Urban Designer

Do you want to work for a company whose purpose is to improve society by considering social outcomes, and to transform businesses, communities, and opportunities for it’s employees? Mott MacDonald is a global consultancy whose people do exactly that.

As an Urban Designer you will:

- Support business development including internal and external client relationship building
- Support the preparation of winning bids including the co-ordination of multidisciplinary inputs and sub consultants
- Contribute to resource planning
- Project manage allocated placemaking and master planning projects including commercial and business system requirements and client liaison supporting senior staff
- Prepare key urban design outputs including reports, spatial frameworks, masterplans, site feasibility studies, design guidance
- Prepare and deliver project presentations to clients, working groups, stakeholder meetings etc
- Undertake stakeholder and community engagement to support the production of the above
- Guide and supervise junior urban designers in the production of urban design outputs ensuring that QA and graphic standards are maintained
- Contribute to the development of Mott MacDonald’s cities business and raising the profile of urban design skills and services within the company and within the market

A bit about the team
This role sits within the newly established cities team which forms part of the Building and Cities Unit. Our aim is to fully realise the potential of our front-end consultancy skills to increase our market profile in cities based work from the earliest stages of strategy development and project creation.

Urban designers are an integral part of our cities business. They work alongside town planners and place economists to provide public sector clients with integrated master planning and placemaking services across the UK and internationally.

This role is being created to support the rapid development of our cities team and provide greater junior level urban design staff capacity to respond to existing client requirements and emerging opportunities and expand technical resource capacity.

Mott MacDonald’s cities team undertakes projects spanning a range of complex urban contexts including:

- Town centre and urban regeneration,
- Transport hubs and Transit orientated development,
- Mixed use urban quarters and neighbourhood.

The post holder will support the preparation of town centre strategies, site and area based masterplans, development frameworks, feasibility studies and public realm concept designs. All projects are likely to involve stakeholder and community engagement.

Significant career development opportunities will be available including client facing and project responsibilities.

Required for the position of Urban Designer;
- Degree in town planning, landscape architecture or architecture.
- A post graduate qualification in urban design (Post Graduate diploma or MA).
- Extensive post qualification experience with a proven track record of relevant skills and experience.
- Chartered membership of a relevant professional institute e.g. MRTPI, MLI, RIBA.
- Worked within a consulting environment on development-led Urban Design projects
- Be able to demonstrate good design outcomes in previous projects and articulate how their input helped to guide the client, regulatory authorities, and support consultants to the end result
- A strong portfolio showing a selection of urban design and master planning work. International project experience is desirable but not essential. Examples that demonstrate multi-disciplinary and collaborative team working and public sector and local authority clients should be emphasised.
- Experience in delivering projects at a variety of scales and in a range of contexts including urban regeneration, town and city centres, transit orientated development, growth areas.
- Excellent ability to develop, draw and communicate urban design and placemaking ideas from appraisal of the local context and early concept development to design development and early stage viability. This includes the preparation of written reports.
- All applicants should have advanced technical abilities and demonstrate proficiency in using: AutoCAD, Sketch-up, Adobe Creative Suite package, and Microsoft Office.
- Ability to work well to deadlines.
- Ability to lead on key aspects of complex multi-disciplinary projects
- Ability to lead and mentor junior members of staff (senior-level role).
- Experience of working for private and public sector and Local Authority clients.
- Excellent spoken and written English.
- A robust understanding of the UK Planning system.
- The ability to travel to project locations in different parts of the country or internationally is required.

Preferred, but not required
- Hand sketching skills
- A UK driving license

If you meet 80% or more of what we’re looking for, please still apply. We understand not everyone will meet all the requirements, but you m