Architecture and the Kindness Economy: Learning from Mary Portas

Mary Portas describes the Kindness Economy as a shift in how businesses are judged: not only on what they sell, but on what they contribute to people, places and the environment along the way. Commerce and social progress, held in balance. We first wrote about her thinking during the pandemic, and it has stayed with us because it describes something we recognise in our own work: buildings are a business, and they are also the physical fabric of how people live. A practice that only attends to the first half of that sentence is doing half the job.

Here's what the Kindness Economy looks like when it's applied to architecture, drawn from our projects rather than from principle.

A former warehouse atrium reused as a shared workspace, its brick fabric kept in view and daylight brought in from above, the kind of reuse the Kindness Economy argues for. RISE Design Studio.

Homes that give more than they take

The pandemic years made everyone more conscious of their homes: how much daylight reaches the kitchen table, whether a bedroom stays warm, whether there's anywhere to sit outside. That awareness hasn't faded, and it aligns with what low energy design was already doing. A home built or retrofitted to a fabric-first standard is kinder in a measurable way: warm in winter and cool in summer without hefty bills, quiet, well ventilated, and cheap to run for whoever lives there next, not just the client who commissioned it. Speaking with Amanda Levete on her podcast, Portas described a deepening relationship between people and the buildings they inhabit, and that's the version of it we can act on: comfort and low running costs are a form of consideration for people we'll never meet.

The same applies at the neighbourhood scale. Housing designed around the people who will live in it, rather than solely around the developer's margin, holds its value better in every sense. When we work with developers, the schemes that succeed are the ones where those two interests are designed to point the same way.

Community buildings are the clearest test

The best example in our own portfolio is The Lexi in Kensal Rise, the independent cinema run as a social enterprise, with profits supporting charitable work. Our role has been architectural, but the building's purpose shapes every design decision: it needs to earn its keep as a working cinema while remaining a place the whole neighbourhood feels ownership of. Buildings like this are the Kindness Economy in built form, and they show that commercial viability and social contribution aren't opposites; they're a design brief.

Reuse is kindness to a place

Portas has argued for repurposing empty town-centre buildings rather than demolishing them, working with the awkward characteristics that make them hard to convert, the deep floor plates, the windowless central spaces, instead of against them. We'd add the carbon argument: the greenest building is very often the one that already exists, because its embodied carbon has already been spent. Retrofit, which makes up a growing share of our work, is the same idea at domestic scale. Upgrading and adapting an existing building keeps its material, its street presence and its familiarity in use, and it usually keeps a neighbourhood's character intact in a way demolition never can.

Old department stores becoming community spaces, workshops or growing projects is no longer a thought experiment; versions of it now exist across the UK. The architectural skill lies in finding what each stubborn building is actually good at.

Workspaces people choose to be in

The return-to-office question has settled into something more permanent: hybrid working is simply how much of the country now works, and it has changed what an office has to offer. A workspace people are merely assigned to can be minimal; a workspace people choose has to be worth the trip, with daylight, fresh air, somewhere outside to sit, and the qualities of a well-designed home. We explored this when we wrote about the rise of co-working, and the direction of travel has only strengthened since: smaller companies in converted houses and neighbourhood buildings, closer to where people live, in spaces designed for people rather than headcount.

What we take from it

The Kindness Economy isn't a manifesto we've signed up to; it's a useful name for a standard we can apply project by project. Does the building give something back to the people in it and around it? Does it use less energy and less new material than the obvious alternative? Would the neighbours say the street is better for it? Those questions have concrete design answers, and they're the ones we try to get right.

You can visit one of Mary's Living and Giving Shops across the UK to see the retail version of the idea in practice.

If you're thinking about a project, whether it's a home, a workspace or a community building, we'd be glad to talk it through. Please do get in touch and we can discuss what your building could give back.

→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
→ Or call the studio on 020 3947 5886

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