Introducing Place+ — a new digital placemaking platform by Prior + Partners

Prior + Partners has launched Place+, a new digital placemaking platform designed to support more informed, collaborative and strategic decision-making in shaping towns, cities and regions.

Developed by placemakers and digital innovators at Prior + Partners, it brings together spatial intelligence, data science and placemaking expertise within a single integrated environment.

The platform launches with the national Place Portrait, a free-to-access tool providing a single interactive view of England and Wales. It brings together place-based datasets into one coherent source of information, reducing the time spent navigating fragmented datasets and reconciling inconsistent formats, and enabling public and private sector teams to focus on interpretation, strategy and delivery.

The national Place Portrait is the first tool within the Place+ platform.

Free to access, it provides a single interactive view of England and Wales, bringing together essential datasets into a coherent view of place conditions. It enables users across the public and private sector to understand how places are changing, and respond with greater clarity and confidence.

It transforms fragmented public datasets into structured thematic views, allowing users to explore place conditions through a consistent spatial framework. Users can move between themes, scales and locations in one place, rather than searching across multiple sources.

The tool is designed to support early-stage analysis and strategic decision-making, helping teams identify patterns, compare places, and focus attention where it is most needed.

Planning and placemaking increasingly depend on interpreting large and complex datasets, but the process of doing so is often slow, fragmented and resource-intensive.

As pressure grows to deliver housing and infrastructure, this creates friction between evidence gathering and decision-making.

The Place Portrait supports a shift in this process by making spatial evidence easier to access, compare and apply in practice. It reduces time spent on data preparation, allowing more focus on interpretation, strategy and delivery.

For public sector users, this supports policy development, prioritisation and stakeholder engagement. For private sector teams, it enables faster site understanding, opportunity identification and more responsive masterplanning.

The Place Portrait will continue to evolve with additional datasets and enhanced multi-layer visualisation, improving the ability to understand where pressures and opportunities overlap.

Future development will include presentation-ready outputs, downloadable data (including GIS and Excel formats), and personalised AI-supported workspaces for ongoing analysis and project work.

While the Place Portrait provides a free entry point into Place+, it also forms the foundation for a wider toolkit used in bespoke planning and masterplanning projects, supporting deeper scenario testing and place-specific strategy development.

Visit the Place+ website to explore place, understand what matters, and shape your future.