Spatial Planning
The organisation of space across scales: allocation, adjacency, zoning, circulation and capacity — the analytical discipline of who and what goes where, and what the arrangement makes easy or hard. In workplace terms it spans from portfolio distribution down to floor-level blocking.
Spatial planning is where organisational structure and physical structure negotiate. Adjacency decisions determine which collaborations are cheap and which are expensive; zoning decisions determine what can coexist; capacity distribution determines where friction concentrates. It is the discipline behind stacking, blocking and the programme of requirements — quantitative, consequential and chronically underestimated.
- Which adjacencies does the evidence require, and which arrangements can deliver them?
- How should capacity distribute across floors, buildings and locations against demand rhythm?
- What zoning logic reconciles openness, confidentiality and customer presence?
- What does a given arrangement cost in movement, encounter and separation?
- Space syntax and spatial analysis research
- Adjacency and interaction studies
- Occupancy and movement data
- Programming and space-planning methodology literature
Stacking and blocking modelled against evidence-weighted adjacency requirements; vertical separation costed honestly; circulation designed as encounter infrastructure; capacity planned as distribution against rhythm, not as area per head.
Stacking and Blocking
The allocation of teams, functions and zones across floors and buildings — converting adjacency evidence, capacity models and building constraints into a spatial distribution.
Taxonomy Alignment
The translation of selected priorities into quantified spatial demand: settings, capacities, sharing ratios, density, enclosure, adjacencies, zoning and programme requirements.
Taxonomy Spatial Benchmarking
Taxonomy compares spatial supply against current and intended organisational demand — a structured inventory of what the portfolio provides versus what the organisation needs.
Business Needs Interviews
Function-level interviews that map how work is actually performed: processes, interdependencies, adjacencies, focus, confidentiality and operational constraints.
Planning by precedent and politics: adjacencies allocated by seniority, ratios imported from benchmarks, and space syntax invoked decoratively rather than analytically. The counter-discipline is the evidence chain — every planning decision traceable to a measured requirement.
Space syntax findings on movement and encounter are robust; their extension to organisational outcomes (collaboration quality, innovation) is more contested and warrants careful claims.