PTE Place Tiles: rapid testing of density, character and capacity
05.11.26
How much could your site deliver, and what kind of place could it become?
Place Tiles is PTE’s rapid masterplanning tool for answering both questions. It helps landowners, agents and developers test the potential of a site early - comparing capacity, density, housing mix, open space and character ahead of committing to a masterplan.
Each Place Tile represents one hectare of neighbourhood bringing together homes, streets, landscape, parking and public space. The tiles can be assembled and adapted to test different development scenarios quickly.
Conventional early masterplan layouts provide the numbers. These are important, but they are only part of the picture. Place Tiles are embedded with compliant cycle and refuse storage requirements, separation distances, urban greening, embodied carbon and good urban design principles built-in - considering character, movement, public realm and value alongside numbers.
PTE's Place Tiles provide more certainty, earlier. Allowing a site to be compared not simply by how much development they accommodate, but by the quality and character of the place they could create.
Place Tiles give that first layout a head start. We’ve done a lot of the homework already, from bins and bikes to parking, carbon and the dimensions that make streets and homes actually work. That means we can spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time asking the interesting questions: how could the potential of this site be unlocked, what kind of neighbourhood should it be, what makes it particular to this place, and could another approach work harder?
Carl Vann, Managing Partner at Pollard Thomas Edwards
The tiles range from lower-density family housing to higher-density neighbourhoods. They can use PTE typologies, bespoke designs or a developer's existing house types, depending on the site and brief.
At Cherry Hinton in Cambridge, for example, the approach combined around 70% Bellway house types with 30% PTE house and apartment typologies. It allowed the team to test how the different types could work together as part of the wider neighbourhood.
For landowners, developers and promoters, Place Tiles provides a way to test some of the important decisions earlier, when there is still scope to change them.
How many homes? Of course. But also: what kind of streets, spaces and neighbourhood do we want to make?
If you'd like to know more about PTE Place Tiles please get in touch with Tim Metcalfe - Partner - Communications tim.metcalfe@ptea.co.uk
