City Design (MA)

Introduction

This has clearly been a more difficult year than many in recent history, with the violence of empire more relentless, more total and everywhere harder to find respite from. The MA City Design programme unfolds within two different design-studio frameworks that acknowledge that violence while challenging the logics that drive it, ‘Underground Palestine’ and ‘Border Environments.’

Scaffolded by the ‘Embodied Knowledges and Urban Struggles’ theory seminar, these frameworks ask students to collectively imagine a future of city design that does not take the violence of partition as a given, but rather seeks to foster a liberated and a generative life in common. Our approach asks students to take ethical and aesthetical stances that refuse the propagation of that violence, and instead afford them the opportunity to design environments and spatial support systems that attend to life. How do we design such environments? From which materials, and in alliances with which (human and non-human) protagonists? Which memories should spaces hold, and what futures might they inscribe? How can we make such proposals tangible, and thus nourish our collective spatial imagination? How can we design life supporting spatial systems that tend to the joy of everyday encounter and liberated life?

During my first year as the Programme Lead, I admired the intellectual generosity and spatial curiosity of our students, as well as the fierce ethical commitment and aesthetic sensitivity of our tutors. We are brought together in the firm belief that it matters how and for whom spatial support systems are designed; we remain united by the understandings that space can empower and not simply oppress, and that no one is free until all of us are. I invite you to engage with the work on display, and alongside its creators imagine other futures for our cities – futures in which we are all free.

Photograph credit – Gabriella Demczuk