DESIGNING CITIES IS an integrated course bringing together knowledge about the city, its architecture and urban planning, to design more sustainable places and futures in both local and international contexts.
The course addresses the challenge of building sustainable cities by training a new generation of experts capable of facing the complexity of cities to understand the forces that shape them and to provide innovative and creative solutions for their urgent problems, including climate change and increasing social inequalities. We are committed to deliver, in our teaching and research, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular Goal no.11: ‘To make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’; and Goal no.13: ‘Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts’.
DESIGNING CITIES IS an integrated course bringing together knowledge about the city, its architecture and urban planning, to design more sustainable places and futures in both local and international contexts.
The course addresses the challenge of building sustainable cities by training a new generation of experts capable of facing the complexity of cities to understand the forces that shape them and to provide innovative and creative solutions for their urgent problems, including climate change and increasing social inequalities. We are committed to deliver, in our teaching and research, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular Goal no.11: ‘To make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’; and Goal no.13: ‘Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts’.
THE DESIGN STUDIO focused on two different geographic, socio-economic and climatic contexts, one which centred around the studio field trip to Ben Guerir, Morocco, and the other to London’s Lea Valley. These two distinctive case studies provided analytical evidence to inform debates around the wider urban and regional contexts and the current use of waterways. In creating resilient urban strategies for these areas, students focused on the environmental history of the place, narratives around water, and the current environmental/climatic challenges, alongside the social divisions associated with presence or lack of water. Precedents of designing in super wet and super dry contexts were gathered in order to provide scenarios to develop the individual proposals in the second part of the semester. The studio centred their design analysis and production around social and cultural dimensions of water and hydro-citizenship, river governance and contested visions, as well as interstitial spaces between land and water to provide creative and inclusive urban and architectural responses to local climatic conditions.
The case study in London is located between the Upper Lea Valley Opportunity Area and the Olympic Legacy area. It is an area where the existing appetite for development is threatening local environmental resources, such as the Leyton Marshes. Advocacy for a more sustainable use of waterways and the surrounding areas has been made by activists of the civil society. The case study in Ben Guerir in Morocco is located between the new Green and Smart City in the south (Ville Verte) and the existing town in the north, where informal settlements are located. The area, which is crossed by a creek, is today underused, but it could provide an opportunity for sustainable regeneration and reconnection for the entire town.
THIS YEAR’S PROJECT is set in Southwark, one of the GLA’s Opportunity Areas, on the south bank of the Thames. Dating back more than 2,000 years to pre-Roman times, the thoroughfare that linked London to the south-east of England was used by the Celts and, later, the Anglo-Saxons who called it the ‘Old Kent Road’ or Watling Street.
Until the nineteenth century, the road was fundamentally rural in character, but this began to change with the industrial development of several adjacent landholdings, including the Metropolitan Gas Works, the old Surrey Canal of 1811, leather tanneries and a soap processing plant. In 1845 the Bricklayers Arms goods station opened and the area developed rapidly to become one of Europe’s highest urban densities (up to 280 inhabitants per acre).
The area experienced rapid transformation during the preand post-war periods due to large-scale slum clearances and bombing, resulting in the development of some of the largest social housing estates in Europe. Industrial and warehouse development continued in subsequent decades, including big-box retail facilities from the 1980s. The area is now the focus of much development speculation due to the large landholdings, high real estate values and the presence of redundant industrial sites. The Bakerloo Line extension along the length of Old Kent Road will further increase the reach of the area. Responding to these development pressures, the GLA established the Old Kent Road Opportunity Area, followed by Southwark’s Area Action Plan. Covering over 114 ha and providing up to 10,000 new jobs with 20,000 new homes, (7,000
affordable tenure), it will become the capital’s latest high density cluster with a number of tall buildings.
In Term 1 the students worked in groups to undertake highlevel urban design and contextual spatial, demographic and socio-economic analysis while proposing strategic plans for large scale development parcels within the opportunity area. During Term 2 they split up to work on smaller sites in order to develop individual architectural development proposals for housing schemes, mixed-use developments or social infrastructure projects such as schools, along with comprehensive public realm design strategies while incorporating affordable housing, employment uses, and aiming to avoid community dislocation and gentrification.
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