People

Dominique is the founder of South Facing, a communications agency championing the transformative power of big ideas in the built environment. She believes the spaces we design and build are the most impactful on Earth, and that bold, effective communication is as vital as architecture itself.

From her in-house role at Max Fordham to her agency experience with ING Media, Dominique’s straight-talking approach has shaped some of the biggest brands in property and design. At South Facing, she collaborates with partners including UKREiiF, the Quality of Life Foundation, Connected Places Catapult, ES Global, and Richard Upton, delivering strategic narratives that leave a lasting mark.

A Civic Trust Awards national judge and Women in Property committee member, Dominique also contributes to industry progress through her involvement with Build Up and Real Estate Women, helping to create events that inspire change.

Francesca Perry is an editor and journalist with a focus on design, architecture, cities and culture. She writes for the Financial Times, CNN and the New York Times, among other titles. She was the commissioning and community editor for the Cities section of The Guardian, building on a background in community engagement and participatory urban design, as well as an MSc in Urban Studies. She edited the book Welfare Architecture for All, published by Arvinius + Orfeus in 2021. Francesca is an editorial consultant for African Futures Institute and has helped organisations such as UCL, the London School of Architecture and the Irish Architecture Foundation with communications and storytelling.

Hani’s interests are informed by a foundation in critical spatial thinking, through his background in architecture, further refined by his studies at the London School of Economics. This led to his interest in systems and the infrastructure that shape our lives. Hani aims to bridge gaps between different contexts through his research, curation, and programming to establish connections that underpin the importance of collective alliances to bring about positive social change.

Hani’s work is focussed particularly on understanding mechanisms for change, working on research that explores policy innovation, health and wellbeing, placemaking and infrastructure. His previous work as a researcher has involved building place-based indicators to measure quality of life, carrying out evidence reviews and delivering qualitative and quantitative research on the impact of the built environment on health and wellbeing.

Image by Justine Trickett.

John is an experienced and successful senior manager whose strong leadership and management qualities have been acquired working in a variety of roles across the public, private and voluntary sector. During this time, he has gained significant project and general management experience; an ability to lead teams with a varying range of skills and experience; and the commercial acumen and organisational abilities to manage regional charities, public sector departments, and major regeneration programmes. 

A major portion of his career has been focused working on the communications and engagement elements of regeneration and broader economic development programmes. During this time, he has acquired a detailed knowledge of the challenges delivering major capital programmes. Regularly working within a pressurised setting, he has become adept at listening and balancing the competing stakeholder priorities, and is able to employ a combination of empathy, effective communication, and determination to ensure the project achieves its objectives.

 

Lucy has spent over a decade supporting communities to realise positive change in their neighbourhoods through collaborative, creative approaches. She has worked with a range of partners to make projects happen, including dozens of local authorities, community groups, housing associations, funders and think tanks. Lucy was a Churchill Fellow in 2023, where she studied equitable approaches to urban development, and remains involved with the Fellowship foundation today. Alongside her freelance work, Lucy works part time as the Head of Creative Programmes at the social arts non-profit Peckham Platform. She is also involved in running two community gardens in London and is a member of the Southwark Design Review Panel. In her spare time, you will usually find her walking her dog or swimming in a lido.

Melissa is passionate about community participation and quality in design, understanding the aspirations, connections and needs between people and places. She has wide-ranging experience working collaboratively with a range of stakeholders, managing client and partnership projects, and mapping social value across community investment.

Her career spans working in the social housing sector to establish community development and enable resident involvement; as a consultant practising participatory design; advising in placemaking and supporting stakeholders in community-led design; and, design research engagement at an architectural practice.

Melissa’s role at the Foundation is to lead on our engagement work, ensuring it has a more positive impact on quality of life, especially inclusive of stakeholders who are most marginalised and underrepresented. Working across resident reviews, quality of life mapping, and stakeholders her role supports clients to work collaboratively, develop an engagement strategy, review and report on methodologies, and deliver projects across neighbourhoods.

Paula is an urban anthropologist and founder of Paula Petkova Office, an independent consultancy that reads the living culture of places earmarked for change. She believes that places are made meaningful by the people who inhabit them — and that development which doesn’t start there tends to fail them. Her particular interest is belonging: what produces it, what threatens it, and how to make it central. Paula embeds anthropological fieldwork across the design and development process — producing the evidence and spatial insight that social value metrics can’t. Her work spans brief development and early-stage research through to community engagement and long-term stewardship.

Her background includes Associate Partner at Foster + Partners, working internationally on urban design and masterplanning, and leading place-shaping engagement at Westminster City Council via Public Practice. She holds degrees in Anthropology from Cambridge and Copenhagen.

Pepper Barney is a Strategic Delivery Adviser applying a master developer lens to bridge quality of life insights with development delivery. She converts evidence and engagement into phasing, investment logic and delivery strategy, ensuring social impact ambitions directly inform what gets built, when, and how across complex, multi-stakeholder schemes.