Take a minute to consider the current social situation in the UK. Benefits claims for mental health issues are at an all-time high.[1] Trust in politics is on the floor.[2] We're in the middle of a loneliness crisis.[3] And more than a million young people are now NEET, the first time since 2013.[4] These issues are usually discussed separately, but they share a common thread: they're all symptoms of a UK social crisis.

There's a growing acceptance that the traditional levers of renewal, economic growth and physical regeneration, don’t automatically trickle down into wellbeing and prosperity. What's needed is a concerted ‘social renewal’; a concerted effort to strengthen relationships, connection, participation and belonging across society. Get this right, and our places will feel safer, our networks for opportunity will widen, and our collective societal health improves.

The built environment is primed to be the engine for that renewal.

The overlooked value of social infrastructure.

A lack of social spaces for people to meaningfully engage with each other runs beneath all of these issues.

Infrastructure is usually understood as the physical and organisational structures a society needs to function, such as roads, airports, utilities. But some of the most important structures a society needs are the places where people actually come together and live out their daily lives: community centres, theatres, music venues, food markets, socially conscious retail spaces, and even hybrid hotels and building societies. These are the places where people go about daily life, be entertained, meet people, find hobbies or work, and exchange ideas. Places where people participate meaningfully in community life.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined a term for these environments in the late 1980s: 'third places'. These are spaces that sit between home (the first place) and work (the second place). Third places generate exactly the outcomes we look for when we talk about social impact: wellbeing, community resilience and trust, and can be the engine for social renewal.

Take Altrincham Market: in 2010 it was written off as a ghost town, with a third of shops standing empty.[5] A 2014 relaunch turned it into a food hub built around independent traders, and it's since been credited as the catalyst for a wider town centre revival, with Altrincham going on to be named England's Best High Street.[6] A food market has functioned as a genuine engine for social renewal. It wasn’t just a place to shop or eat, it’s a facility that has helped to pull a whole town back from the brink.

Designing for social outcomes

A well-designed and implemented third place can create valuable opportunities that wouldn't otherwise occur.

That's both an opportunity and a challenge for developers, operators and local authorities: positive social outcomes don't happen automatically. Building a new space doesn't guarantee connection, participation or belonging. Quality and activation matter just as much. Outcomes emerge from a combination of design, programming, management and partnership working: who feels welcome, how a space is activated, what's on offer, how different groups interact. Partnership is often where this starts, working with an anchor institution to reimagine what a space is for.

RealWorth recently worked with the Building Societies Association on research demonstrating that branches function as places of learning, emotional support, and high street vitality, with some branches doubling up as libraries and community centres, sometimes acting as the last remaining public-facing space on the high street. Building on those findings, we developed a toolkit helping branches design their spaces and programming around the social impact they can deliver.

Getting this right means putting social impact at the heart of decision-making from the start, rather than bolting it on at the end.

Measuring what matters

One of the biggest barriers to investing in social infrastructure is that its benefits are hard to see and quantify. How do you measure stronger communities, increased trust, new friendships, better wellbeing? These outcomes are less visible than financial ones, but no less important.

Robust evaluation, stakeholder engagement and social impact measurement help organisations understand the difference they're making, and demand for this is growing, as investors, public bodies and communities increasingly want evidence of genuine social value, not just economic return.

Take our work with the Social Hub (TSH), which operates hybrid hotels combining accommodation, student living and coworking space. The obvious value of the sites is the ability to cater to needs of different stakeholder groups while providing density. But our measurement work found the real value drivers were the convenience of having different facilities in one site; creating better work life balance and allowing for wider daily routines, as well as informal interactions between spaces: guests, students and coworkers crossing paths, borrowing ideas, forming connections that wouldn't happen in single-use buildings. We called this the multiplier effect; the demonstrable benefits of places being designed as social infrastructure.

Making it happen

Social renewal won't come from a policy announcement or a single investment programme. It will come from hundreds of ordinary decisions, about ‘third places’, markets, branches, hotels, community centres, made by people who understand that the space they're building is the infrastructure society needs for people to feel positive. Treat it that way, measure it that way, and the built environment stops being a backdrop to social renewal and starts being the thing that delivers it.

[1] https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/disability-benefits-for-anxiety-hit-new-record-high

[2] https://natcen.ac.uk/news/trust-and-confidence-britains-system-government-record-low

[3] https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/facts-and-statistics/

[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report/young-people-and-work-interim-report

[5] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/altrincham-trafford-boom-town-market-14299990

[6] https://confidentials.com/manchester/altrincham-has-the-best-high-street-in-england