Apply before January 29 to be eligible for Bursaries and financial support
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Applications and bursaries to study at AA Landscape Urbanism Post Graduate Programme are open and available.
Apply before Friday, January 29, 2021 to be elegible for bursaries to reduce substantially programme fees.
The Landscape Urbanism Post Graduate Programme (AALU) leads to either an MArch (16 months) or MSc (12 months) degree. It explores the role that design and designers (from architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners) can play when confronted with processes, landscapes and territories of planetary urbanisation (metropolitan areas, rural environments, infrastructural and productive landscapes, etc) and the multiple crisis they have triggered:environmental, health, racial and socio-economic. Planetary urbanisation is structured by an economic model based on economic policies, legal frameworks, political decisions, social and cultural contexts, and engineering solutions where design inputs are either left out altogether or consigned to the fringes.
In this context, Landscape Urbanism explores design beyond normative aesthetic and performative proposals and as a mechanism with which to orchestrate, choreograph and negotiate political and economic frameworks to avert the contemporary climate crisis we are living through. AALU is inherently multidisciplinar, and integrates at its core, critical thinking as well as practices such as policy making, political ecology, cartographic representation, scripted simulations and GIS mapping as well as various forms of media representations all of which are widely available but relatively untapped within the design fields.
Landscape Urbanism programme is commited to explore alternative design practices directed to understand, revealed, communicate and tackle the multiple crisis within which planetary urbanistion unfolds. To this extend AALU will be exploring the role designs can play as part of a potential implementation of a Global Green New Deal (GND). Given the climate and ecological emergency that the world is currently facing, it is of paramount importance that architects, landscape architects and designers support a socially just re-structuring of the world we inhabit. This effort should be intrinsically dependent on the health of the earth systems and trigger, in turn, a radical transformation of the role designers can collectively play in developing design proposals, mitigation strategies, advocacy initiatives and activism. Landscape Urbanism is currently developing projects and existing GND proposals in close relation with progressive economic think tanks such as Common Wealth and the New Economic Foundation in London.
The design expertise of Landscape Urbanism in the visualisation, mapping and spatial understanding of socio-ecological systems is crucial to this project and the particular challenges that it will face. The programme will therefore develop proposals for a Global GND through the exploration of different policies, such as:
-Retroffiting existing buildings, specially housing across cities and towns to save energy, reduce material consumption and footprint and promote the repair, maintenance and reuse of material, structures and infrastructures within the building industry.
-The exploration of urban life away from private cars and the subsequent research of mobility alternatives based on people, mass public transport and healthy and just environments for citizens.
-The transformation of urbanisation process via the reduction of the working week to 4 days and the implications and impacts a 3 day weekend will bring to the landscape of cities.
-The transformation of a the agricultural system in a UK post-Brexit scenario and the impact it could have on local communities, the food system as well as the creation of new commons.
-The rewilding of vast areas in UK and Europe and the benefits that this could have for the wellbeing of humans and non-humans in both, urban and rural environments.
-A Just Transition towards a post-fossil-fuel economies, including the proposition of alternative economic models such as degrowth and doughnuts economics and the spatial impacts these will have on the design of urbanisation processes.
-The exploration of different land ownership schemes, beyond existing privatised and individual models, that could radically transform the UK landscape and lead to a comprehensive land reformation in UK, Europe and worldwide.
