The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment

The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment (PFBE) is The Prince’s main charity concerned with designing, planning and building in an environmentally sustainable way.

The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment has four main areas of activity. The Design Operation works on live projects that are largely funded by the project promoter or developer. Its specialism is urban planning, particularly regeneration of failing communities, urban extensions and public transport-related development strategies. The Education Department run education events, including workshops and seminars, and are developing a Graduate Fellows programme and an MSc in Sustainable Urbanism. The Design Theory Department offers architectural advice on individual buildings, including those organisations which enjoy HRH The Prince of Wales’s patronage. The Chief Executive’s team run an extensive public affairs programme of conferences, policy, advocacy work, speaking engagements, and research and it also holds the PR function for the Organisation.

At the heart of the mission of The PFBE is the principle that we must heed the lessons of traditional place-making in new architecture and planning. This is a departure from the thinking of most mainstream architecture and planning education which still promotes modernist style architecture and zoned town development in which residential areas are separated from shops, schools, places of work and leisure. Inevitably, such patterns of development lead to car dependency and are not environmentally sustainable. Instead, The Foundation promotes traditional urbanism in which uses are interspersed, and align with, a clear street hierarchy in which it is easy to find one’s way about on foot or by using public transport. It promotes reasonable population densities to limit urban sprawl, strong links to context in architectural style and building materials, as well as the incorporation of green space, through private gardens, parks and leisure areas.

Whilst The Foundation does not lobby Government, it enjoys active collaborations with various departments and agencies, including CLG, English Partnerships, CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), and many professional bodies, private and plc developers, landowners, locally elected officials and planners. Increasingly, it has an international remit with the establishment of regeneration projects in Jamaica and Sierra Leone, and opportunities to influence new build in Saudi Arabia, India, and the Far East.