He helped rebuild Haiti following the devastating earthquake of 2010 and erected schools in Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, but now the leading British architect John McAslan is to turn his attention to Tottenham in north London.
The Scottish designer, a former colleague of Richard Rogers, is to open what is believed to be the first architect's studio on Tottenham High Road, opposite the police station where protests spilled over into riots in 2011 that spread across English cities.
McAslan's vision is simple: he wants to train local youngsters as architectural apprentices and give them control over their home areas. In the process, he hopes to help rectify a major imbalance in the make-up of the UK's architectural profession that has hardly improved since the murder two decades ago of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who wanted to study architecture. Only 2% of the country's architects are non-white, according to a recent government study, compared with 40% of the population of Haringey, the borough where Tottenham is situated.
"Everybody deserves an equal chance," said McAslan, who has worked with Bill Clinton on his foreign projects. "I felt the same way in Malawi, Haiti and now in Tottenham. The riots happened and this is about trying to contribute to the rebuilding of Tottenham by engaging with young people."
He said he was partly inspired by Ralph Erskine, who set up an office in the deprived Byker area of Newcastle in the 1970s from where – alongside the local population – he masterminded its rebirth.
The Tottenham studio is currently being fitted out at the council's expense in a disused sports shop between a launderette and a funeral director on a street where shops were burned and looted in August 2011. It will boast wide shop windows and a huge model of Tottenham's potential regeneration projects in an attempt to draw in locals.
The lease is being paid for by the London borough of Haringey, whose leader, Claire Kober, met McAslan a year ago at a lunch hosted by the London mayor, Boris Johnson.
She said McAslan's office would be the first prominent architectural practice to set up in N17 and said the move came in a place "where there is new energy and a determination to say regeneration can happen".
She said the regeneration of Brixton and parts of Hackney provided a template for Tottenham in as much as "the place retains its identity and the economic, physical and social potential is realised."
Kober added: "People have pointed to the general level of deprivation in the community and structural economic decline so the background here isn't just the riots but a place that has experienced wider decline."
The project will begin in the spring and will take on two 12-month apprentices as well as work experience students from local secondary schools and colleges and conduct outreach work. McAslan, whose £400m revamp of King's Cross station was completed last year, will staff the office with experienced architects and run some of the practice's UK and international workload from there, as well as competing for local work.
Aidan Potter, McAslan's partner who is running the project, said he had already identified one teenager who has ambitions to become an architect in the area, but he said the practice would also try to boost the wider employability of young people, not just in architecture. He said there was already a queue of established architects from the firm's central London office wanting to be seconded to the project.
"When we looked up architects in Tottenham, we found 13 pages of practices in Islington, but only three firms in N17," he said. "It didn't seem like the profession was falling over itself to engage. Even though it is only 30 minutes from here [to central London], it almost could be Malawi.
"Any project that we compete for in the local area, we are going to use kids with a couple of months' training to be part of the team. Regeneration will come from the bottom up, it won't be imposed or 'graciously' given from above. We think it is important there is a visible presence to the beginning of a professional class here. It may seem absurd, but it is as good an idea as any other."
The initiative by McAslan comes after the government has agreed to underwrite £1bn in loans to the private sector in Tottenham and funding has been agreed to quadruple the number of trains from the deprived north of the area to the international hubs of Stratford and Liverpool Street.
