As the pace of organisational change accelerates and as new technologies demand more rapid responses from organisations to changing conditions in their business environment, buildings are being called on to play an active role in helping to generate new organisational structures and in facilitating individual communication. This raises questions not only of the nature of organisational structure and of how communication technologies will affect that, but also of the possible mechanisms by which spatial structure can affect patterns of interaction in the work organisation. In this paper we will review two recent research-led design projects in which space syntax techniques were used to help define the building brief for an organisation which depends for its market lead on its ability to innovate. Building on research into the design of research laboratories, we found that patterns of space use and movement generated by spatial configuration have a direct impact on the frequency of contact between workers in office-based organisations. The frequency of contact is shown in turn to have an impact on work-related communications cited as ‘useful’ by questionnaire. These patterns are found to be ‘system effects’ in that they cannot be attributed to an individual worker's desk location but appear to result from the configuration of the whole system of spaces through which people move in their daily work, and have detectable effects on the mean ‘usefulness’ to others of all workers in a part of a building. The analysis suggests, however, that spatial integration alone may be insufficient to support flexible working and that spatial differentiation is necessary to provide the range of environments needed by different types of work activity.

Economic, physical, built, cultural, learning, social and service environments have a profound effect on lifelong health. However, policy thinking about health research is dominated by the ‘biomedical model’ which promotes medicalisation and an emphasis on diagnosis and treatment at the expense of prevention. Prevention research has tended to focus on ‘downstream’ interventions that rely on individual behaviour change, frequently increasing inequalities. Preventive strategies often focus on isolated leverage points and are scattered across different settings. This paper describes a major new prevention research programme that aims to create City Collaboratory testbeds to support the identification, implementation and evaluation of upstream interventions within a whole system city setting. Prevention of physical and mental ill-health will come from the cumulative effect of multiple system-wide interventions. Rather than scatter these interventions across many settings and evaluate single outcomes, we will test their collective impact across multiple outcomes with the goal of achieving a tipping point for better health. Our focus is on early life (ActEarly) in recognition of childhood and adolescence being such critical periods for influencing lifelong health and wellbeing.