The best way to predict the future
is to build it
is to build it
Quality of Life Futures is your strategic partner for the built environment. We ensure you make the right decisions today to create the safe, healthy, and more connected communities of tomorrow.
About us
About Quality of Life Futures
Our core belief: Having a decent, affordable home in a safe, well-designed neighbourhood is the foundation of a happy, healthy life. When we get this right, we don’t just build houses; we develop communities, reduce loneliness, and extend life expectancy.
Our heritage: Quality of Life Futures is a social enterprise that has grown out of the pioneering work of the Quality of Life Foundation. While the Foundation established the evidence for what people need from their homes and communities, Quality of Life Futures provides the strategic vehicle to embed those insights into the entire lifecycle of the built environment. We carry forward this golden thread of research to ensure that every project is built on a foundation of lived experience.
Our futures: When working within a complex system, it can often feel that inequalities, rigid ways of working, or poor outcomes are predetermined or baked in. By adopting a long-term approach that maintains a sense of the possible, rooted in evidence, we believe there are multiple potential futures. If you have the agency to make decisions in your work or your community, you have the power to build the future.
What we do
Shifting the narrative from site to story
We help residents, developers, housing associations, and local authorities move beyond static masterplans. By focusing on long-term outcomes that improve health equity and community agency from day one, we can create places that remain resilient, inclusive, and valuable, long into the future.
Strategy and Stewardship
We help developers and landowners set the purpose and long-term outcomes for a project before ground is broken, then build the governance and partnerships to keep it on track. This means places don’t just get planned well – they get cared for well, long after delivery teams have moved on.
Evaluation
We find out honestly what a place is like to live in once people have actually moved in, using our own Quality of Life Framework to look past satisfaction scores to lived experience. This gives our partners clear, specific findings they can act on, not results softened to look good.
Research and influence
We turn what we learn on the ground into research and campaigns that push the wider sector to build differently. This is how we make the case, beyond any single scheme, for placing long-term social outcomes on equal footing with commercial and planning ones.
Quality of Life Framework
The Quality of Life Framework
Originally developed by the Quality of Life Foundation through pioneering research, the Quality of Life Framework identifies six key themes that define how the built environment impacts people’s health and wellbeing.
We use this evidence-based Framework as a practical tool to help our partners and clients move beyond static metrics, ensuring that every home and neighbourhood is designed, built, and stewarded to provide a better quality of life for everyone.
The Framework is available to use through a Creative Commons License, and is reviewed and updated every four years to ensure it is underpinned by the latest evidence.
Projects
Proven impact
Our team has considerable experience of working with partners on projects aimed at putting health, wellbeing and social impact at the heart of how we create and care for homes and neighbourhoods. These projects, delivered under our mission, run the course of the housing development cycle – from strategic land use to post-occupancy evaluation (asking people what they think and feel about where they live). Below are some examples of our work.
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