blog-post-welcomeWelcome to our new website! We hope that this may be the beginning of a continuing relationship, mutually sharing the global advances in Placemaking.

Placemakers appears on the scene as the natural evolution of Consultal’s mission over several years to assist its clients in finding practical and sustainable solutions for the challenges that face those fortunate enough to be responsible for cultural and heritage assets. Heritage has been a personal passion of mine for as long as I can remember, even as a child back in England, and creating Consultal was that realization. However, Consultal has since developed …. and now it’s our new brand image of Placemakers® full-on!

I know it’s a cliché to say we are different, but the fact is that we are a group of individually successful professionals from Portugal and the United Kingdom brought together by a common passion: Living Places. Strangely enough, commercial drive is not always our priority, although of course we need to survive. Yes, we have our traditional commercially driven projects, but we also take a genuine and almost altruistic interest in helping bring about great solutions for places whose characteristics are not profit motivated.

Consultal as a company was focused primarily on Visitor Attractions – attracting visitors to visitor attractions was our tagline; both cultural and leisure, effectively achieving footfall for profit-driven objectives. Although this activity continues within the company, more and more we have come to realise that sustainability is derived from a holistic solution for places and communities and not just from the pursuit of commercial margins. We were not the only ones, and we quickly identified with an international movement harnessing people- based development known as Placemaking which seeks to involve the community and stakeholders in compelling integrated solutions based on the principle that the result is more than simply the sum of its parts and that complicity helps support their sustainability. This applies to public realm, a local museum, place regeneration or a new visitor attraction for the area – it doesn’t matter what the project is so long as there is complicity and the added value to be had from stakeholder and community buy-in.

We have been lucky enough to establish some important relationships with UK based Trusts and experts whose hard-earned experience over the years enables us to enter projects with a valuable head-start in areas relatively unfamiliar in Portugal. As for the Trusts, which by definition are not-for-profit, it was due to our sense of purpose and mission over and above commercial gain that allowed this relationship to come about.

We are riding a wave of cultural and social responsibility without losing site of that bottom-line which underwrites our practical approach. Understanding the make-up is the science, keeping a sensible balance is our art – for sharing.

We at Placemakers all share in the wish to help create great places for and with you.