Ben SnapeFor most of the history of UK planning policy, “the environment” meant energy efficiency, insulation values, and carbon.
Over the past two years, that has changed in a way that directly affects what architects design, what they can charge for, and what their clients now legally require. Biodiversity is no longer a value-add. It is, in most cases, a condition of planning permission.
This shift sits alongside a broader cultural movement called “more-than-human” design. It questions the assumption that buildings are made for humans alone and asks what it would mean to design for the species that share a site, a building, or a city with us.
The Design Museum’s More than Human exhibition, which ran in London through summer and autumn 2025, brought this movement into the mainstream, presenting work from over 50 contributors spanning architecture, art, and product design.
What “more-than-human” architecture actually means
“More-than-human design” is a term used across architecture, product design, and art to describe practice that takes non-human species (animals, plants, fungi, microbial life, whole ecosystems) as “legitimate stakeholders” in the design process.
Notable Magazine’s coverage of the Design Museum exhibition describes it as a movement that questions the human-centric lens that has defined Western design practice, built on the idea that the flourishing of all species is interconnected.
In architectural terms, this manifests as a spectrum. At one end are conceptual, research-led projects; at the other end is a set of design decisions that are now routine, regulated, and billable. This includes habitat creation, species-specific nesting provision, green roofs and walls, and so on. The biodiversity metrics can be calculated, reported, and approved as part of a standard planning application.
The conceptual and the regulatory ends of this spectrum reinforce each other.
The changing more-than-human and biodiversity regulation
Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is the single most significant change to UK planning in this area in a generation. Under Schedule 14 of the Environment Act 2021, which inserted a new Section 90A and Schedule 7A into the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, every planning permission granted in England is now deemed subject to a general condition: a biodiversity gain plan must be submitted and approved before development can lawfully commence, demonstrating at least a 10% net gain in biodiversity value between the pre-development and post-development states.
This became mandatory for major developments from 12 February 2024, and for small sites from 2 April 2024, following the Biodiversity Gain (Town and Country Planning) (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2024. Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects follow from November 2026.
The practical effect for architects is that biodiversity has become a quantified, documented design output with the same procedural status as a flood risk assessment or a transport statement.
RIBA’s own guidance for members notes that on-site design response is now the preferred, policy-favoured route, which puts the question squarely in the architect’s hands from the earliest design stages.
The December 2024 update to the National Planning Policy Framework made clear that developments should incorporate features supporting priority or threatened species such as swifts, bats, and hedgehogs
Scotland has already made swift bricks mandatory for new buildings. In England, Amendment 245 to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill would require integral bird nest boxes in developments over 5 metres in height, built to British Standard BS 42021:2022.
Brighton & Hove City Council already requires them via planning conditions, and the Future Homes Hub operates a voluntary commitment to install a bird nesting brick or box in every new home.
For an architect, this is a near-zero-cost item (each brick costs roughly £25) that is rapidly moving from “nice to have” to “expected by the LPA” to, potentially, “required by Building Regulations.”
Practices that have already integrated this into their standard specifications are simply ahead of where the regulation is heading.
The Urban Greening Factor (UGF) is a scoring tool that quantifies the proportion of a development’s surface given over to green infrastructure like green roofs, living walls, soft landscaping, and permeable paving with planting.
The tool is already mandatory in the London Plan, and Natural England has since published a national UGF model that other local authorities are beginning to adopt into their own Local Plans.
Running alongside this is Building with Nature, the UK’s first benchmark and accreditation scheme for high-quality green infrastructure. It’s developed with the Landscape Institute and is applicable at any stage from policy through to post-construction. Accreditation costs range from £1,300 to £8,000 + VAT depending on project scale, so assess the cost against the needs and likely benefits of your project.
Key aspects of more-than-human design
Habitat-led site analysis
Traditionally, an ecological survey happens after the design has taken shape, often as a constraint to be designed around.
A more-than-human approach inverts this: the site’s existing habitats, species records, and ecological connectivity are assessed at RIBA Stage 0 or 1, alongside the conventional site analysis.
This means understanding what already lives on or moves through a site (badger routes, bat foraging corridors, breeding bird records, veteran trees) before committing to a massing strategy that might sever those connections.
Species-specific architectural features
Beyond swift bricks, this category includes bat boxes and bat-access roof tiles, bee bricks, hedgehog highways (gaps in garden boundaries allowing hedgehog movement between gardens), bird-safe glazing to reduce collision strikes, and habitat features integrated into landscape design, such as log piles, wildflower margins, ponds.
Each of these is individually inexpensive. Collectively, and designed in from the outset rather than retrofitted, they form a coherent ecological strategy that LPAs are increasingly expecting to see articulated in a Design and Access Statement.
BNG metric literacy
The statutory biodiversity metric assigns numerical values to habitats based on type, condition, distinctiveness, and strategic significance, and calculates the net change between pre- and post-development states.
Architects do not need to become ecologists, but understanding how design decisions directly move the BNG calculation is now a core design literacy.
A scheme that loses a fraction of a biodiversity unit through an avoidable layout decision can mean the difference between meeting the 10% gain on-site and having to procure off-site units, which carry real cost and programme risk.
Green infrastructure integration
This covers green and brown roofs, living walls, sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) designed as habitat rather than purely as engineering infrastructure, and landscape strategies that connect a site’s green infrastructure.
The Building with Nature standards provide a structured framework for this that has been developed specifically to be deliverable within normal design processes.
Post-occupancy ecological monitoring
Just as post-occupancy evaluation has become standard practice for assessing how buildings perform for their human occupants, ecological monitoring after completion is becoming a parallel requirement.
BNG habitat management plans carry a minimum 30-year monitoring and maintenance commitment under the Environment Act framework, and that creates an ongoing relationship between practices, clients, and sites that didn’t exist under previous planning regimes.
The business case: how this becomes a growth strategy
This is where the conversation matters most for practice principals. Everything above is, on its own, a compliance burden.
But viewed as a business question, it is one of the clearest service-diversification opportunities UK architecture has seen in years, for a simple reason: it is now mandatory for almost every client, on almost every project, and most practices are not yet fluent in it.
A new, billable service line
BNG assessment, habitat design, and biodiversity gain plan preparation are work that needs to be done. Someone has to do the baseline metric calculation, design the on-site habitat response, coordinate with an ecologist on the post-development metric, and write the biodiversity gain plan that goes to the LPA.
At present, much of this is being handled by ecological consultants working in isolation from the design team.
A practice that builds genuine in-house capability in BNG metric literacy and habitat-led design can either bring this work in-house as a fee-earning service, or position itself as the coordinating hub for a small specialist ecological consultant.
Given that an estimated 7,500 planning applications already required BNG as of early 2025, this is not a niche service.
Reduced planning risk for clients
A scheme that has been designed with BNG and habitat considerations is significantly less likely to encounter delay, refusal, or costly redesign at the validation or determination stage.
Wild Justice’s “Lost Nature” research, cited in a 2025 parliamentary briefing on swift bricks, found that around 75% of ecological enhancements secured via planning conditions are never actually delivered. This means that biodiversity requirements are treated as an afterthought, with predictable consequences for compliance and reputational risk down the line.
For developer clients, an architect who can demonstrate fluency in this area reduces a genuine source of planning risk.
Differentiation in a crowded market
In a market where fee competition is intense, genuine expertise in an area that is both legally mandatory and poorly understood by most competitors is a real differentiator.
A practice that can speak credibly about more-than-human project concepts in a client pitch stands out in a way that “we do sustainable design” no longer does. BNG Compliance and the wider more-than-human agenda has moved well past the point where it is a marketing differentiator on its own. The differentiator now is depth and fluency.
This is consistent with the broader pattern explored in high-profit business models for UK architects. The practices growing fastest are generally those that have identified a specific, defensible area of expertise that intersects with a genuine market need, rather than trying to be generalists in an oversaturated market.
Access to a genuinely new market: habitat banking
Beyond direct design fees, BNG has created an entirely new market: habitat banks, where landowners create and register habitat that developers can purchase as off-site biodiversity units.
Industry analysis from Biodiversity Units UK forecasts this market could be worth £3 billion by 2035, with over 91,000 units in play, and notes that the legislation has already created over 450 full-time green jobs and engaged more than 800 contractors since its 2024 rollout.
Unit prices vary enormously by habitat type and location, from roughly £20,000 per unit for lower-distinctiveness habitats up to £125,000 for specialist habitats like floodplain wetland mosaic, and as high as £650,000 for rare habitats like alkaline lakes, according to Defra’s 2023 statutory credit pricing framework.
For architectural practices working with landowner clients, advising on the potential to register land as a habitat bank, as well as the design and management plans that registration requires, is an entirely new advisory service that did not exist three years ago.
A number of UK practices have moved early on this, and their positioning is instructive.
NDLA, a UK landscape architecture and environmental planning practice, describes BNG as “more than a requirement,” working closely with ecological consultants and planning specialists to embed it from the earliest project stages.
Outerspace, a London landscape architecture studio, frames its entire practice philosophy around the premise that human and ecological wellbeing cannot be designed independently. Outerspace has been integrating nectar-rich and habitat-supporting planting into high-density residential schemes well ahead of BNG becoming mandatory.
HollandGreen, a residential-focused practice, established a dedicated Landscape Design Studio that won a ProLandscaper Sustainability & Biodiversity award, and has explicitly framed the goal as translating that landscape expertise into the work of its architecture and interior design teams.
The common thread across all of these is that none of them treat more-than-human design as a side project.
How PlanMan supports more-than-human project delivery
PlanMan.app is a project management platform built for UK architects and town planners, and the operational demands of more-than-human design and BNG compliance map closely onto our core features.
PlanMan’s project management module allows practices to set up custom stages and tasks that track these obligations through the full project lifecycle: baseline metric survey, design integration, biodiversity gain plan submission, condition discharge, and long-term monitoring milestones.
Each BNG-related project generates a growing file of documents. PlanMan’s document management module keeps all of this organised, version-controlled, and accessible per project, including from site via the mobile app.
More-than-human design depends on close coordination between architects, ecologists, and landscape architects. These are all disciplines that have historically worked in sequence rather than in parallel.
PlanMan’s co-consultants module and granular permission settings let practices bring ecological consultants into the project environment from Stage 1, with access to the relevant design information and a shared communication record.
If a practice begins offering BNG assessment, habitat design coordination, or Building with Nature assessment support as a distinct service, it needs to be priced, quoted, and invoiced as such: separately from the core design fee. PlanMan’s quote management and invoice management features make it straightforward to structure and track this as its own fee line from the outset.
For practices that want to move beyond treating biodiversity and ecology requirements as a cost to be minimised, and instead build them into a genuine area of expertise and a new revenue stream, the operational infrastructure matters as much as the design knowledge.
PlanMan provides that infrastructure.
Start your free 30-day trial and see how it supports this kind of service expansion.