BA DESIGNING CITIES

BA Designing Cities (BADC) is an integrated course between planning and architecture that equips students with the necessary skills and competences to tackle together the multiple challenges of city sustainability, inclusion and resiliency. Over the last years the BADC teaching team gathered together with students and alumni to discuss the future of the course, in the context of an evolving job market and new emerging challenges. The result has been the redesign of a new course focused on the method of inquiry by design, as an explorative tool to test creatively ideas of sustainable urban futures.

The course will be re-launched in the coming months with more emphasis on the relationship between climate emergency and cities, aligned with the on-going work of ArCCAT, the Architecture and Cities Climate Action Taskforce. Cities are understood as both problems and opportunities in the transition towards net-zero emission. At the same time, cities are places where to experience new ways of living, linked to new emerging narratives of happiness, wellbeing and diversity.

Our teaching is focuses on solving emerging urban problems such as the increasing demand of quality green space in London, as we have experienced in the context of year 2 ‘Climate Studio’. At the same time, students had the possibility to visit urban transformation projects in Manchester and East London, observing, at the same time, the tensions of urban regeneration projects in relationship to diverse migrants communities, such as in Elephant & Castle and Seven Sisters. As in the past, we have organized Industry projects with our key partners (i.e. Jacobs, Grosvenor, WSP), and students have been exposed to new problems to solve and new concrete solutions to explore.

The course is accredited by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI).

Giulio Verdini and Luz Navarro

Course Leaders

BA DESIGNING CITIES 2nd YEAR STUDIO: CLIMATE URBANISM STUDIO The Climate Urbanism Studio investigates how to build up climate-resilient local areas, exploring ways to improve the provision and quality of urban green in contemporary cities. Our Climate Urbanism Studio employs an integrated analytical and design framework to understand and map city vulnerabilities to address collaboratively complex urban challenges, and producing meanwhile scenarios of resiliency and inclusive design explorations at the local level. The case study selected this year is in located in the Lower Lea Valley, in East London. Due to its very fragmented nature, being comprised of mixed residential areas, in some cases with problems of social deprivation, and large-scale industrial areas, the area has remained relatively untouched by large property developments of the London Docks, but equally affected by the Olympic Games regeneration project in the North. Since then, a framework for a new linear park along the Lea was proposed but never fully implemented. Owing to its location, between the boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham, the area has been always considered as a ‘backyard’ without being politically relevant. However, nowadays this area has been reconsidered as an important ecological resource with the potential to reinforce its role as a key social and environmental infrastructure for the surrounding residential areas. Students have therefore worked on proposals aiming to provide resilient a

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