MA City Design at the Royal College of Art is concerned with urban transformation through multi-scalar, strategic, spatial reasoning and its relationship to new forms of technology, data and calculation, and new deliberative, multi-stakeholder and institutional development and delivery models.
The programme positions itself within a complex context of change: shifting demographics and ageing populations, housing affordability and intergenerational conflict, weather volatility through climate change, mass migration, changes in work and a new plasticity and mobility to labour, and the centralisation of cities—away from the suburban periphery toward the core, with all of the attendant problems of exclusion and social equity.
Under pressure from these issues, and as the structures that have traditionally defined the city fracture in response to new disruptive technologies: public/private, home/city, City Design asks: what are the new spatial performances, the new and existing institutional forms, the new technologies, and the new governance mechanisms that together will enable us to find new collectivities of intimacy and care. In the interest of resilient and socially inclusive cities, what are the new spatial organisations that will for example support our old people against isolation and loneliness, ensure children belong in cities, and that will allow all of us to find new ways of being together to achieve this.
While the programme is multi-disciplinary both in terms of student, faculty and stakeholder participants and also in terms of content, it recognises that key to the work of change in the city is architecture’s material, formal and spatial experimentation. Central to this is the role of the drawing as a site of negotiation, disagreement and dispute amongst stakeholders. We understand this to be a process constitutive of, not just reflective of, new communities of interest. The only question that matters is who are we together, and what is the city.
Faculty: Dr Tarsha Finney; Dr Platon Issaias
Technical Faculty: Antonyia Stoitsova, Nicolo Bencini
Industry Advisors: Prof. Peter Bishop (Allies and Morrison); Dan Hill (ARUP) Emma Cariaga (British Land); Malcolm Smith (ARUP)
Guest critics and contributors 2017/2018:
Dr Sam Jacoby (RCA); Prof. Chris Lee (Harvard GSD/Serie); Prof. Hanif Kara (AKTII/Harvard GSD); Conor Moloney; Arthur Smart (ARUP); Dr Pavlos Philippou (J&A Philippou); Paul Eaton (Allies and Morrison); Samaneh Moafi (AA); Colin Ward (Foster + Partners HK); Paul Karakusevic (Karakusevic-Carson); Friedrich Ludewig (ACME); Abigail Batchelor (Karakusevic-Carson); Simon Bevan (Director of Planning, Southwark Council); Mark Kewley (Director of Transformation, NHS Southwark Clinical Commissioning Group); Kathryn Perera (Head of Transformation | NHS Horizons ); Roger Madelin (Head of Canada Water Development, British Land); Dan Hill (ARUP); Lucy Kennedy (Executive Director, Research Centres RCA); Sally Crew (Transport Policy Manager Chief Executive’s Department Southwark Council); Calvin Zhiyong LIANG (Post-Doctoral Fellow Division of Landscape Architecture The University of Hong Kong); Melissa Cate Christ (Assistant Professor of Design at the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University); Dr Eunice Seng (Assistant Prof. HKU); Dr Evelyn Kwok (UTS); Rama Gheerawo (Helen Hamlyn Centre RCA); Prof Jeremy Meyerson (Helen Hamlyn Centre RCA)
Current Projects 2017/2018
New Logics of Collectivity: Housing, Care and the Urban Field.
City Design, Design Studio Brief 2017/2018
British Land’s 46 acre site in Canada Water, South London is the starting point for City Design’s 2017/2018 Studio work. Informing the strategy are interrelated fields of investigation, and a series of problems, opportunities and potentials in the specific conditions of the site regarding social equity, labour and social care in London. These include: the current crisis of recruitment and capacity that the NHS is undergoing; housing affordability in the centralising city and its effects on key labour; the crisis of elder care and its problematisation as aging in place; social care versus acute care; the notion of the modern family as an organising unit for urban life; the role and transformation of the ground and the streetscape; and alternative forms of ownership and governance that facilitate both new forms of dwelling arrangements in the city, and new forms of civil society and collective interest.
To work through these problems requires that one ask what is at stake in the most basic divisions in the city: public v. private, house v. city. Beyond the economics, regulatory and legal framing, procurement and delivery contexts of housing, all of the burdens and responsibilities of the strategic diagram of domesticity are visible in the two and three bedroom dwelling typically supplied by housing providors in London. This is a diagram of socio-political relationships that emerged from a complex constellation of professional tutelage marking social reform and philanthropy in the 19th century. Changing this complex of socio-familial relationships in space, the modern family, is not as simple as drawing something new. The gender based subjectivities of mother, father, daughter, brother, sister, lover are all instrumentalised in their familiarity in these rooms and in these spatial hierarchies. How then does one make change, what is at stake in change: what is the new.
Our strategy proposes a series of guiding principles comprising the integration of spaces, practices and facilities for care and mutual aid in housing and public spaces; the provision for direct forms of participation in the management of buildings, neighbourhood amenities and the public sphere; and finally, the long term affordability of housing understood as urban infrastructure rather than speculative commodity.
Future symposium
Future Homes for London: Housing, Social Care and the Creation of Value.
September 21/22, 2018 (tbc)
In Partnership with the St Anne’s Redevelopment Trust Haringey. Speakers to be confirmed.
Past Symposium
Future Homes for London: Alternate Models.
April 13/14, 2018
In partnership with the St Anne’s Redevelopment Trust Haringey, The Architecture Foundation, and Walmer Yard
Participants: Cristina Gamboa (Lacol), La Borda, Barcelona; Jeremy McLeod (Breathe Architecture): The Nightingale Principle; Christoph Schmidt (ifau), R50, Berlin; Christian Roth (Zanderroth Architekten), BIGyard, Berlin; Claudia Thiesen (Mehr Als Wohnen), Kraftwerk I, Zurich; Paul Karakusevic (Karakusevic Carson Architects): Camden/New York; Vanessa Ricketts (StART); Stephen Hill (National CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network); Dinah Roake (Atlas, Homes and Communities Agency); Marlene Barrett (StART); Frances Northrop (Principal Director for Communities and Localities, NEF)Pete Gladwell (Head of Public Sector Partnerships, Legal & General InvestmentManagement)
Video of all presentations and discussion available here.
Call for applications for the 2018 MA Programme are open until the end of July.
