Dundee Year 4 2023 AR41001 Module Book

University of Dundee Architecture Year 4

AR41001 Urban Theory, Analysis &

URBAN THEORY ANALYSIS

Henri Lefebvre.

The City and its Seduction: Vision, Consensus, Subsumption.

Whatever Happened to Vision?

In the summer of 1950, a letter from the government of the Punjab arrived at 35, Rue de Sèvres, announcing that a mission would come from Europe, to engage two architects to undertake the construction of the new capital of the Punjab … Le Corbusier told them without false modesty: “Your capital can be constructed here. You can rely on us at 35, Rue de Sèvres to produce the solution to the problem.” … In eighteen months the atelier in the Rue de Sèvres had solved the problems of the Capitol … (Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète V5, 114-115.)

There is a tendency to synonomise urban visions with the industrial era’s staggering demographic demands. Yet four thousand years before any of these great works of the modern era, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, written by the ancient Mesopotamians, the character of Enkidu is seduced by an equally compelling urban vision - that of the fabled city of Uruk, the largest city in the world. As Ben Wilson notes in his history of cities, Metropolis, Enkidu, “[h]is hairy body shaved, his skin anointed with oils, and his nakedness concealed under costly garments” renounces his harmonious natural existence, and heads for Uruk’s symbols of civilization and power. Endiku is drawn to the vision of an artificial human habitat, dominated by huge temples dedicated to gods and goddesses, and “by the lure of sex, food and luxury,” the products of the collaborations and exchanges of intense human propinquity – The City.

For as long as any notion of “the city” has existed, it has held concord with great, seductive visions of how humans might live together. From Uruk, through the political space of Athens, imperial Rome, the innovations of Bagdad and Kaifeng, the origins of the world economy in Venice, the laissez-faire capitalism of London, to the modern hyper city, the allure of the city has never receded. In recent centuries, as capitalism’s “primitive accumulation” (as Marx put it) through expropriation of peasant land caused a rural exodus, cities grew at extraordinary rates and our species found the need to plan habitats on an increasingly large scale. Vision became a way of imagining how our human habitat might respond to intense change, and for a while it relied on the unique abilities of extraordinary individuals to imagine new urban responses to new social forms. The twentieth-century brought staggering new scales and demographics, and modernism’s universal social project responded with global operations under complex bureaucratic structures of the Keynesian social state.

The abandonment of the social project of modernism appeared to represent the end of four thousand years of “vision,” the postmodern era rejecting it in favour of “consensus.” Taking the form of published local plans and other guiding frameworks, available to anyone and devised to regulate, planning as a statutory process was born. Vision quickly became considered undemocratic - an imposition on individual liberty. Belief in it diminished toward the latter part of the twentieth century to the point where the term became almost taboo in planning vocabulary. Consensus dictated risk aversion and planning became, in the main, about restraint – controlling the exponential growth of population and its continued unfettered urbanisation. With the rise of the financial economy and its global hegemony, consensus has now morphed into passivity. Planning, instead of being concerned with restraint, is largely pro-development, and we have come to accept the city as an ‘economic growth machine.’ The city is more magnetic than ever and we are now fully urbanised as a species, but with this has emerged a new form of vision – the city brand. Its key engine – development – determines its planning, and citizens (qua entrepreneurs) become part of its mechanics, managed through “policy,” the framework within which development is controlled, and which many have argued serves the market. Power yielders now express their remarkable visions in fields of towers in the central business districts of hyper-cities such as Shanghai and Tokyo, but equally strongly in other districts devised for various other forms of consumption of the urban product. But for the likes of Enkidu, the magnetism of this neoliberal city brings not the luxuries and pleasures he discovered in Uruk, but an impoverishment of habitat. For him, as an ordinary citizen, the city is still seductive, but its “vision” is now subsumed into the mechanics of its promotion, which is more often than not devised to support growth. Capital accumulation of the powerful very often operates under the guise of representing the people.

What About Architecture?

The grandfather of urban sociology Henri Lefebvre’s recognition that “…new social relationships call for a new space, and vice-versa.”3 concisely underscores the importance of architecture in imagining and articulating change. Urban Theory, Analysis and Strategy both celebrates and questions the role of our urban environment in society, and ultimately in contributing to various forms of social change. Yet the place of architecture in mechanisms for social critique has long been sidelined. In his book The Efficacy of Architecture, Tahl Kaminer observes that the discipline has for decades “marinated in formal and phenomenological explorations . . . while the social and political project of the modernist avant-garde [has] receded from view.”4 Through engaging theoretical discourse and researching the problems of diverse and variegated urban situations, the module will seek to imagine a reclamation of efficacy, understanding architecture and the built environment as spaces for social relations, and the act of designing within these spaces as always holding potential for the reinforcement, adaptation improvement or change of these social relations. As Lefebvre remins us, space is “socially produced.”

The Fields and Fieldwork

While Year 4’s physical operational territories can be defined as urban “fields,” the year will begin by building an understanding of the ideas of important urban thinkers and their related urban theories. These will most likely transcend the physical territories under investigation and will help you to critically analyse them and eventually hypothesise on what their futures might be. This will be carried out through focus on a particular area of research. As such, fields can be considered as physical territories, but can also simultaneously be conceptualised as the scope of your research on those territories. Through this process, we would like you to think deeply about the field of the city. You should not simply operate within it, but should think about what it is, what is has been and, crucially, what it might be. We will build on the understanding of cities as totalities, as places of plurality, and as places of everyday situations, subversions, rituals and representations. Crucially, we will build on the idea that any urban design imperative is inescapably concomitant with the politico-economic and social fields that form part of it. In your investigation of urban theory, you will almost certainly be drawing on ideas from outside the discipline of architecture. As Lefebvre notes:

Inasmuch as they deal with socially ‘real’ space, one might suppose on first consideration that architecture and texts relating to architecture would be a better choice than literary texts proper. Unfortunately, any definition of architecture itself requires a prior analysis and exposition of the concept of space.1

You will look intently at an urban environment, considering its spaces and built forms not in isolation, but as a multiplicity that, along with political, economic and ecological issues, constitutes the totality of a social field. You will scrutinise these fields, understanding how they operate and how they are organised. You will expose and confront paradoxes, prejudices, inequalities and other issues that lie within them, asking important societal questions that can become hypothesised, tested, and eventually instantiated as new strategic spatial propositions. You will discover how critical questions in these areas can be formative in design, helping you construct project narratives, articulate design arguments and meaningfully situate your projects in a future we do not yet know.

Field work: This page: Meeting and interviewing locals on a field survey. Shanghai, 2019.

Oppopsite page: Street life in Shanghai’s old town - the fish seller, the general store and the allyway ironer. A marble-lined subterranean shopping street and a food hall in Hong Kong.

Nathaniel Coleman, in his writing on what Lefebvre called “the problematic of architecture”, observes that there is a great benefit for architecture in “enlisting the assistance of thinkers from beyond the discipline, who are unencumbered by its professional habits, and who can thus begin imagining otherwise unthinkable alternatives.”2 These unthinkable alternatives? Are they utopias? Probably! Certainly they are ideas that are only able to be sketched out as an imaginary via the spatial skills of the architect. Your hypotheses will be tested through developing urban strategies invested in the totality of your imaginary. Lefebvre does not hold back on his views toward architects who choose not to exercise their critical capacity in the city: “Who is not a utopian today? Only narrowly specialized practitioners working to order without the slightest critical examination of stipulated norms and constraints, only those not very interesting people escape utopianism.”3

Finally, in architecture schools the question of “real-worldliness” often rears its head in various ways. As a student of architecture, you are in a real world – your world is one of imagination, of pushing boundaries of knowledge, of contributing to intellectual discourse. You are now in a position to make a difference. Perhaps there is a moral imperative to think alternately in an age where the all too familiar social injustices, economic distortions and environmental damages afflicting our planet are now joined by global pandemics. This module attempts to stimulate you to develop the tools to face the need for radical future change – to not fiddle while Rome burns. The final words go to urban theorist Neil Brenner:

Young architects need to realise that this is a profession that has long contained untapped potential to promote radical forms of social change. Surely architects and designers can and must contribute to envisioning a very different form of the built environment, at every spatial scale, based on social needs, democratic empowerment and social justice rather than the unfettered rule of the commodity form.”4

Notes:

1 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), 15.

2 Nathaniel Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects, Routledge, Abingdon, 2015), 5.

3 Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, in Writings on Cities: Henri Lefebvre, eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 151.

4 Neil Brenner, “Designing out of the Crisis”, Fulcrum Issue 65, 2013: Neoliberalisation, London, Bedford Press (2013).

UNDENIABLE ARCHITECTURAL IDEOLOGY PROPELLING TO THE CITY AND PRODUCTION AND

Manfredo Tafuri

CONTENT AND TASKS

Content Overview

A key part of the study of cities is the understanding of the theories that seek to explain their phenomena. This module explores the ideas of important urban thinkers and their related theories to uncover a range of possibilities for the analysis of urban issues. The emphasis is on both the analytical power of these theories and their policy, planning and architectural implications. The module also examines the institutional structures and practices used in planning and managing cities and how these impact on urban areas. Students study a body of therotical work, bringing it to bear on their analysis of an existing city enclave, considered within its wider context (physical, historical, social, economic, political). This work informs strategic proposals considered at the urban scale.

Tasks

Any form of urban “plan” – whether projective, reformist or purely critical – is not an act of conjuring. Students should become versed in the multifarious theorisations that attempt to explain the social complexity of cities. Tutors will present a range of urban fields within which students can operate for the semester. The fields will hold potentials for investigation of specific strands of theory, which will be outlined in a presentation. Students will visit the field and immerse themselvesin it for a short period of time.

Theory stage

In advance of the visits, a set of theoretical ideas relating to “the modern city” will be discussed over an intense ”urban theory day” at the beginning of the semester. A selection of these theoretical ideas will form the basis of students’ initial research, which, in groups, will be fleshed out in detail and eventually brought to bear on the urban field. You will supplement the theoretical research with empirical research into such phenomena as use-patterns, temporal cycles, daily life . . .

Analysis Stage

In groups, students will be expected to collate a comprehensive set of survey information, which they will use in tandem with theoretical and empirical research to present a thorough analytical account of a specifically nuanced aspect of their urban field. Students should have a clearly defined territory that allows them to pull apart and reveal the social phenomena lying behind it. [50% of grade]

Strategy Stage

Studnts will stategise a trajectory for their field, based on projection, reform or critique of the processes and systems lying behind the social and physical morphology they have uncovered. [50% of grade]

Field trip, London 2019.

AIMS, OUTCOMES, ASSESSMENT

Aims

- To introduce students to urban theories, their relationship to and potential application in the development of urban strategy.

- Developing understanding of the historical, political social economic and physical context of the city, the relationships between people and buildings, buildings and the environment.

- To develop students critical understanding of the structure purpose and role of planning in the development process.

- To facilitate and encourage skills in development and communication of creative strategies for urban design, how to identify key problems/issues and propose responses which address the city context at macro, intermediate and detail scales.

Learning Outcomes

Through an exhibition and printed books students will demonstrate:

- A knowledge and critical understanding of urban theory and its relationship to contemporary urban design, planning and management.

- An understanding of the impact of historical development, the physical, economic, social, political and cultural context on the shape of the contemporary city.

- An understanding of planning and development management structures and legislation, and the relevance of these to urban development.

- An ability to develop and communicate appropriate strategic responses to the problems of city enclaves and urban spaces: emphasising the relationship between people and place, and between buildings and the wider environment.

Assessment

- Assessment type: 100% coursework.

- Students must submit and attend all events and assessments to pass the module.

- All components and outcomes must be passed in order to pass the module.

Work will be assessed as follows:

- 50% on the studio-wide work completed at the end of the analysis stage, assessed through the exhibition. and book(s).

- 50% on the sub-group work completed at the end of the strategy stage, assessed through the exhibition and book(s). The ability to use both media effectively will be part of the assessment.

The exhibition, whether digital or physical, will contain studio-wide work and sub-group work. Both should be clearly identifiable and the exhibition should be curated to show the relationship between research, analysis and strategy.

Any work iterations, process work or other work not included in the exhibition or book(s) must be kept and be made available for assessment.

Students working on a transect model, 2019.

The transect plan, 2019.

Assessment Criteria

Learning outcomes: 1. A knowledge and critical understanding of urban theory and its relationship to contemporary urban design, planning and management. 2. An understanding of the impact of historical development, the physical, economic, social, political and cultural context on the shape of the contemporary city.

3. An understanding of planning and development management structures and legislation, and the relevance of these to urban development. 4. An ability to develop and communicate appropriate strategic responses to the problems of city enclaves and urban spaces: emphasising the relationship between people and place, and between buildings and the wider environment .

Strategy (ILO4)

Does the student construct an intellectually rigorous, properly referenced urban hypothesis, projection or set of urban priorities from theoretical and empirical analysis ? -

-

Do they develop a clear propositional strategy that is able to test the hypothesis or respond to the projection or urban priorities ? -

Do they use well edited and skilfully executed graphical, textual and artefactorientated communication to clearly and effectively explain the strategy, its various iterations and the work that informs it ?

The work demonstrates a highly original strategic proposition at the urban scale which is built from a rigorous synthesis of theoretical and empirical work intelligently brought to bear on an urban field. The strategy is fully emergent from the research that precedes it and evidences excellent critical analysis, reflection , and an iterative app roach to design. It clearly tests a hypothesis or demonstrates a projection or set of urban priorities and is extremely skilful in how it communicates a comprehensive body of work.

The work demonstrates an original strategic proposition at the urban scale which is built from a rigorous synthesis of theoretical and empirical work intelligently brought to bear on an urban field. It may fall back on predetermined approaches in some area

Planning ( ILO3) -

How clear is the student’s understand ing of planning policies, development management structures and and legislation that relate to their specific urban fields? -

Have they reflected intelligently on whether their work serves at critique or affirmation of these ? -

Do they clearly and effectively articulate and graphically communicate the findings from this work ?

T he work demonstrates a n extremely thorough understanding and application of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field, or f rom a n analytical base, t he work makes an extremely thorough and intellectually rigorous critique of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field .

The work demonstrates a very good understanding and application of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field, or f

analytical base, t he work makes

Context s (ILO2) -

How well does the student understand the diverse and variegated contexts that affect a specific urban field ? -

How effectively do they carry out empirical research on a specific urban field, both through remote means and direct data gathering from fieldwork? -

Does the work as presented synthesi se theory with empirical research and analysis, including from fieldwork ? -

How clearly and effectively articulate d and graphically communicate d are t he findings from this work ?

Extremely thorough, rigorous empirical research into an urban field and an excellent understanding of its contexts. The work is extremely well nuanced, fully synthesised with theoretical ideas and communicated with exceptional clarity and effectiv eness.

T horough and rigorous empirical research into an urban field and a very good understanding of its contexts . The work is well nuanced and synthesised with theoretical ideas, but there may some lack of resonance in areas. The work is

clearly and

Theory (ILO1)

How well does the student source, analyse and present recognised published urban theory ? -

-

How effectively are theoretical ideas brought to bear on a specific urban field and used to inform design ? -

How clearly and effectively articulate d and communicate d (graphically and textually) are both the body of theoretical work and its impact on the urban field ?

Relevant and recognised published t heory has been very well understood and has been intelligently brought to bear on the urban field, setting up a framework for a highly original and challenging design hypothesis, projection or set of urban priorities. The findings have been presented with exceptional clarity and graphical skill.

A

Relevant and recognised published theory has been very well understood and has been intelligently brought to bear on the urban field. It sets up a framework for design which, while not necessarily highly original, has very good elements of critical reflection. The

B

predetermined approaches in some area s, but evidences very good critical analysis, reflection , and an iterative approach to design. It clearly tests a hypothesis or demonstrates a projection or set of urban priorities and is very skilful in how it communicates a comprehensive body of work.

f rom a n analytical base, t he work makes a thorough and intellectually appropriate critique of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field .

in areas. The work is very clearly and effectively communicated.

good elements of critical reflection. The findings have been presented with very good clarity and graphical skill.

The work demonstrates a good, but not always rigorous, understanding and application of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field, or f rom a n analytical base, t he work makes a good attempt at a critique the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field, but may fail to fully grasp their deficiencies and/or longterm effects

There is a good attempt at relevant research into an urban field and a good understanding of its contexts . The work is nuanced an has some synthesis with theoretical ideas, but there is a clear lack of resonance in areas. The work is clearly and effectively commun icated.

Relevant and recognised published theory has been fairly well understood, although there may be some misinterpretations. The theory has been brought to bear on the urban field with good, clear and recognisable intent for design, which may be falling ba ck on pre determined ideas. It sets up a framework for design which has some good elements of critical reflection. The findings have been presented with good clarity and graphical skill.

C

The work demonstrates a clear strategic proposition at the urban scale which is built from a synthesis of theoretical and empirical work intelligently brought to bear on an urban field. It fall s back on predetermined approaches, but evidences some good critical analysis, reflection , a nd an iterative approach to design. There is evidence that it tests a hypothesis or demonstrates a projection or set of urban priorities and is skilful in how it communicates a comprehensive body of work. D

The work demonstrates a strategic proposition at the urban scale . It may lack clarity, but there is evidence that it is built from a synthesis of theoretical and empirical work brought to bear on an urban field. It fall s back on predetermined approaches, but still evidences adequate critical analysis, reflection , and a n iterative approach to design. There is evidence that it tests a hypothesis or demonstrates a projection or set of urban priorities and is adequate in how it communicates a comprehensive body of work.

The work demonstrates a satisfactory, but not rigorous understanding and application of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field, or f rom a n analytical base, t he work makes a satisfactory attempt at a critique of urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field , but fails to fully grasp their deficiencies and/or longterm effects

There is an adequate attempt at relevant research into an urban field . There is a n understanding of some of its contexts , but more depth and breadth are necessary The work has little nuance and attempt s synthesis with theoretical ideas, but there is a clear lack of resonance in many areas. The work is adequately communicated but may lack some clarity and effectiveness.

Relevant and recognised published theory has been understood adequately , although not in great depth. The theory has been brought to bear on the urban field with some recognisable intent for design, which may be falling back on pre determined ideas. It sets up a framework for design which has some go od elements of critical reflection. The findings have been presented with some clarity and graphical skill.

The work demonstrates a strategic proposition at the urban scale, but it fails to evidence any reliance on theoretic al and empirical work that prece de s it. There is little or no evidence that is tests any hypothesis or demonstrates a projection or set of urban priorities. It fails to adequately communicate a comprehensive body of work.

The work does not demonstrate enough understanding and application of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field, or t he work may attempt critique of urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field , but fails to do this from an appropriate analytical base

The work may carry out some empirical research into an urban fi eld, but it does it with little or no understanding of the contexts involved.

MF There may be a limited understanding of relevant and recognised published urban theory, but it has not been brought to bear on the urban field in a way that offers critical design potentials.

The work fails to demonstrate a n urbanscale strategic proposition that can test any hypothesis or demonstrate a projection or set of urb an priorities. It fails to communicate a comprehensive body of work.

The work fails to either demonstrate understanding and application of the urban policy, planning and management structures that relate to its urban field or to make an appropriate critique of them.

The work fails to carry out any appropriate empirical research into an urban field and demonstrates no understanding of the contexts involved.

CF There is no evident understanding of relevant and recognised publi shed urban theory.

The Leaning Outcomes:

A knowledge and critical understanding of urban theory and its relationship to contemporary urban design, planning and management.

SUMMATIVE

Assessed through: Overall assessment of work submitted:

Unsatisfactory Satisfactory

STUDIO-WIDE WORK (Exhibition and book(s))

An understanding of the impact of historical development, the physical, economic, social, political and cultural context on the shape of the contemporary city.

STUDIO-WIDE WORK (Exhibition and book(s))

STUDIO-WIDE WORK (Exhibition and book(s))

An understanding of planning and development management structures and legislation, and the relevance of these to urban development.

An ability to develop and communicate appropriate strategic responses to the problems of city enclaves and urban spaces: emphasising the relationship between people and place, and between buildings and the wider environment.

Your communication – generative and representative. [Embedded in all LOs]. This is assessed against a demonstration of the quality and effectiveness of editing and executing graphical, textual and artefact-orientated communication and the ability to effectively edit and curate the work into an exhibition and document(s) with sophisticated understanding and exploitation of both media.

SUB-GROUP WORK (Exhibition and book(s)) Inc. how well the theory and analysis is assimilated into the strategy, reflected on and expanded upon

STUDIO-WIDE WORK (Exhibition and book(s))

SUB-GROUP WORK (Exhibition and book(s))

SUMMATIVE FEEDBACK

submitted: Comments on each learning outcome:

Satisfactory Good Very Good Excellent

FINAL STUDIO GRADE (50%)

FINAL SUB-GROUP GRADE (50%)

IN SPITE OF ITS EARLY ITS FREQUENT BRAVERY, URBANISM HAS TO INVENT AND

EARLY PROMISE, BRAVERY, BEEN UNABLE AND IMPLEMENT AT DEMANDED BY ITS DEMOGRAPHICS.

Rem Koolhaas

PAST WORK

Cube: The Paradox of the Specious City, Shanghai, 2018/19. Guo Changda, Wang Lei, Wu Qiaoyi, Cheng Shuo, Jinghui Chen, Chao Wei.

Heygate Estate Tenants Postcode Displacement Map

This map showing where former Heygate tenants have been displaced to truly shows how destructive gentrification is to permanent communities. The forced dispersal of former residents to make way for private development in Elephant and Castle has completely disregarded the Heygate and its community where Southwark Council only view the estate as an opportunity for profit.

Hattie Smith Kirsty Elliot Priyanka Sharma

Khalil Atchia

The Super-Enclave and the Mirrored Hybrid, Shanghai, 2019/20.

Waheeda Hanaa Rasool

Veera Kivela

Public House | Private House:

Harriet Jamieson

Kieran Lindsay MacKenzie Thompson Nik Lagarias

From Politics to Section 106, London, 2021/22.

“ONLY APPROXIMATELY 1 PER CENT OF HOUSING STOCK WAS STATE-OWNED IN 1918: THERE WAS NO MEANINGFUL PUBLIC HOUSING SECTOR. BY THE TIME WORLD WAR II BEGAN MORE THAN 10 PER CENT OF HOUSEHOLDS WERE RENTING FROM THE STATE. THE KEY CONSIDERATION IS THAT IMPLEMENTING THIS MASSIVE SOCIAL HOUSING PROGRAMME REQUIRED NOT JUST FUNDING AND DETERMINATION, BUT ANOTHER ESSENTIAL ASSET: LAND. LOCAL AUTHORITIES HAD NEVER BEEN SIGNIFICANT URBAN LANDOWNERS. TO SECURE THE LAND ON WHICH TO BUILD, THEY PROCEEDED TO BUY IT, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT BY INVOKING POWERS OF COMPULSORY PURCHASE (EXPROPRIATION). SUCH POWERS HAD BEEN STRENGTHENED, AND EXTENDED TO SOCIAL WELFARE PURPOSES, THROUGH LATENINETEENTH-CENTURY LEGISLATION SUCH AS THE PUBLIC HEALTH ACT OF 1875 AND THE HOUSING OF THE WORKING CLASSES ACT OF 1885 (WHICH ENABLED LOCAL AUTHORITIES TO ACQUIRE LAND COMPULSORILY TO BUILD LODGING HOUSES); NEW LEGISLATION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FORTIFIED AND EXTENDED THESE POWERS STILL FURTHER.”

KEYNESIAN CITY OF LONDON

“SINCE MARGARET THATCHER ENTERED DOWNING STREET IN 1979, AND CONTINUING ALL THE WAY TO THE PRESENT DAY, THE STATE HAS BEEN SELLING PUBLIC LAND TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR. IT HAS SOLD VAST QUANTITIES - SOME 2 MILLION HECTARES, OR ABOUT 10 PER CENT OF THE ENTIRE BRITISH LAND MASS. SOME OF THIS LAND, TO BE SURE, HAS DISAPPEARED WITH BRITAIN’S COUNCIL HOUSING: MUCH OF THE VALUE OF THE HOUSING THAT HAS BEEN SOLD, IS IN FACT THE VALUE OF THE LAND ON WHICH THAT HOUSING SITS. BUT HOUSING LAND ACCOUNTS FOR ONLY A SMALL PROPORTION OF THE OVERALL LAND MASS THAT HAS BEEN PRIVATIZED.”

NEOLIBERAL CITY OF LONDON

The Keynesian map represents a shift from Laissez-faire policy towards the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes; the central tenet of this idealogy being that public spending and government intervention would stabilise the economy. Bolstered by the tabula rasa that the Second World War offered, large swathes of the city turned almost entirely public, with a series of mass housing projects allowing for portions of previously private land to allow collective activity. Whilst these activities were previously restricted to the public streets between the private realm, the collective housing of the Keynesian era allowed action to form on this newly public land.

PUBLIC PRIVATE

Central House | Peripheral House: The Myth of the Bucolic Suburb, London, 2021/22. Yavor Nedelchev, Fran De Inza, Steven Huo, Xin Shu.

SCENARIOS

FOR LONDON’S FUTURE URBAN DEVELOPMENT

SCENARIO 1 SCENARIO 2

SCENARIO 5 SCENARIO 6

PETER BARBER HYPOTHESIS

2.0 ?

HYPOTHESIS

BARBER

CONTROLLED GROWTH

London continues to grow at the same rate, but the teritory of the city does not expand resulting in a very overcrowded and congested living envinronment

UNCONTROLLED GROWTH

London continues to grow and consumes adjecent villages, green spaces and teritory. The urbanization of the city advances and London becomes a Mega City.

SCENARIO 3 SCENARIO 4

By densifying the edge of the Orbital Motorway, Peter Barber argues that this will cause the city to grow inwards and eventually in time balance the urban population and expansion.

An alternative to Barber’s proposal could be to open entrances through the density strip and to investigate densifying the north and south circular roads.

SCENARIO 7 SCENARIO 8

BIG DENSE FRAGMENTS

SMALL DENSE FRAGMENTS

?

MOVE TO THE SUBURBS

BACK TO THE CITY

Through advertisment and marketing, property developers manage to convince the population and manage to reverse aggregate out-migration patterns and rapidly gentrify the city.

Instead of densifying the edges, another argument could be that by placing density fragments around London, the same effect could be achievied without blocking of the city completely.

Historic Growth of the Borough of Lambeth

Historic Growth of the Borough of Southwark

The big density fragments would make an uneven distribution through the city, a better alternative would be to spread smaller fragments in London and still achiving the same effect.

1801: 34,135 1831: 102,524 1861: 204,252 1891: 332,619 1921: 388,779 1951: 321,795 1981: 244,153 2001: 266,170 2011: 303,086

Total Area: 57.97 sq mi (150.15 km2) Total Population: 332,336 Density: 5,700/sq mi (2,200/km2)

FIG.39 FIG.40 1888 1903 1951 1888 1903 1951 PERIPHERAL RECONSTRUCTION 65 PERIPHERAL RECONSTRUCTION 64

ITERATION 8 : A D A P T A T I O N A more clear demonstration of Mat-Building, creating a more diverse nature of spaces, establishing links between different areas, showing a more rhythmic distribution. It shows a balance between open and closed spaces without completely isolating the latter.

C R I T I Q U E

Perhaps its lack of a pattern and repetition would cause for some of the resulting volumes of this iteration to pose a difficult situation for the design of certain spaces, but slight changes could be applied in order to achieve specific results.

Photographs of Physical Model in Context

Plan 1:5000 3D Isometric Model in Context

ITERATION 7 : I N C R E A S E Similarly to the 6th iteration, we can see a more diverse distribution of the open spaces, especially on the edge of the mass, creating an interesting balance between the most public and the most private open spaces.

Photographs of Physical Model in Context

C R I T I Q U E Again, so many open spaces make it difficult for this iteration to satisfy the residential requirements, as well as its configuration would make it difficult for light to reach certain areas of the mass.

Plan 1:5000

Isometric Model in Context

Cube: The Paradox of the Specious City, Shanghai, 2018/19. Guo Changda, Wang Lei, Wu Qiaoyi, Cheng Shuo, Jinghui Chen, Chao Wei.

LECTURES

Lectures will commence at the start of the module with an intense Urban Theory Day. This day will involve an introduction to the module, a very quick synopsis of the lecture topics for the following weeks, and discussions with staff on their specific studio topics.

The lectures will take place on Friday afternoons with probably two or three topics fleshed out in more detail in each lecture. The lectures will use theory to explore the various topics and each will contain references to various theoretical strands. The lecture topics are as follows.

1. The Seduction of the city: the Epic of Gilgamesh to Roman Cement. A brief look at cities of the ancient and classical worlds; the origins of the city-state; the polis as the site of politics.

2. The Renaissance City and the Nascent World Economy. The return of the city as a centre of global power through mercantile capitalism.

3. Feudalism, The Inclosure Acts and the Dawn of the Capitalist City.

4. Romanticism: The Classical versus the Medieval.

5. Small and Big: Laissez- faire and the Victorian Mega-project.

6. Dispersal and Condensation: Ideological Proxies of the Twentieth Century.

7. Bretton Woods: Planning Internationalism.

8. Peak Oil and the Crisis of the City: Urban Exodus and Indeterminacy.

9. The Eclectic Project: Unplanning Internationalism.

10. The Populism Project: Unplanning Everything.

11. The Critical Project: Superstudio, Archizoom and the Radicals.

12. The Autonomy Project: Aldo Rossi, Heteronomy and Autonomy.

13. The Nostalgia Project: Jane Jacobs, Disney and New Urbanism.

14. Urbanising Hegemony: The Massive (re)Growth of the Urban: Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre and Neoliberal Development.

15. Planetary Urbanisation: Stephen Cairns, Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid and the Scale Question.

TIMETABLE

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.

DUNDEE

Introductory Note

It strikes me that the Sino-European collaboration that exists in year 4 might be considerd both in urban terms and as a project in itself. It prompted me to write a short essay.

It is widely recognised that “the urban” is now the dominant form of human habitat. The statistics and predictions are familiar: 55% of us currently live in areas defined as “cities” and this is predicted to rise to 68% by 2050.1 Megacities (greater than 10 million) have increased from ten in 1990 to thirty-three today, and the number is predicted to rise to forty-three by 2030. In studying Shanghai’s old town over several years, I was confronted with many of the internal problems of the fast-growing, super-dense city and its exponential rise as a field for capital investment. I also encountered the familiar global problems of social inequity, community displacement and various forms of gentrification.

In the essay below, I have attempted to outline the historical lineage that got the city to this point, with a particular focus on the influences of global exchange. In writing the piece, I have become acutely aware of my own bias toward urban issues of the West. I feel that this in itself highlights the importance and potential strength of such international collaboration, and hope that our own exchange might in a small way be part of this history, operating as a collaborative and far-reaching venture. I hope this venture might go beyond the import of foreign knowledge one way or the other, to form an academic programme with proper synthesis of perspective at its core – one where the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. As such, I hope that it can be viewed both as a work in progress and as an ongoing body of research in itself.

Thoughts on “The Urban.”

Two Thousand Years of Politics and Exchange: A Very Brief Historical Overview.

What of the origin of the city? According to the father-figure of western urban theory, Henri Lefebvre, “[a]ntiquity began with the city, while the Middle Ages (European, Western) began in the countryside.”2 The polis originated in the ancient Greek city-states, with Rome arguably representing the western apotheosis of city life. Rome’s expansive empire - which at its zenith (around 100 AD) stretched from Britain in the Northwest to Egypt in the Southeast – remained centred on city life and all the necessity for negotiation that its propinquity brings about. Lefebvre reminds us that, etymologically, the polis is quite literally the field of politics - “Urban existence is conflated with political existence, as the word indicates.”3 To use the terminology of another key western urban thinker, Hannah Arendt, the ancient city’s public spaces were quite literally the manifestation of its citizens’ “actions.”4 As the Roman Empire grew in the west, the great empire of the Han dynasty was yielding an equivalent power in China. Too far apart physically to engage directly (or fight as may have been the case), these great empires were connected by trade, transferring products like Roman glassware and rugs to the east and Chinese silks to the west.5 Without detailed knowledge, I have a sense that the same conflation of politics with the city that so defined Athens and Rome can equally be applied to the great cities of early Chinese dynasties – from the enormous importance of Chang’an to the Han Dynasty, not least in education and literature, right up to Kaifeng, as the Song Dynasty capital with its staggering claim to social, scientific and technical innovation.

A Mini-Essay: Andy Stoane.

Chinese Song Dynasty Kaifeng and Roman Timgad.

“The town concentrates not only the populace but the instruments of production, capital, needs, pleasures. That is why the advent of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of administration, police, taxes etc., in short, of the municipality . . . , and thus of politics in general.”6

In the West, the city as a political entity lost its dominance through the feudalism of the Middle Ages, as land-holding and serfdom shifted economic priorities to the country. Lefebvre notes that “[f]eudal property is the result of a two-stage process: the breakdown of the Roman Empire . . . and the arrival of the barbarians.”7 After a thousand years, that power was gradually reclaimed through the emergence of the agrarian capitalism and international mercantilism of the Renaissance. In his book Local and Global, sociologist (and Lefebvre’s doctoral student) Manuel Castells talks of the “global” and the “local” complementing each other “at the beginnings of the world economy in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, a time when the city-states became centres for innovation and commerce on a worldwide scale.”8 This early world economy elevated the dual importance of European and Chinese cities as strategic sea ports, with Shanghai, for example, reaching its golden age in the nineteenth century, where the significance of the Yangtze river to trade pushed the city to new levels of growth, international significance and exotic exchange of international cultures. One only has to look at the famous Bund and the architecture of the city’s “international concessions” to see evidence of this. In this rapidly developing “industrial age,” industry was replacing agriculture economically, stripping the great feudal landowners of their grip on power. The new economic mode, and its politico-economic transformations, played out in new urban fields, operating on larger scales than ever before, and charged with new intensities. As Lefebvre observes:

“Isn’t it obvious that the town is simultaneously the place, the instrument, the dramatic theatre of this gigantic metamorphosis?”9

Such “dramatic theatre” brought massive urban population growth. London’s population, for example, rose from one million in 1800 to almost seven million in 1900. Yet, if the post-feudal industrial age brought us back a city-centric imperative, Georg Simmel, in his 1903 classic text The Metropolis and Mental Life, observes that the city, far from bringing its population together, brings an impersonality and an objective existence, devoid of emotional attachment. Arendt similarly argues that the staggering and exponential growth of cities in the late-modern age, far from bringing back the forms of collective life and the “action” of the Greek Polis, quite conversely, succeeded in destroying imperatives of collectivity. She discusses the paradox of “mass society’s” increasing introspection, brought about by late-capitalism and its prioritisation of the individual over the collective. This, she tells us, destroys the “space of appearance”, and thus destroys the city as a political entity. I was reminded of this continually in Shanghai when observing the remarkable collectivity in operation within the enclaves of the Old Town – where the fabric operates almost as one large house, with the street its collective living space, and with tasks like ironing, household maintenance and shopping shared as part of an informal internalised market. It felt like the micro-politics of urban life in these enclaves were still quite literally being acted out in the streets, despite the macro-scale politics operating at the larger scale threatening their very existence.

The interchangeable architecture of esat and west. Nineteenthcentury Shanghai and Edinburgh.

As Arendt puts it, “[w]hat makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, . . . but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together.”10

In the twentieth century, the enormous growth of society and its unsettling relationship with existing urban fabric brought widespread call for large-scale urban renewal - for the replacement of problematic, insanitary and over-crowded cities with new formations informed by modern-era progress in areas such as mechanical transportation, new standards of housing, new forms of business operation, new formations of public activity, and of course new building technologies. In this era of widespread social, political and cultural change, the modernist avant-garde saw architecture and urban design as instruments for social reform. Le Corbusier’s continual attempt to define a new city - from the generic Ville Contemporaine (1922) to Plan Voisin for Paris (1925) to Ville Radieuse (1930) to Chandigarh, the realised capital of the Punjab (1950-60) - all represent the most ambitious attempts to find a new sociallyreforming urbanism for this new age.

Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Reformist urban planning at its most powerful.

But it was in the post-WWII decades (1945-1975) where these social ambitions were really instantiated on a large scale. In what was arguably the last great “social age” for architecture, the western world had in the main adopted Keynesian economic principles, which manifested in Britain as what came to be known as “the welfare state,” or the “social state.” Crucially, the idea of “welfare” back then was very different to the idea of neoliberalised welfare we are familiar with today. Welfare was part of an understanding of the collective role of society, orchestrated through the apparatus of the state. Historian, Mark Swenarton, in his excellent book about the prolific publicly funded housing innovations in London of this period, Cook’s Camden, reminds us of French economist Jean Fourastié’s term for those three decades - the “Trente glorieuses (‘glorious 30’) - in which social goals had (apparently) been the drivers of public policy.”11 Through citing the sociologist Kevin Farnsworth, Swenarton goes on, however, to point out that “[t]he aim of the welfare state . . . was not social welfare per se but social welfare as part of the maintenance of existing economic relations, particularly those between capital and labour.”12 This Keynesian idea of publicly funded housing projects as part of government fiscal spending programmes had a profound effect on the city, with the appearance of large-scale housing estates in the urban landscape, like the work of Neave Brown with Camden Council, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s hybridised Barbican complex developed for The Corporation of The City of London, or Erno Goldfinger’s public housing estates. Freed from the restraints of market risk-aversion, the opportunity existed, albeit for a short period, for architects “. . . through their inventiveness and creativity . . . [to make] a fundamental difference to the form of housing and thereby to the lives of the mass of the population.”13

Architecture’s “social mission” was short-lived. In the last quarter of the twentieth-century, while China still retained the last phase of its Soviet-style planned economy - itself the result of global exchange and political re-calibration after WWII - a very different priority was gaining traction in the west. The shift from industrial economy to service economy - with Britain moving dramatically to the right through the “neo-liberal counter-revolution led by Margaret Thatcher” as Swenarton puts it – caused architecture to abandon its social-political mission in favour of market conciliation. With this shift, came the rejection of any attempt to bring about a new modus-operandi for the modern city. The postmodern wilderness, left after the abandonment of modernism’s mission, prompted a “multiplicity of issues vying for attention,” as Kate Nesbitt describes it in her anthology of architectural theory.15 It was the age of “the manifesto” for architecture and the city, with everyone, it seemed, exporting ideas globally through publication. In the 1970s, architects such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter developed ideas on the city which lamented eclecticism, criticising the imperative for widespread renewal and “total-design” in modernist city planning. “. . . I am for messy vitality over obvious unity . . . “ stated Venturi in the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966).16 In 1972 Venturi and Scott-Brown, along with their students from Yale, carried out their now famous survey of Las Vegas, from which they forged a thesis that celebrated the ugly, the ordinary and the everyday over what they considered to be the needlessly heroic and monumental priorities of the modernist city. A few years later, Rowe and Koetter published their ideas of “bricolage,” borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological work, in their book Collage City (1978). Stated as “a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design”, they rejected practices of “total-design,” which they considered to be the “psychological substratum of urban theory and its practical application,” instead promoting a celebration of the city’s eclecticism involving the co-existence of fragments from the past, present, and future.17 But in these days of prioritisation of ‘individual over collective’, the rejection of “total-design,” drew most accord, not with architectural manifestos or even the street-level activism of the likes of Jane Jacobs and her followers in America, but with the forces of capitalism itself. These figures simply set the scene for the market dominance and the selling-off of the city in individual “development lots” which was to dominate the city from that moment onward.

By the late 1980s, the reaction against modernism had polarised into two distinct, and ostensibly oppositional forms, ontologically connected through a new-found “positivism” or “anti-critical” world view. First, “populism,” spearheaded by the work of Luxembourgish architects and theorists Leon and Rob Krier, and second, “engagement,” led, with a mixture of intellect and irony, by the work of Rem Koolhaas and his office, OMA. The Kriers aligned themselves with the growing “New Urbanist” and

Different forms of city in the architecture of the Keynesian social-state: Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower and Brownfield Estate, East London; and Neave Brown’s Dumboyne Estate, Gospel Oak, London.

conservationist movements, eventually planning Prince Charles’ town at Poundbury in southern England , “built on the principles of architecture and urban planning as advocated by The Prince of Wales in [his book] ‘A Vision of Britain’.”18 One might consider schemes like Thamestown, Shanghai’s British-themed suburb, built on simulation and curiosity, to be a distant variant of this mode of thinking – and another, perhaps Baudrillardian, form of global exchange.

Koolhaas, on the other hand, perhaps the most intellectually vociferous architect of the neoliberal age, began to strategise on new, more metropolitan, formations for a non-critical future for architecture and the city. China held a particular fascination for him, embracing its necessity and zeal for rapid growth and unfettered modernisation. In her essay “The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas,” Ellen Dunham-Jones tells us that Koolhaas’ “essays and projects of the ‘90s smoothed the way for the parade of ‘starchitecture’ object-buildings that followed” and “encouraged his followers to shed the crippling shackles of critical theory and pick up a surfboard upon which to ride the shockwaves of the new economy.”19 In his 1987 competition entry for the new town of Melun-Senart in France, Koolhaas embraces the “average-contemporary-everyday ugliness of current European-American-Japanese architecture”, seeing his job not as the creation of the substance of the city but as the protection of special zones from that substance – he does this via a series of carefully organised voids from which the “merde”, as he calls it, is banished.20 He is ingeniously able to embrace the un-critical without actually doing it. With this came a relinquishing of the architect’s urban role to one of protection or specialism. The “ordinary” was left to the market. Reflecting on these turbulent few decades for architecture at the end of the twentieth century, the fascinating paradox I observed on my various trips to China is that Chinese cities contains very “ordinary,” ubiquitous housing architecture from this period. It is all constructed by the state. Most of the “exemplars” are private. Yet, in Britain, the reverse is true. The market prevailed everywhere in this age with its bottom-line architecture. This architecture is ordinary and ubiquitous. In Britain, the exemplars were constructed by the state. This century, urbanisation has exploded. With the exponential rapid rise of the global economy, China has found itself at the forefront, and the impact on “the urban” has been dramatic - Shenzhen, for example, has grown from a small town of thirty thousand to a global city of thirteen million in only thirty years. Western architects operating at the larger end of practice have become part of its fabric in yet another form of exchange, but this time instead of importing western styles as in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the pendulum of power swung to the east China pushed these architects to create new formal spectacle to represent and express globally its meteoric economic rise. The global presence of the new super-scale of city has brought urban theorists such as Neil Smith, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid to research the

The British-themed Shanghai suburb of Thamestown.

sociospatial ramifications of such accelerating globalisation and the now accepted metanarrative of “city as machine for economic growth.” Such research has revealed, perhaps counter-intuitively, that globalisation and its associated cultural imperialism have far from homogenised “the landscapes of everyday life around the world.”21 Brenner states that “[m]ost critical geographers have stridently rejected such claims, arguing that late modern capitalism has in fact been premised upon an intensification of differences among places, regions, and territories, even as the mobility of capital, commodities, and populations is enhanced.”22 These global differences - “uneven spatial developments” as they are often referred to - are supported by the tendency toward “localism” in urban research earlier this century, with terms such as “place-making” finding their way into managerialist practices of urbandesign, instrumentalised into the priorities of the market. Such a focus assumes a certain naturalisation of the local scale. Much contemporary thought, however, now sees this as a retreat - a further relinquishing of any critical position, ignoring as it does the importance (and history) of multi-scalar and supraurban processes in not only supporting cities, but in realising their potential for social transformation.

What lies beyond urban “development” – the subsummation of power, quite literally planted in our social field as individual “commodity-form” buildings? As author Nathanial Coleman, in his writings on Lefebvre, puts it, while this practice seems to “liberate each individual work of architecture and its architect to the significant pleasures of his or her own apparent creativity, . . . [it] barely veils the complicity of such buildings in the fragmentation of the urban environment, including widespread disregard for the everyday life encroached upon and threatened with dissolution.“23 This is a fragmentation concomitant with the ongoing, and seemingly unstoppable, atomisation of society. It has brought about a resurgence of interest in the Lefebvrian idea of urbanisation as a planetary phenomenon, where boundaries are arbitrary; where the “urban” is more of a theoretical category than an empirical object; and where the urban is a condition with no “outside.” After all, the objective for unconditional liberalisation, and the atomisation of society that comes with it, will likely leave the city as an a-political and uncollaborative field. Accordingly, any resistance must surely have equal scope and scale to the forces of the market.

Space crumbles, is exchanged (sold) in bits and pieces, investigated piecemeal by the fragmented sciences, whereas it is formed as a worldwide and, even, interplanetary totality.”24

Differentiated towers jostle for attention in neoliberal London.

The city has had a turbulent two millennia, its importance ebbing and flowing according to shifting economic and political imperatives. Today the city - “the urban” as we now know it - is once again a global condition. It is more so than ever international in scope. But this time around, it is less of a site for international exchange of ideas, cultures and styles, and more a repository for the parking of international capital. As economies of east and west become increasingly interdependent, it is hoped that the research focus of this particular programme will allow not only its theoretical questions to deepen and broaden, addressing discovered prejudices, inequalities and inequities across the planet, but also will allow its physical fields to expand further, together making important and urgent contributions to new discourse, including, in particular, the expanding field of research into issues of the global south. We must also realise that the gravitation of the human population toward cities and all they have to offer is only half the story. What of the effect on the remainder of the planet – the residual (non-city) spaces now subsumed into the globally dominant condition of “urban” - the hinterlands, suburbs, industrial sites, airports . . . ? I hope that in future years our research can go deeper into this “urban” condition and can recognise that it extends far beyond the city itself. In a way, perhaps the SinoEuropean collaboration can serve as a model for a deeper form of exchange – one which can only grow in depth as it absorbs more energy.

1 Data from UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

2 Henri Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City, Minneapolis, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 2016), 29. Ibid., 37.

3 Ibid.

4 In The Human Condition, Arendt organises and articulates her well known triad of human activity, using the referent of the Greek city-state. “Action” relates to the public activities, including communication, collaboration and negotiation, which take place when we “appear” together in public. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958).

5 Timothy B. Leetim, 40 maps that explain the Roman Empire, in Vox.com, Aug 19, 2014, https://www.vox.com/world/2018/6/19/17469176/roman-empire-maps-history-explained

6 Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City, 37.

7 Ibid., 29.

8 Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells, Local & Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age, (London, Earthscan, 1997), 3.

9 Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City, 22.

10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52.

11 Marl Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, (London, Lund Humphries, 2017), 14.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 13.

14 Ibid., 14.

15 Kate Nesbitt, Theorizisng a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 16.

16 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 16.

17 Jacket description in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City. (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1978).

18 Duchy of Cornwall, Poundbury. https://poundbury.co.uk/

19 Ellen Dunham-Jones, “The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas,” Places Journal, (April 2013).

20 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, SMLXL, (Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995), 977.

21 Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2019), 256.

22 Ibid.

23 Nathaniel Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 57.

24 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 148.

SPACE IS SOCIAL MORPHOLOGY: EXPERIENCE WHAT ITSELF IS TO THE ORGANISM, AND

SOCIAL IT IS TO LIVED WHAT FORM THE LIVING AND JUST AS BOUND UP WITH AND STRUCTURE

Henri Lefebvre.

The following list is broad, diverse but non-exhaustive range of notable texts on urban theory. The texts include classics such as Lefebvre, contemporary discourse such as Brenner, and important specific categories too pervasive to ignore, such as gentrification, infrastructure and the housing crisis You should select a few to read by reading synopses and ascertaining relevance to your particular studio.

Studio-specific reading materials will be included in your studio briefs.

Classics

Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903, http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/ Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1984. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space.,Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Abingdon, Routledge, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002. Koolhaas, Rem., Mau, Bruce. S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995. Essays: “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture”; “Bigness, or the Problem of the Large”; “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?”. Project: “Surrender, Ville MelunSénart, France, 1987”.

Marcuse , Peter, Connolly, James, Novy, Johannes, and Olivo, Ingrid, Potter, Cuz, and Steil, Justin. (Eds.). Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011. Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City, London, Edward Arnold, 1973.

Useful Compendiums

Kofman, Eleonore, and Lebas, Elizabeth. (Eds.). Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996.

Deamer, Peggy. Architrecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, Routledge, Abingdon, 2014.

Brenner, Neil, Marcuse, Peter, Mayer, Margrit. (eds). Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011.

Leach, Neil. (ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Abingdon, Routledge, 1997. (particularly Jameson’s Is Space Political? and Leach’s Architecture or Revolution).

Specifics

Coleman, Nathaniel, Lefebvre for Architects, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Marcuse, Peter. Connolly, James. Novy, Johannes. Olivo, Ingrid. Potter, Cuz. Steil, Justin. Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011.

Castells, Manuel., Borja, Jordi. Local & Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age, London, Earthscan, 1997.

Brenner, Neil. New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, New York, OUP USA, 2019.

Kaminer, Tahl. The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017. Marcuse, Peter., Madden, David. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, London, Verso, 2016. Ryan-Collins, Josh, and Macfarlane, Laurie. Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, London, Zed, 2017. Hughes, Jonathan, and Sadler, Simon. (Eds.). Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, New York, Architectural Press, 1999.

Aureli, Pierre Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011. Desimini, Jill, and Waldheim, Charles. Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.

MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, Scaling Infrastructure, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. Larkin, Brian. 2013, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 42. Koolhaas, Rem., Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, Cologne, Taschen GmbH, 2011.

The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Zurich, Lars Müller, 2013. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1984.

Rowe, Colin, and Koetter, Fred. Collage City, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1978.

Analysis, Strategy, Manifesto

Bunschoten, Raoul, Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City, Rotterdam, 010 Uitgeverij, 2000.

Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1964.

Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise, and Izenour, Steven. Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, New York, Monacelli Press, 1994. Ungers, Oswald and Koolhaas, Rem. Hertweck, Florian., Marot, Sébastien (eds.) A Manifesto (1977) Berlin: The City in the City: A Green Archipelago. Lars Mullers Publishers, 2013.

STUDIOS & FIELDS

The following pages provide single-page descriptors of the urban fields and the topics you will explore within them. A detailed studio brief will be issued by your tutor at the start of the module.

The fields and their tutors are:

Studio A: London [Andy Stoane]

Studio B: Liverpool [Richard Dundas]

Studio C: Glasgow [Sandra Costa Santos]

Studio D: Cumbernauld [Penny Lewis]

Studio E: Edinburgh [Gary Cunningham]

Studio F: Orkney [Colin Ross]

C D E

STUDIO A: LONDON [Andy Stoane]

ESTATE

Collective Productions in the Age of the Individual.

Space is “socially produced” argued Henri Lefebvre. The key social field of our era, within which these productions currently precipitate, is the city.

When Manfredo Tafuri famously discussed the “social machine of the city,” he referred to the inability of modern architecture to escape the logics of industrial capitalism that had gradually subsumed sociourban processes since the eighteenth-century. Yet within twentieth-century modernism there existed a brief socially reformist mission, connected deeply to ideas of the Keynesian social state, where housing provision (and welfare generally) were part of an understanding of collective responsibility. It lasted only a few decades, before postmodernism, and its engagement with the unstoppable atomising forces of society, destroyed it forever, turning its central tropes toward the idea that vitality resided only in the individual. Tafuri observed how architecture of this era “renounces its propelling role in regard to the city and structures of production and hides behind a rediscovered disciplinary autonomy, or behind neurotic attitudes of self-destruction.” A set of “projects” ensued, naturalising individualism and entrenching it into values now so hegemonic that, to paraphrase Frederic Jameson. ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than any alternative.’ In this era, most of modernism’s socio-urban product has been able to be destroyed or captured and sold as commodity. Yet there remains one stubborn urban production that is continually problematic – the estate

A clear counter-proposition to the surrounding city, the estate is an enclave of collectivity – a register of a ‘people’ in an urban field of individuals; a non-propertarian logic in a world of ownership; a dinosaur of the social age. It entirely disrupts the socio-geographic stratification of wealth that defines the neoliberal city. The constant attempts to destroy, gentrify and/or socially cleanse it are difficult. People, after all, do still retain one or two “rights.”

We will go to London and visit numerous exemplars of this social form. Your operational field will be in East London, on a site adjacent to London City airport. We will propose morphological alternatives that lean on the estate and push against the market, with a view to challenging the housing inequalities sitting within the social injustices that so define London and that are spreading around world cities like a rhizome.

A few of the estates you will visit in London.

Theory (non-exhaustively)

Tafuri: The Social Machine of the City. Keynesianism and the Social State.

Postmodern tropes of individualism: Jacobs, Venturi, Rowe/Koetter, Newman/Coleman. De-industrialisation and the squadering of waterfronts. Processes of gentrification and socio-geographic disparity.

Brenner: City as Economic Growth machine.

Lefebvre: The Right to the City.

Lefebvre: The Production of Space.

Analysis

You will visit numerous London estates brought into being through the mechanics of the Keynesian social state and will consider the trajectory of housing in London since. You will analyse how the crisis of affordability in London’s housing has occured. You will examine and analyse case-studies of gentrification and social displacement. On a site adjacent to London City Airport, you will analyse and critique the objectives of redevelopment in its current form.

Strategy

You will make strategic propositions for the dock to the north of London City Airport, currently occupied by University of East London. The proposition will include a compact housing landscape with associated programmes. It will use (and add to) the existing infrastructures, including the road network, the Docklands Light Railway, London City Airport and the Thames Clippers. You will recognise the importance of key related morphological features such as The City of London, Canary Wharf, Thamesmead, Isle of Dogs, Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Crucially, your strategy will use intelligence gleaned from the studies of public architecture of the twentieth-century (the estates) to make suggestions for new social and spatial forms for the twenty-first century - forms resistant to current forces of “development” and prioritising ideas of publicness.

The operational field adjacent to London City Airport.

YEAR 4 2022/23 URBAN THEORY, ANALYSIS AND STRATEGY | STUDIO DESCRIPTOR

STUDIO B: LIVERPOOL [Richard Dundas]

UNIVERSE

The City as a Global Project

“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common.” Buckminster Fuller.

In architecture, the idea of the universal has always been a preoccupation, whether in line with Fuller’s use of the universal as a means of tackling problems on a global scale, or as a political provocation which used a universal future as a form of pollical critique (Archizoom’s No-Stop City), or the architecture of universal spatial frames (Yona Friedman’s Spatial City) into which individual choice and freedom is inserted, or Cedric Price’s ideas of embracing obsolescence. The studio will focus on the possibilities (or impossibilities) of creating a genuinely ‘universal’ urban project, free from restriction, inconvenience or limitations that may come from a range of building typologies. Can the city be truly without inconvenience?

The idea that the cities belong to ‘the people’ (or, at least, of exclusive benefit to the general public, their needs as well as their ownership) is being continually eroded through deindustrialisation, the rise of the finance economy, gentrification and other neoliberal processes. In Adrian Jones and Chris Matthews’ book ‘Towns in Britain’, Jones writes ‘[a]n ever-more-globalised world also means the power of cities, and of states, is hugely weakened’. More than ever, perhaps the built environment requires a re-evaluation towards bringing influence away from the few and handed over to the majority. It is now time for architecture to reconfigure the way in which we use places, prioritising spaces that are genuinely inclusive, allowing the individual to take control and push the possibilities in using ‘the universal’ for human progress and acceptance.

‘Liverpool is one of the wonders of Britain’ – Daniel Defoe, 1680 ‘[Liverpool is] all slums and docks, docks and slums’ – J.B Priestly, English Journey, 1934

Your attentions are to be focussed on Liverpool, in the north-west of England. Liverpool is a city experiencing a period of transition; with its recent loss of its UNESCO World Heritage status in 2021 and highly publicised rise in gun-crime, to its reputation as a cultural capital and tourist destination. The re-development of the city infrastructure through the completion of Liverpool One and Museum of Liverpool have solidified its status within the UK. Often funded through international capital investment, these are projects built on a particular brand of universality. Despite these current public success stories, the continued demise of the UK high street and the re-evaluation of what a city centre provides has created transitional areas, which we will identify as ‘un-sites’ to be defined and located.

Theory (non-exhaustively)

Post-industrial landscapes Marc Auge, ‘Non-places: An Anthropology of Supermoderninty’ Jordi Borja & Manuel Castells, ‘Local and Global: The Management of Cities in the Information Age’ Buckminster Fuller, ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’ Saskia Sassen, ‘The Global City’

Analysis

“We’re not English; we are Scouse” – Local phrase

You will explore Liverpool’s history as a ‘World City’ but also its present treatment as an unofficial independent state. This process will inevitably track the city’s cultural impact and its political outlook while arguing as to whether the physical urban context is an appropriate representation of these aspirations. Your research will document the development of the city’s key public and industrial infrastructure focussing primarily on the Liverpool Waterfront and other key landmarks and interventions across the city. The (former) UNESCO World Heritage Site will be discussed with a look at reviewing the potential sites of universality (past and present) with an eye towards future possibilities.

Strategy

‘Liverpool is the grandest of the Northern cities, but is also the most inscrutable and the most frustrating. Here the disparity between past glory and present reality, between its potential and the banality of the actual outcomes in the built environment, are at their most extreme. In many ways, Liverpool is less a Northern city than a World city’ – page 169, ‘Cities of the North’, Adrian Hones and Chris Matthews

You will make strategic proposals to re-establish Liverpool as a ‘World City’ through considered interventions within (and responding to) the internationally recognised waterfront. The city’s global reputation was built around mercantile trade, however you will consider what may support its new world status. As a studio, you will look to re-examine and re-configure a new kind of urban environment – a new idea for architecture’s universal engagement, beginning in Liverpool.

STUDIO C: GLASGOW [Sandra Costa Santos]

ENCLAVE

Contested Studentification in the Post-industrial City

Lefebvre’s reading of the city as a complex and social construction calls for urban design strategies that transcend physical space.

Urban regeneration of the post-industrial city is driven by intangible phenomena such as culture, thus transforming local universities into a resource to build a cultural economy. Glasgow, for example, sought to retain creative talent as an alternative to the job losses resulting from the industrial restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s. Housing developments in centrally located heritage buildings are seen as strategies of urban regeneration and can particularly appeal to HE students given their high cultural capital. However, urban regeneration also faces spatial challenges that originate in governance modelsthat direct individuals to work, live and consume under defined conditions within a secluded urban district defined by a recognizable perimeter: the enclave

The term studentification was first used to describe similar changes to gentrification resulting from the residential concentration of university students in an urban enclave. However, the volatility of student housing markets, the seasonality of student lifestyles, and the influence of the student population on the existing community give the student enclave a heterotopic quality: the student enclave is a real place but composed of several urban sites that are themselves incompatible.

We will interrogate Glasgow through the lens of studentification to consider urban strategies to mitigate challenges resulting from the volatility and seasonality of student housing and their influence on wider urban communities.

Theory (non-exhaustively)

Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City (1960)

Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (1974)

Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter: Collage City (1978)

David Shane: Recombinant Urbanism (2005)

Analysis

You will visit Yorkhill & Kelvingrove (Glasgow), where residents oppose to the transformation of the area into a student enclave and demand affordable co-housing for families and community facilities. You will use Shane’s ‘recombinant assemblage’ model to analyse the transformation of the area into a student enclave, by identifying armature(s), attractors, dominant typological patterns, boundaries and communicating ‘gates’.

Strategy

You will consider the contested balance between local and incoming student populations to make strategic propositions for Yorkhill & Kelvingrove including: student accommodation, affordable cohousing and a community centre with gym hall.

Limerick University student accommodation, Grafton Architects

STUDIO D: CUMBERNAULD [Penny Lewis]

AUTHORITY

The Legacy of Post-war Planning

This unit will explore the history of post-war planning in Scotland and the contemporary debate about the re-use and retention of modern buildings, modern civic centres and regional regeneration. Cumbernauld will be the focus of attention with a particular emphasis on the public and professional reactions to modernist planning and architecture (past and present).

Today in Scotland post-war planning ambitions and modern buildings are often derided or neglected, occasionally they provoke real hostility. The unit will attempt to make sense of both post-war planning and architecture in Scotland and the nature of the visceral reaction against this work. We will look at the Clyde Valley Plan drawn up by Robert Matthew and Patrick Abercrombie in the 1940s and the original plans for Cumbernauld New Town alongside today’s planning frameworks and ambitions. Central to this analysis will be an in-depth survey designed by the students and a personal mapping exercise created as a result of discussion with local residents.

At the end of the process, based on an understanding of current regional economics, transport, demographics, leisure and lifestyles and speculating on future social patterns the unit will make a broadbrush proposal for a new Clyde Valley Plan and a more specific proposal for the future of Cumbernauld town centre. Each student will develop an urban proposition for some part of Cumbernauld based on this work.

Theory (non-exhaustively)

In this unit we will explore the relationship between modern planning to mass politics, democracy and government. We will look at the history of modern urban development drawing on the work of the Italian historian Leonardo Benevolo (1971). And the judgements made my Tafuri and Dal Co in Modern Architecture Volume 2 (1976). Benevolo’s work addresses the tensions within the modern planning between social progress and social control. Tafuri and Dal Co situate Cumbernauld, which they describe as an ‘neo-avant- garde experiment’ within the broader context of British modernism, Team X and their European (and Japanese) peers. We will explore the specific themes explored in the mid-1960s such as ‘continuous structures’, variability, ‘mobility and the promise of freedom’, ‘networks and streets’, the possibility of the ‘unexpected’and the ‘as found’, the problems and possibilities of ‘mass production’ and the new ‘technological aesthetic’. These two texts ( and the broader reading list) throw up questions about the role of the architect and the difficulties of building coherent modernist works at a time when the ‘architecture of bureaucracy’ and social crisis has dampened enthusiasm for an ordered or totalising approach to planning.

The unit will try to understand why many local authorities are so hostile to modern planning policy and modernist building. The attempt to demolish Cumbernauld Town centre can be seen as a pragmatic solution to deal with a failing shopping centre. However, it may also be understood, as an expression of a cultural failure to learn from the past. The fact that Cumbernauld (and other modern structures – our own Matthew Building included) divides public opinion so passionately (in a new cultural war) suggests that we need to ask a few more questions about why the modern movement makes us uncomfortable. In this context we need a more intelligent approach to what we do with redundant post-war buildings? Today there are many publications about brutalism, 1960s concrete structures are very fashionable among young design professionals. Why is this? What do these commentators and their supporters find compelling in this work, while other dismiss it as ‘ugly’. The debate suggests a very awkward relationship with our immediate past, can we change this?

Analysis

This study will involve a rigorous survey of public attitudes to Cumbernauld. Our main concern will explore different methods of recording public satisfaction with their built environment and the development process. We will undertake street and estate surveys and organise a public meeting to present our findings. In addition to the survey of opinions, based on discussion with residents, you will produce a new map of Cumbernauld which captures important local knowledge and social questions, journeys, smells, housing desirability, human social activity etc. Our 3-Day study trip will cover the new towns (minus Irvine) and important modernist developments, such as George Square, Edinburgh, Stirling University and St Peter’s Cardross. This material on modern planning and architecture will help us to situate Cumbernauld in a broader body of work.

Strategy

At the end of the analysis and the study trip students will develop a strategy for the New Towns of Scotland. Students will place themselves in the position of Robert Mathew and Patrick Abercrombie in 1944 and make some strategic proposals for the development of the region. Based on an understanding of current regional economics, transport, demographics, leisure and lifestyles and speculating on future social patterns the unit will make a broad-brush proposal for a new Clyde Valley Plan and a more specific proposal for the future of Cumbernauld town centre. Each student will develop a basic urban proposition for some part of Cumbernauld based on this strategic work.

Illustrations (clockwise from top left): David Bowie in Cumbernauld Town Centre myth, St Paul’s Glenrothes by Gillespie Kidd and Coia, Clyde Valley Regional Planning Advisory Committee Report to the Constituent Local Authorities, 1947, Cumbernauld Town Centre today.

YEAR 4 2022/23 URBAN THEORY, ANALYSIS AND STRATEGY | STUDIO DESCRIPTOR

STUDIO E: EDINBURGH [Gary Cunningham]

EDGE

Promoting an Equitable City Through Public Participation

The ex-dockland neighbourhood of Leith, Edinburgh is Scotland’s densest inner suburban area and is brimming with potential for residential development. To date, Leith’s waterfront redevelopment has only accelerated Edinburgh’s high property prices and has left a shortage of affordable homes for young families. Consequently, people are moving out of the city to places in East Lothian and there is an evident building boom in areas like Musselburgh, Wallyford, Prestonpans, Cockenzie and Port Seton. The additional commuter traffic pressurises existing road and rail infrastructures, creating congestion and new challenges on public transport between Edinburgh and East Lothian.

There is an opportunity in the area linking the Port of Leith and Portobello, that stretches along the Firth of Forth, to counteract the mass house-building boom in East Lothian. Use of these post-industrial lands for high quality, dense residential neighbourhoods, within walking distance of the Shore, Leith Walk (the main artery to the city centre) and Portobello (Edinburgh’s “beach resort”) is crucial in achieving this. Creating density in this urban edge location will relieve land pressure on the city centre. According to Peter Barber’s thesis on edges (100 mile city), inward development will then occur on a more even, higher density, leading to a compact city, reducing car journeys, improving physical and mental health and ensuring long term sustainability. The studio aims to endorse this idea of edge density, but at the same time explore how current market models of development might be reconsidered to establish development frameworks that involve the public (residents) as active participants in urban design.

Theory (non-exhaustively)

The Squander and Salvage of Global Urban Waterfronts, Kate Shaw.

The theories and principles that lie behind public particpation in design and reciprocal design/end user arrangements (eg Assemble Collective).

Peter Barber – 100 mile city project and Project Interrupted (2018).

“Participation.” Issue of the journal Footprint, “The Participatory Turn in Urbanism,” with an introduction by Tahl Kaminer and Maros Krivy.

Byker and Ralph Erskine.

Gentrification and forms of socio-geographic disparity. Neil Smith’s writing on the “white collar return to the city movement”). “Back to the city” is synonymous with gentrification. How might socio-spatial exclusivity be avoided?

Lefebvre’s “Right to the City.” Public participation resonates with Lefebvre’s thesis in several ways.

Michel De Certeau – The Practice of Everyday Life, “Walking in the City” chapter.

Analysis

- You will visit numerous similar post-industrial sites to understand the successes and failures of these areas.

- You will examine and understand why residents are choosing to living in low density out of town locations and commuting larger distances over living in inner city suburbs

- You will gather site information, surveys, research frameworks, research Edinburgh’s City Plan 2030 alongside wider academic research to help unpick this urban field.

- You will analysis community involvement in current and historic local development to help Inform your strategic response to the field. Leith has a particularly passionate and vocal community who care deeply about their surroundings and its future. Through analysis of previous grassroots community campaigns and speaking to local groups, you will develop your strategy with the people who will live here in mind.

Strategy

You will devise an urban strategy for this field (Port of Leith to Portobello corridor). This will be grounded in an understanding and critique of what is currently proposed and will build upon this knowledge, along with the knowledge of other similar fields in other cities. Itwill involve dense housing and public open spaces and will be predicated on your formation of a strategic framework for active public participation in urban design.

YEAR 4 2022/23 URBAN THEORY, ANALYSIS AND STRATEGY | STUDIO DESCRIPTOR

STUDIO F: ORKNEY [Colin Ross]

ISLAND

Looking Backward and Forward in Changing Conditions of Remote Communities

Saskia Sassen, in her work on the “Global City,” attaches the idea of the “urban citizen” to extremes of spatial agglomeration and urban propinquity. This occurs in the consolidation of increasingly dominant global centres of finance, and, in a way, makes the contemporary global citizen complicit in the annexation of urbanisation to capital. Yet contemporary theory on planetary urbanisation suggests a different form of urban citizen - one who resides in the quieter, remoter zones, which while still very much supporting the now inescapable register of “urban” through supraurban planetary processes, exists within a set of very different, and relatively new, conditions.

Representing the intersection of remote, isolated, “backward” island live and the “forward” cutting edge of research and innovation in renewable sources of global energy, these new conditions play out in the island archipelago that sits off the north coast of Scotland. The studio will examine new forms of “the urban” through studying changing island conditions on Orkney. Change is happening already on the island. Researchers, science/technology, and environmental expertise are now embedded in the life of the place. Increasingly transient workers will arrive to develop and construct large scale wind/tidal and wave technologies that will help power the nation and export energy internationally. How does a place mediate changes that will inevitably happen? How can it react to its own position as a global player in clean energy transition without sacrificing its position as a clean and relatively remote place?

Theory (non-exhaustively)

Global Cities (Saskia Sassen). Planetary Urbanisation (Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid). Global design Culture (Bruce Mau, “Massive Change”). Energy (Dr Laura Watts “Energy at the end of the World” [factual island perspectives]) Junkspace (Rem Koolhaas).

Analysis

You will visit Orkney, researching the current town settlement structures, island qualities, community history and contemporary ambitions. You will explore the emergence of the place as a centre of global expertise and research into renewable technologies and its importance as national energy provider. You will also reflect upon the island’s historic importance as the stopping point for Arctic exploration and it’s latent importance in future blue economy strategies as the arctic route opens up due to the melting of arctic ice.

We may have ethe opportunity to engage directly with local community/ stakeholders in Orkney. Time dependent, we will develop engagement tools to feed conversation and map outcomes. Questions will focus on: Island life versus urban life; historic and contemporary differences; speculations on future island life; climate and energy transition; islands as producer and centre of innovation; covid - islands as place of escape and better life-balance; remote working; international and expanding population- permanent/ temporary and transient; the housing crisis- UK/ islands local.

Strategy

You will develop strategic ideas relating to the island’s new global infrastructures and economies, while recognising its remoteness. You will make strategic propositions for expansion of the main towns of the Orkneys Islands; Kirkwall and Stromness. Each operates a significant port function and waterfront focus serving the needs of residents, commercial maritime industry and year-round visiting public. The proposition will include compact housing with associated programmes that support current accommodation shortages and will seek to react flexibly to the latent population expansion. You will explore the role of rural island expansion as testbed for scaled, sustainable “urban” living that draws on the equal strengths of social, ecological and economic themes.

ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS CONTRIBUTE TO VERY DIFFERENT FORM ENVIRONMENT, AT EVERY BASED ON SOCIAL

DEMOCRATIC EMPOWERMENT

JUSTICE RATHER THAN THE OF THE COMMODITY

Brenner, Designing out of the Crisis, Fulcrum Issue 65, 2013: Neoliberalisation, London, Bedford Press, 2013.