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Locality, Ground and Totality Locality Your year 5 thesis should be seen as a consistent, synthesisied body of work. It will involve your thinking, researching, reading, designing and writing extensively about the contemporary urban condition and its relationship to the planet. As such, there will be no prescription of operational fields, other than that your fields will be considered on a planetary scale - a patchwork of variegated fields making up the surface of our world. The meta-question is about the ability of a unitary theory of space to affect and ameliorate our inhabitation of the planet? Can urbanisation create unity instead of fracture in the world? How can inequities be avoided? Where, how, and if you localise these ideas is open to discussion and is part of your thesis. Ground From our modern perspective, ownership of ground often connotes a form of freedom and liberation – having our own piece of the world. Yet, As Rousseau observed, paradoxically, this freedom is also a form of theft. Rosseau made this observation when the population of the planet was around eight hundred million - when industrial capitalism was embryonic and over a century before the “mass society” Hannah Arendt talks of began to re-shape world according to the logics of production and consumption that we have now normalised. These logics see ground as power - a place to park capital in the form of architecture and space. On a planet of now almost eight billion people, ground (as perhaps its most precious resource) becomes more and more scarce – and consequently more and more expensive - as that population grows. The commoditisation of ground, accordingly, deprives future generations. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out, ground is an increasingly valuable part of our asset structure. Escalating levels of investment in it will raise social inequalities and bring a “renewed importance of inherited wealth.” Totality The studio will aim to realign the design of the built environment with its social mission. We will re-address the de-facto (non)relationship between individual architecture and the urban “totality”. However, please be clear, understanding the totality of a particular urban field does not simply mean researching or analysing it in its entirety. We may well find means of exploring the typical conditions of the whole fields, by cutting transects or other by methods, but crucially, we will try to build understanding of an urban totality within which architecture, as a socio-spatial discipline, is deeply interwoven with socio-economic and socio-political ideas and concerns. Totality means understanding, in Hilberseimmer’s words, that the entire “organism” has many interconnected factors - the relationship between the individual piece of architecture and the urban whole will always be considered as the relationship between an individual and the public to which the individual belongs.
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