application. If you are able to or interested in supporting the project you can find out how to here. They are already over 50% away from meeting their target. By supporting the project, you will enable the UK’s first regenerative community-led housing scheme featuring an adjacent woodland that will deepen into a true temperate rainforest.
Festival of Place 2026
Wongani will be chairing a panel discussion on ‘Healthy places: Shaping healthy environments, behaviour change and urban planning’ as part of this year’s Festival of Place in Wembley BOXPark, London (Wednesday June 10th). The panel will include:
- Saira Ali, President Elect, Landscape Institute and Landscape Architect and Team Leader, Landscape Design and Conservation, Bradford City Council
- Michael Chang, Associate Town Planner (Healthy Planning Lead), NHS Property Services
- James Green, Investment Lead, Kajima Partnerships
- Wongani Mwanza, Architect, Transition by Design Cooperative CIC (Chair)
The discussion will consider future policy and practice in shaping healthy environments, behaviour change and urban planning: Is our planning system still fit to deliver the social purpose of planning?
💭 What would it look like to genuinely and meaningfully move conversations forward on gender equity in architecture?
Wongani attended the RIBA Build it Together: Gender in Architecture Symposium with many honest conversations. Here is what he wrote about the event and key takeaways:
- The panel discussion on the ‘W in Women stands for White’, highlighting how we need to speak about intersectionality including actions around race, class, socioeconomic backgrounds and religion (Kudzai Matsvai, Anna Abengowe, Bernadette Bone, Glenn Strachan, Kavita Dhande, Timea Lewkot)
- Helen Iball‘s speaking about what feminist architecture could / would / should be & that it should be integral and it’s not a ‘niche’ subject as it impacts over 50% of the population
- Fantastic to hear about the collective action galvanised by gathering architecture schools across the country through Victoria Farrow & Kelly Mackinnon‘s Females in Architectural Education, and their longitudinal study to track where recent graduates are going, and our duty to ensure as educators we acknowledge the over 50% female representation at undergraduate level and that we should not see this drop to the current level of 31% at architect level
- Becca Thomas‘ standout quote to me was “believing a team member has never gone wrong”, when speaking of inclusive policies in the workplace
- Hearing about proactive policies that promote gender equity including clear pay bands, clear career progression pathways, shared parental leave policies, dependency leave, flexible / remote working, menstruation & menopause policies from organisations such as Grimshaw, Sheppard Robson, HTA Design, New Practice, part of Civic, DSDHA
🤝🏿 The move towards gender equity is a collective exercise. Someone from our discussion group pointed out that about 15% of the people in the room were men. In order for us to move forward in this area, we genuinely need to ‘Build it Together’ to drive change in our organisations / architecture schools, and I hope there will be greater diversity in the room next time.
What we’ve been up to outside of T/D
Joyce recently spent a few weeks back home in Hong Kong, catching up with relatives and friends and enjoying plenty of local delicacies along the way. She returned just in time for flame tree season—when the bright red blossoms begin to appear across the city, you know summer has arrived.
Looking to make changes to your home?
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