The Bartlett B-Pro Show Book 2023

School of Architecture, UCL

B-Pro Show

2023

The Bartlett

Contents

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Introduction Frédéric Migayrou, Andrew Porter

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Automated Architecture Labs Material Architecture Lab Urban Morphogenesis Lab

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Architectural Design MArch RC1 Monumental Wastelands: Hyper-Local 30 RC2 softROBOTIC ARCHITECTURE 38 RC3 Living Architecture Lab: AI + Autonomous Architecture 50 RC5 Product Architecture 62 RC6 Art and Material 76 RC7 Unruly Assemblies 84 RC8 Towards a Multi-Material Architecture 92 RC9 Architecture for the Augmented Age 102 RC10 Constructing the Phygital 112 Architectural Design Thesis

120 Urban Design MArch 122 RC11 Bound Infinity/In-Between 132 RC12 Videogame Urbanism 144 RC14 Machine Learning Urbanism: Cities Beyond Cognition 156 RC15 Pervasive Urbanism: Mediated Ecologies of Affect 166 RC16 DeepGreen City 178 RC18 Relational Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Planetary 190 Urban Design Thesis 196 Architectural Computation MSc/MRes 210 Bio-Integrated Design MArch/MSc 214 215 216 218 219 220 221 222

Our Programmes Short Courses Public Lectures Exhibitions & Events Bartlett Shows Website Alumni The Bartlett Promise Staff, Visitors & Consultants

Introduction

B-Pro, or Bartlett Prospective, is a suite of graduate programmes devoted to advanced experimentation in computational architecture, design and urban environments.

Architectural Design MArch explores the most advanced experimental research in design and fabrication. Urban Design MArch takes critical approaches towards creative urban and landscape design, defining creative strategies for global cities and communities.

Our Architectural Computation MSc and MRes programmes are focused on computational programming and artificial intelligence (AI) in architecture. Linked to these three programmes oriented to research in design and computation are our Architecture & Digital Theory MRes programme and a doctoral stream. In 2018, B-Pro was joined by two innovative BioIntegrated Design Master’s degrees, which respond to the impact of biotechnology, computation and climate change on the built environment. The B-Pro programmes welcome a diverse international student cohort, offering highly structured access to the realisation of research, and to the production of new schemes in architecture and urbanism.

Architectural Design, directed by Tyson Hosmer and Gilles Retsin, is organised around research clusters driven by their respective tutors, including two labs – the Automated Architecture Lab and Material Architecture Lab – to explore specific speculative domains of application. The latest technologies – robotics and AI, CNC fabrication, 3D printing, supercomputing, simulation, generative design, interactivity, advanced algorithms, extensive material prototyping, biotechnologies, links to material science – and their many applications, are researched in great depth. The exploration of supercomputing and generative platforms also forms a core part of our innovative approach to conception and fabrication, 4

enabled by exceptional digital production facilities. With extensive use of AI and simulation in virtual reality, the degree offers access to new fields for experimental research and generative design.

Urban Design, directed by Roberto Bottazzi, looks at creative approaches towards environments and cities at all scales, innovative computational design, biotechnologies, AI and digital approaches to networks and territories. The research clusters and the programme’s lab, Urban Morphogenesis Lab, develop alternative proposals based on new morphological concepts and protocols, which reflect how cities are complex, dynamic living systems.

Critical environmental and ecological questions are also viewed through an interdisciplinary lens, acknowledging the dispersed and often paradoxical nature of contemporary urbanism. Through contextual case studies and interventions, students address the challenges involved in resolving complex issues facing populations, public space, building typologies and land use.

Our Architectural Computation programmes are directed by Philippe Morel and Manuel Jiménez Garcia and challenge the boundaries of what architectural computation can achieve.

Projects explore computational methods for automated construction, augmented reality applications for the built environment and use AI for space navigation and pattern generation. The work of this programme demonstrates the possibility of becoming truly fluent in computational language, opening up new domains for research.

Our B-Pro programmes are further enhanced by collaboration with the school’s Architecture & Digital Theory MRes programme co-directed by Professor Frédéric Migayrou and Professor Mario Carpo, dedicated to the theory, history and criticism of digital design and digital

fabrication. We look forward to supporting doctoral research in this exciting arena with a global seminar series open to our MRes and PhD students. The B-Pro Prospectives Lecture Series, with numerous speakers, architects, historians and theoreticians, continues to present new opportunities for students to encounter fresh takes on emerging research in the fields of digital theory.

Connected to the same field of digital research and computation are the Bio-Integrated Design Master’s programmes led jointly by Professor Marcos Cruz (The Bartlett) and Dr Brenda Parker (UCL Biochemical Engineering).

With access to the latest in biotechnology and advanced fabrication, students work collaboratively in the lab, studio and workshop to develop novel products and environments, in the context of critical issues of climate change and sustainability.

The solutions produced hold the potential to be shaped into world-changing environmental and social innovations.

Through a shared vision of creative architecture, B-Pro is an opportunity for students to participate in a new community and to affirm the singularity of their individual talents. These programmes are not only an open door to advanced architectural practice but also form the base from which each student can define their particular approach and architectural philosophy, in order to seek a position in the professional world.

Beyond the annual programmes, tutors have begun to develop more specific entities in the form of laboratories which will be structured to associate doctoral students with distinct areas of research in the fields of materials, robotics and AI, in partnership with companies in the digital and production fields.

This year the work has continued to further develop the clear shift in the contextualisation of previous research, the application of digital design and thinking has

engaged directly with political, cultural and societal realms. In particular the climate crisis is addressed by a number of clusters with an emphasis on changing landscapes and ecosystems, environmental sensing and materials. Issues of social justice and poverty are addressed through engagement with the political structures and economics of housing and population programmes.

In addition to the physical show, the online B-Pro show and this accompanying book are a broad showcase and testament to the continuation of the exceptional quality of work at B-Pro, its incredible commitment to design research and digital innovation, and the continuing creativity, passion and dedication of staff and students at The Bartlett School of Architecture.

Professor Frédéric Migayrou Chair, Bartlett Professor of Architecture Director of B-Pro Professor Andrew Porter Deputy Director of B-Pro

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Otrivin Air Lab by ecoLogicStudio, 2022. Photo: NAARO

B-Pro Labs

Automated Architecture Labs Lab Directors: Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jiménez Garcia, Claire McAndrew, Gilles Retsin

Automated Architecture (AUAR) Labs is a consortium of research streams at The Bartlett School of Architecture, operating at the intersection between architecture, automation and platforms.

Increasing automation requires architectural input. To make this work, we utilise the notion of the discrete, considering every element, part or particle as a piece of data that can be computed. Parts therefore take on the properties of a ‘bit’, becoming serialised, standardised and embedded with a simple binary rule: 0 or 1 (that is, connected or not connected). The emphasis on the part as a unit reintroduces the age-old disciplinary notion of part-to-whole relationships and constructs an architectural framework designed for automation.

Our research brings advanced technologies, design, people and communities together to radically rethink architectural production. We are exclusively interested in revolutionising housing production using a regenerative, circular and localised approach to automate the design and manufacture of homes.

We run live design research projects with communities across the UK, most recently in London, Dorset and Bristol. In 2021 we won the Architects’ Journal Social Sustainability Prize for our project Block West and were the recipients of its Small Projects Award in 2020 as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Transforming Construction Network Plus. Block West was referred to as ‘an intersectional piece of architecture which goes beyond a building’ by the Architects’ Journal jury.

AUAR Labs works with students with an agenda on housing, automation and platforms. Current and past collaborators include Knowle West Media Centre, Hackney Council, Bristol City Council, Waltham Forest Future Creatives, New City College, the Building Centre, East London Dance, Studio Wayne McGregor and Nagami Design. AUAR Labs has received funding from UCL Innovation and Enterprise, UCL Culture, Transforming Construction Network Plus, Epic Games and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Impact Acceleration Fund.

Image: House Block, 2021. Photo: James Harris 8

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Material Architecture Lab Lab Directors: Guan Lee, Daniel Widrig Affiliated with Architectural Design MArch Research Cluster 6

Our research starts by asking questions about materials through design, both digitally and manually. With the prevalence of digital tools, the capabilities of industrial production have migrated from factory floors to smaller-scale workshops, laboratories and research facilities. Coupled with advances in material science at a microscopic scale, and availability of specialist tools to customise materials, the prospect of a new kind of architecture is now imminent.

Despite advances in technology, the cost of digital fabrication is high, while change in the construction industry is slow. Digitally driven fabrication is deterministic by nature: everything made has to be modelled digitally, without the element of chance. In Material Architecture Lab we encourage making without preconceptions, allowing the characteristics of the material and fabrication techniques to inform and enrich the outcome. In order to be experimental with processes of making, we look closely at existing crafts and manufacturing techniques with the aim of adding to existing knowledge when possible, learning from it at the very least. Exploring the potential of material design requires setting aside established ideas of not only how something should be constructed, but also how materials should appear or behave.

New materials in architecture emerge rarely, but their impact is considerable.

The fabric of our cities and landscapes is a testament to what prevails and endures. Traditional materials can be refashioned by altering the way they are processed or utilised. Material behaviour changes with quantity; performance differs depending on a structure’s size and on the environment in which it is constructed, while visual impact varies with distance. Our method of enquiry is hands-on, set firmly in the realms of empirical testing of matter and fabrication on an architectural scale. The development of material science goes hand-in-hand with technological shifts. As a research laboratory, our interest in material is mediated through not only experimentation with the latest in digital design and fabrication but also applicability, tested in the construction industry through live projects. Our methodology prioritises a hybrid of fabrication techniques, favouring customised systems, the design of processes as well as products, and use of digitally controlled machining and semi-automated processes.

Our experiments are grounded in cyclical processes of making prototypes, with rigorous and iterative refinements. The lab’s work is as much about traditional making as it is about computation and digital technology.

Image: Coir, Material Architecture Lab, 2018. Photo: NAARO 10

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Urban Morphogenesis Lab Lab Director: Claudia Pasquero Affiliated with Urban Design MArch Research Cluster 16

The Urban Morphogenesis Lab was founded in 2012 as a research platform for the application of biocomputation in the design of contemporary ecological cities. In 2017, the lab established an ongoing collaboration focusing on photosynthetic architecture with The Synthetic Landscape Lab at the Institute of Urban Design, Innsbruck University, as well as the design innovation practice ecoLogicStudio, London. Over the past year, the lab has collaborated on several practice-based projects with this team.

‘Otrivin Air Lab’, a public laboratory and algae garden, was conceived in partnership with the healthcare company Otrivin. The living showroom and bio-design workshop was open to the public for several months in 2022.

Photosynthetic microalgae in the Air Lab absorbed carbon dioxide from the air, producing biomass that the project’s bio designers collected. The biopolymer filaments were fed into a 3D printer to create new products, including neti pots, stools and bottles. The project, which was housed inside a timber-frame structure within London’s Building Centre, demonstrated a route toward a circular city.

A second architectural installation, ‘Habitat One’ imagined a new architectural model of a carbon-neutral city. Developed in collaboration with Hyundai Motor Company, the project was exhibited in Busan and Seoul, South Korea and Chengdu, China in 2022–23. The project invited visitors to experience the possibilities of living in a carbon-neutral world through three creations: two artificial intelligence videos, a living photosynthetic 3D-printed sculpture named Tree One and an urban bio lab.

The lab has also recently worked on the publication, Biodesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Deep Green (Routledge, 2023). Co-authored by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, the book investigates the potential of nature-based technology to shape the evolution of contemporary architecture and design in a time of catastrophic climate change. It proposes to engage with design and architecture as an extended cognitive interface, a sentient being that is co-evolutionary and symbiotic with the living planet, contributing to its beauty and our continued enjoyment of it.

Image: Habitat One, Hyundai Motor Studio Seoul, South Korea, 2023. Photo: Joonhwan Yoon.

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The B-Pro Show 2022. Photo: Richard Stonehouse

Architectural Design MArch

Architectural Design MArch Programme Directors: Tyson Hosmer, Gilles Retsin

Architectural Design at The Bartlett School of Architecture is invested in the frontiers of advanced architecture and design and its convergence with science and technology. Composed of an international staff of experts and students, this programme is designed to deliver diverse yet focused strands of speculative research, emphasising the key role computation plays within complex design synthesis.

Design is increasingly recognised as a crucial agency for uncovering complex patterns and relations. Historically, the most successful architecture has managed to capture cultural conditions, utilise technological advancements and answer to the pressures and constraints of materials, economics, ecology and politics.

This synthesis is now being accelerated by the introduction of computation and the ever-evolving landscape of production.

Architectural Design students are introduced to advanced coding, fabrication and robotic skills, aimed at computational and technological fluency. Simultaneously, they are taught about the theoretical frameworks which underpin their enquiries.

Students are part of a vibrant urban and professional community, enriching the process of learning and opportunities for networking.

With advanced design at its core, the Architectural Design programme devotes a high proportion of its time to studio-based design enquiry, culminating in a major project and thesis. The programme is organised into research clusters, each with their own agendas, underpinned by the shared resources of technical tutorials, theoretical lectures and seminars. The latest approaches to robotics and artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, supercomputing, simulation, generative design, interactivity, extensive material prototyping and links to material science are explored.

Students engage critically with new developments in technology, which are rapidly changing the landscape of architecture, its social and economic role and its effectiveness in industry applications.

Students are introduced to theoretical concepts through lectures and introductory design projects and are supported by workshops to build computation and robotics skills. Throughout the year, students work in small teams or individually, according to the methodology of each research cluster, amplifying their focus and individual talents in the context of complex design research and project development. Projects are continuously evaluated via tutorials, with regular design reviews by external critics. Alongside our cutting-edge research, we host public lectures and seminars throughout the year.

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Programme Administrators Tung Ying (Crystal) Chow, Tom Mole

Image: ‘BioColony’, Kun Chen, Jiaming (Key) Hu, Yuxiao Huo, Xuran Xiao, Research Cluster 7

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Monumental Wastelands: RC1 Hyper-Local Hadin Charbel, Déborah López Lobato

Research Cluster 1 explores the Anthropocene through the lens of ubiquity, examining the production of data, raw material and logistical processes, and analysing their impact on contemporary scenarios.

This year’s theme, Hyper-Local, explores what the terms ‘local’, ‘vernacular’ and ‘sustainable’ mean to us today, as well as examining the concept of time.

Using Climate-Fiction (Cli-Fi) as a vehicle, we research, experiment with and project imminent realities. Our two strands of research topics have generally been categorised under ‘cli-migration’ – the forced migration of people due to changing climatic conditions – and ‘autonomous ecologies’ – the automation, rights and participation in discourse of nature. To address these issues, contextual research as well as legal precedents are analysed to devise highly bespoke responses that generate architectural outcomes from a sociopolitical approach.

With that in mind, this year’s projects have taken on a variety of forms, including: a contract for ecological custodianship in response to deforestation; participatory platforms that counter community displacement due to developer housing schemes; a zero-carbon strategy for reclaiming, recirculating and reintegrating used building materials; natural disaster prevention and community resilience through a gamified simulator; and the revitalisation of abandoned lands through cooperative and evolving allotments.

There are two key interrelated methodologies in our cluster that can be classified as conceptual and technical approaches.

At the conceptual level, the cluster devises strategies of preservation through adaptation. This approach moves away from the idea of a nostalgic return to the past and instead embraces imminent realities, recognising that, while some things will inevitably be lost, others can and should be preserved through a practical yet sensitively tuned strategy. At the technical level, this is translated through decoding and recoding, understanding that preservation takes place through the identification of the peculiarities and localities of certain conditions and the analysis of data such as behaviours, materials and resources.

This year our cluster sought to foreground materiality and physical prototyping as an additional layer to the continued exploration into gamification and world making.

Students Carpenters Fedora Jiaying Chu, Mingyuan (Frederick) Li, Kexin Li Flux-Lot Xueqing Li, Shikun Tang, Wanting Xu Material Locale Zihan Xiang, Jiaxin Yue, Jun Yue Transferring Resilience Shuting Huang, Yi Song, Yuhan Xu Vernacular Contract Hadi El Kassar, Shiyu Tian, Dingsheng Xu Theory Tutor Albert Brenchat-Aguilar Skills Tutors Vicente Sanchez, Zehao Qin

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1.1–1.2 Material Locale 1.1 The project explores the feasibility of achieving a circular economy for building materials in urban environments. It does so by developing a system for recycling existing materials based on different demolition and reuse methods, measured under the various realities of cost, carbon, machinery, transport and so on. The project responds to excessive global resource extraction and provides a framework for a systematic approach that could potentially yield a new form of vernacular, displayed through both materiality and assembly logic. A case study site in Seven Sisters, London, is chosen to test this notion of a hyper-local material and language system. 1.2 A virtual library of the decommissioned materials collected around London.

1.3–1.9 Flux-Lot Exploring the political implications of informal structures in urban areas as spaces for the commons. The project evolves as a system to reinvent the allotment: a vernacular typology of community gardens seen in the UK. Underperforming industrial spaces are ideal sites to offer new possibilities in urban development that feature gardening and community activities. A digital platform is combined with physical instruments to achieve maximum flexibility in planning and building, promoting community-based DIY through collective decision-making and easy-to-assemble logic.

Functioning as both a planner and a construction consultant, the digital platform evolves along with the architectural components on site and collects user input as the basis for future adjustments.

1.10–1.11 Carpenters Fedora The Carpenters Estate in East London is made up of a combination of low-rise, high-rise and public-space community housing. It is set to be redeveloped in a scheme that will have undesirable impacts on its current tenants. The project proposes an alternative method of community relocation that enables current residents to carry out their own relocation on site, modifying their current dwellings to account for new and old unmet needs in their current homes.

Departing from Fedora in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the proposal explores how the future of community housing can resist homogeneity and instead embrace the heterogeneity of people, wants and needs.

1.12–1.15 Vernacular Contract Located in a Ugandan forest ravaged by ecological threats, a refugee crisis and the remnants of European colonial planning, the project explores the possibility of creating communal craft settlements that operate on indigenous preservational paradigms. A carbon offsetting scheme is proposed where displaced Indigenous participants adopt an ‘inhabitation as protection’ model by relying on a platform that manages the planning and building process of relocation settlements and simplifies contractual elements into game rules. Combining local materials and using the human body as a design generator and building constraint, pragmatic construction systems and vernacular architectures form a language that is individually pleasurable and communally monumental.

1.16–1.20 Transferring Resilience What is there to be learned from the world’s archive of traditional ecological knowledge, and how might one acquire such information?

The project responds to vulnerable communities, threatened by climate change, through a process of gamification that allows them to train for potential disasters as well as disassemble and relocate their existing homes in more strategic locations. A virtual archive is created that catalogues existing regional ecological practices and architecture and makes them accessible to anyone, anywhere. The proposal speculates that a decentralised and networked approach to knowledge transfer can enhance the resilience of small towns and villages that are at risk of disappearing, while maintaining a degree of identity and familiarity.

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softROBOTIC ARCHITECTURE

RC2

Valentina Soana

Research Cluster 2 explores the potential of robotic systems, lightweight structures and shape-changing materials in architecture and design.

For many years, designers have envisioned building systems that can respond and adapt to multiple human, environmental and structural conditions. Recent technological advancements in robotics enable machines to be self-aware, and to plan and react to undetermined circumstances. Integrating robotic solutions into elastic material systems makes it possible to create novel structures that can self-form, reconfigure and achieve multiple states, operating and interacting at architectural and human scales. This approach can generate systems that achieve motion leveraging material behaviours. Compared with conventional rigid body kinematic systems, elastic kinetic structures can adapt to continuous changes of internal and external conditions with a minimum amount of energy and material resource.

Throughout the year, students were introduced to multidisciplinary approaches at the intersection of architecture, art and engineering. The cluster strove to develop novel adaptive material and structural systems that could achieve multiple states of equilibrium. The integration of actuation principles based on pneumatic and cable-driven approaches, with elastic, bending and tensile material behaviours, generated lightweight kinetic systems.

These robotically controlled systems leveraged material behaviours, responding to changing human, environmental and structural conditions. Each team focused on a different design context to create structures that could respond to human emotions and other criteria, such as music.

Parallel to the design of a new physical system, the work focused on the development of novel methods to control the behaviour of these continuously changing material and structural systems. Custom algorithms were developed to compute system choreographies and control data based on feedback such as human and sound data.

This approach allowed the designer/choreographer to generate a continuously changing system by integrating design intentions and physical feedback.

At a conceptual level, our research explores the role of robotics in architecture, moving beyond its role as a tool, towards the notion of robotic spaces, structures and building systems. This approach opens new possibilities for interactions between human, material and machine systems.

Students A Dance of Other Bodies (ADOOB) Aya Meskawi, Vaishnavi More, Xiangyi Tian, Kexin Wang EMObot Ziheng Chen, Aofan Song, Keke Zhao Theory Tutor Provides Ng Skills Tutors Emmanouil Dimitrakakis, Shahram Minooee Sabery

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2.1–2.4 EMObot 2.1 The ‘EMObot’ soft robotic in three different states. The structure comprises an adaptive bending-active pneumatic hybrid system, which is robotically actuated. The integration of motorised and pneumatic actuation enables the system to deform, leveraging the elastic material properties of the system.

The structure changes shape in response to human emotional states, generating a space where users can rest, interact and connect with the surrounding environment. 2.2 EMObot triangular module. Through the development of the EMObot soft robotic system, multiple geometries and materials are tested and their dynamic behaviour evaluated. This image shows a physical model made of a pneumatically actuated cushion with a triangular shape and custom seams. The system is reinforced by bending-actuated plates that provide stiffness and control the bending behaviour of the overall deformations. Varying internal pneumatic pressure causes different shapes to be generated.

2.3 EMObot human-scale prototype. The pneumatic soft-actuated modules are held in place by a bendingactive substructure. Their spatial configuration is designed to provide a deep sense of connection with inhabitants. The modules open and close and are capable of hugging their users based on their individual preferences. Users can control the modules through their breathing or by using manual controls. 2.4 Architectural vision. The image shows a rendering of an architectural proposal for a public adaptive space in an urban context.

The proposal consists of EMObot pneumatic spatial modules arranged to create a large system of spaces that are soft and can change to generate multiple experiences. Users can immerse themselves and navigate through the structure, which changes shape and lighting to create forms based on human breathing and preferences. Through a custom control system, changes in shape are generated by negotiating design, materials and human states and preferences.

2.5–2.10 A Dance of Other Bodies (ADOOB) 2.5–2.6 ‘ADOOB’: The physical system. Both images show pictures of the ADOOB robotic pneumatic system in multiple states. The structure is made of a bending-active substructure that holds adaptive pneumatic bendingactive hybrid leaf-shaped modules. These modules are highly engineered to enable controlled bending of their geometry solely through pneumatic actuation. This is made possible by integrating multiple elastic and bending materials with different stiffnesses. The module is composed of elastic membranes, bending plates and bending-active perimeter rods. The leaf shape is based on multiple studies that were carried out to ascertain the best dynamic performance. 2.7 ADOOB sound generation strategy. ADOOB is a dynamic system that is robotically controlled. Its activation generates a melodic sound. This strategy addresses one of the main sensory issues of pneumatic actuation: noise. Pneumatic systems are widely used in design and architecture for their soft, lightweight aesthetics and structural performance.

However, pneumatic noise is often an unpleasant sound.

ADOOB’s actuation strategy integrates a design process where pneumatic sound is altered and controlled by a custom-developed, real-time sound production engine.

The image shows a diagrammatic representation of the relationship between geometrical deformations (simulated modules) and sound levels (graphs). Each geometrical state corresponds to sound parameters – therefore, global deformation, pressure parameters and sound values affect each other. 2.8–2.10 ADOOB’s architectural vision. The images show a proposed actuated structure for public performances. The structure is made of a bending-active system and robotically actuated bending-active pneumatic 32

hybrid modules. Changes in shape, light and sound create a 3D performance where users experience a fully immersive environment.

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Living Architecture Lab: AI + Autonomous Architecture

RC3

Tyson Hosmer, Octavian Gheorghiu, Philipp Siedler Research Cluster 3 interrogates the notion of ‘living architecture’ as a coupling of living systems with the continuous [re]assembly and [re]formation of architecture. The cluster reappraises linear building lifecycles holistically, learning from living systems and their extraordinary scalable efficiencies arising from adaptive construction with simple flexible parts. Our research focuses on developing autonomously reconfigurable buildings with situated and embodied agency, facilitated variation and artificial intelligence (AI). The cluster develops experimental design models embedded with the ability to self-organise, self-assess and self-improve using deep reinforcement learning to train assembly systems to negotiate shifting architectural objectives. In parallel, we develop architectural robotics and intelligent simulation models in a tightly coupled feedback loop to create self-aware architecture.

We seek to embed local adaptability in the design process by training models to adjust and reconfigure to unforeseen and changing socio-economic needs and environmental conditions.

One research thread focuses on physical reconfiguration enabled through autonomous robotic assembly systems that are tuned and trained in digital simulation environments. Real-time control and sensory feedback of physical robotics is managed within bespoke digital twin simulation environments developed in Unity. Another thread focuses on generative design models that apply AI to spatial planning and the organisation of reconfigurable parts to generate solutions that negotiate multi-objective architectural problems.

This year, Research Cluster 3 rethought the notions of home, work and factory as separate building typologies. The research largely evolved from collective robotic construction systems as ecologies of varied modular robots working collaboratively.

Projects investigated new socio-economic models and scalable platforms that enable the formation of emergent communities through novel distributed living, working and production models aligned with autonomously adaptive architectural systems. We operated across several scales and topologies, from small-scale collaborative robotics for assembly, to adaptive hybrid material systems, to larger-scale robotic spatial [re]assembly.

State of the art architectural robotics and AI design algorithms have the potential to not only transform how we design and build architecture, but fundamentally change our relationship to and conversation with the built environment. In addition, the work interrogates how we live with robots or within robotic environments and how this may change our patterns and way of life.

Students Co-Space Hanbei Chen, Fan Jiang, Jiaqi Peng, Ling Zhang (re)2Bot Janhavi Khairnar, Yu Chia Lin, Yen-Chen Liu, Nelisha Mehta, Pichapa Wipawiwat Re-Space Yuechuan Jin, Yaosheng Tang, Yongye Xie, Weiheng Zhao Stigmergic Spaces Huize Qiu, Çağla Şamcı, Yuying Xiang, Hansen Ye, Ziheng Zhou Theory Tutor Jordi Vivaldi Piera Skills Tutors Ziming He, Baris Erdincer, Philipp Siedler, Panagiotis Tigas Consultants and Critics Sebastian Andia, Alisa Andrasek, Tiffany Cheng, Moritz Doerstelmann, Mustafa El-Sayed, Jelle Feringa, Nils Fischer, Paulo Flores, Marcelyn Gow, Catherine Griffiths, Sung Ho Kim, Toshikatsu Kiuchi, Jakub Klaska, Daniel Koehler, Theo Lalis, Areti Markopoulou, Anna-Maria Meister, Daniela Mitterberger, Philippe Morel, Campbell Orme, Stefana Parascho, Casey Rehm, Gili Ron, Jose Sanchez, Karolin Schmidbaur, Patrik Schumacher, Roland Snooks, Aldo Sollazzo, Theodora Vardouli, Andrew Witt, Maria Yablonina

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3.1, 3.5–3.11 Stigmergic Spaces Inspired by the behaviours of social organisms and natural builders such as ants and slime moulds, the project is a reversible and reconfigurable collective robotic construction (CRC) system. A bespoke cyber-physical simulation environment is used to simulate force feedback, multi-agent collaborative behaviour, a spatial planning algorithm and reinforcement learning for adaptive architecture with programmable collective intelligence. The project targets dynamic construction environments, complex terrains and sites with limited accessibility for largescale construction equipment. Through a virtual platform, this system integrates user demands and environmental data to compress the process of design to adaptive construction and migration while using force feedback to maintain dynamic stability during the construction process. 3.1 Adaptive architecture visualisation of the distributed robotic material system.

3.5–3.6 Distributed robotic material system prototyping.

An iterative series of robotic material system prototypes are tested, considering a bi-directional synergy between a locking and sliding system of reversible architectural elements and the degrees of freedom of assembly robots.

3.7–3.8 Spatial adaptation visualisations. The constraints of the robotic material system are developed to be able to continuously adapt existing assemblies. 3.9 Adaptive architecture visualisations. The system can adapt to dynamic landscapes and environments. 3.10 A custom simulator is developed and trained with deep reinforcement learning to create adaptive continuously stable structures considering the feedback of dynamic loads during the construction process. 3.11 Full-scale distributed robotic prototypes are developed to test adaptive and collaborative behaviours.

3.2–3.3, 3.21–3.28 Re-Space An autonomously adaptive reuse project that incorporates robotic building systems to reactivate derelict buildings for incubator communities. The project is a continuously adaptive CRC with collaboration between three types of relatively simple robots with low degrees of freedom – a freemoving robotic arm, a horizontal wheel and a track sliding robot – and modular blocks with magnets, tracks and a reversible locking system. A digital platform enables multiple users to input individual and shared spatial requirements and an agent-based spatial planner algorithm is used to autonomously negotiate and adapt space planning accordingly. Spatial adjustments communicate with the robotic system. A cyber-physical simulation system is developed with integrated pathfinding and collaborative behaviour for various complex assembly tasks to be trained with reinforcement learning for efficient reconfiguration sequencing to adapt spatial layouts to multi-user requirements.

3.2–3.3, 3.25–3.27 Architectural robotic prototyping with collaborative behaviour. A large series of robotic prototypes test and integrate a material system composed of three types of robots which collaborate, connect and disconnect with a voxel-based material system using tracks, magnets and reversible locking joints.

A wide variety of collaborative behaviours is explored and physically tested. 3.21–3.22 Modular robots. Three types of modular robots are developed: a simple robot that slides on tracks, an arm-like robot and a wheelbased robot. They collaborate to create efficient and complex reconfiguration sequences of reversible wooden blocks. 3.23 Adaptive spatial planning algorithm with deep reinforcement learning. A 3D-adaptive spatial planning algorithm is composed of autonomous spatial agents that modify volumetric boundaries of space over time. The spatial planner is trained to adjust spaces to user requirements while communicating directly with the robotic control system. 3.24 Bespoke robotic simulation 40

and control. A Unity-based simulator is developed with direct real-time communication with the robotic material system. The simulator is trained using reinforcement learning to learn efficient collaborative behaviours for assembly and reconfiguration sequences.

3.12–3.20 (re)2Bot A modular construction system for disaster and refugee relief scenarios that can be assembled, disassembled and reconfigured by an ecology of large-scale robots. Rather than focusing on temporary short-term solutions, the project provides long-term solutions that can evolve over time. Quickly deployable camp settlements can be converted into permanent and adaptive communities over a series of stages. The construction system is developed with lightweight reversible monocoque parts prefabricated with sustainable materials in on-site micro-factories and co-designed with large-scale collaborative assembly robots. The project leverages constraintsolving computational algorithms and reinforcement learning to generate, construct, expand and reconfigure multifunctional spatial compositions according to the needs of the local refugee community for the present and future. 3.12 Generative constraint-solving algorithm outputs for various building topologies. 3.13–3.14, 3.19–3.20 Architectural visualisations of various phases of refugee community assembly and adaptation over time by large-scale autonomous robots. 3.15–3.16 Robotic prototypes. Scaled robotic prototypes are developed with custom end effectors and degrees of freedom for the reversible assembly of prefabricated fibre composite monocoque elements. 3.17–3.18 Material system prototyping. Natural fibre composite monocoque elements are developed as a rib system connected through robotic winding which is produced in micro-factories on site.

3.4, 3.29–3.35 Co-Space A platform providing flexible and continuously adaptive spatial solutions for housing and shared community space for members of cooperative organisations. The project is developed as an autonomous living architecture system through the co-design of a collaborative ecology of modular assembly robots and reversible blocks. Inspired by termite mounds and ant construction, modular robots incrementally adapt cave-like spaces and assemble into collaborative body plans with passive parts for more complex tasks. The project has an adaptive lifecycle and operates over multiple timescales, leveraging a spatial planning and constraint-solving algorithm linked to a robotic simulator. The simulator uses reinforcement learning to negotiate multi-user private and shared spatial requirements, modifying spaces accordingly.

The project considers a continuous co-existence between humans and robots enabling constantly evolving cooperative communities to form and reform.

3.4, 3.32–3.34 Modular collaborative robotic prototyping. Three types of simple modular robotics are developed with the ability to connect, disconnect and collaborate as individuals or as larger, more complex body plans for reversible assembly tasks.

Robots and material systems are co-designed with each other for complex assembly and reconfiguration.

3.29–3.30 Generative design algorithm. A voxel-based generative algorithm is developed for continuous adaptive space planning. 3.31, 3.35 Co-space community visualisations. The system utilises generative space planning in communication with the robotic material system to continuously adjust spaces to cooperative community requirements.

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Product Architecture

RC5

Stefan Bassing, Marios Tsiliakos

Research Cluster 5 investigates the relationship between digital and physical products for architectural or spatial applications.

The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry operates on the principle of non-repetitive processes, where every building is conceived as a prototype within a unique context. Typically, buildings are executed on a per project basis, making the architectural industry part of the service economy. The research cluster aims to transform the traditionally service-oriented architectural design industry into one that develops its own product applications and focuses on automation and scalability. We augment tangible or intangible technological capabilities into physical items, inventing new digital products that replace traditional spatial experiences. Product architecture extends the reach of design beyond that which can be built. We enhance the design cycle with novel solutions developed from industries such as industrial design, software development and systems design. The intention is to adopt a range of computational design techniques to generate geometry and interactive content, or to explore the design of latent space through machine learning.

Over the year, students worked with user-centric design thinking strategies, firstly to identify a distinct spatial problem, and then to examine the existing landscape of applications that bridge design, fabrication and technological innovation. Throughout the subsequent stages of the design process, we developed a series of multi-layered solutions tailored to these individual use cases, blending the domains of technology and architecture. We achieved this by employing cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of recommender systems, robotics for adaptable spatial configurations and 3D printing for flexible fabrication and circularity of materials. At the same time, we investigated introducing contemporary concepts popular in the Web3 domain such as gamification, where design is incentivised by rewards through experiences, and digital twins in the form of retrofitting spaces and improving their spatial and operational performance, looking beyond the traditional meaning of Building Management Systems (BMS).

During the past year, we have investigated many different architectural products, from affordable and configurable 3D-printed housing solutions and highly adaptive co-working spaces with mobile robotic furniture, to rethinking contemporary education as a gamified experience in the metaverse space.

Students Aurora Diba Baghernejad, Chen Liang, Shiyu Liu, Shiyuan Liu, Haojin Qin Eduverse Jueqiu Gong, Qixuan Huang, Qiyue Huang, Huizhao Liu, Dehui Tian Wanderland Ziding Cai, Enci Xie, Yuting (Nina) Yan, Xuanhao Zhang Theory Tutor Daria Ricchi Skills Tutors Mumin Keser, JJ Lee, Alvaro Lopez, Zehao Qin Consultants and Critics Ai Build, Calin Craiu, FabPub, Pietro Gottardi, Loukia Iliopoulou

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5.1–5.11 Aurora The project offers an innovative and configurable 3D-printed housing solution that integrates web technologies, machine learning (ML) and extended reality. It rethinks the way we design, construct and assemble homes – ultimately enhancing the quality of urban living. 5.1 Aurora sections deconstructed.

Permutations of the Aurora home in axonometric view.

5.2–5.3 Layout and furniture configurator. The Aurora app introduces a unique system for the configuration of units. The process is split into multiple levels, from a brute force layout packing to an optimisation step, attempting to maximise the utilisation of available space tailored to the needs of the individual. Next, the system is ready to accommodate furniture according to the user’s needs and preferences. 5.4 Furniture configurator interface.

The front end of Aurora includes a series of web apps built in a games engine environment. These allow the user to reconfigure their Aurora homes in real time, control smart systems or purchase add-ons. 5.5 Artificial intelligence recommender system. Aurora is trained using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with data collected through questionnaires. Users can decide whether they want assistance from the system in establishing the best configuration for their Aurora home. With a set of inputs regarding the individual, the ML model recommends possible configurations for them. 5.6 Aurora enhances small-space living by blending the tangible with the digital. Augmented reality (AR) experiences are offered to Aurora users through an on-demand app and can be mapped onto the Aurora sections, extending the experience of space beyond the physical. 5.7 An Aurora home use case. Space is not an issue when this can be tailored to your needs. 5.8 Users can exchange their old parts, recycle them or reuse the material for printing new parts. They can also exchange parts with others, all through the Aurora marketplace.

5.9 The Aurora home offers endless possibilities and arrangements of its distinct but at the same time modular parts. 5.10–5.11 Aurora is a fully 3D-printable solution, tailored to the needs of its users.

5.12–5.19 Wanderland The project provides a holistic solution for the unpredictable workspace demands of the expanding digital nomad community. It automates the dynamic allocation of space by mounting 3D-printed office equipment onto mobile robots. 5.12 Wanderland‘s mobile robots will be there for you when you arrive.

5.13 A day in Wanderland begins by navigating through the space using the AR app. Users can easily find their allocated space even if it differs from their previous visits.

5.14 Space-planning tool. Wanderland employs a back-end system capable of analysing existing floor plans and assessing them in regard to daylight, noise levels and connectivity, providing a heat map of whether different working types can be located for more effective working. 5.15 Solving layouts with genetic optimisation.

A genetic algorithm is utilised to provide the best layout configuration for the following working day. It takes into account data from previous analysis but is also dynamic, noting the number and types of bookings and assessing robot mobility within users’ calendars. 5.16 Wanderland furniture details. All Wanderland equipment is specifically designed to fit various add-ons, adapting to the everchanging needs of digital nomads. In addition, it is equipped with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors capable of providing evidence-based information on the assumptions of the space-planning tool in terms of operational performance. 5.17 Furniture is mounted on semi-autonomous robots that are controlled by the back-end space-planning tool. It also adapts to Wanderland’s local mobile robots as they rearrange the space to host different events. 5.18 All of Wanderland’s furniture is 3D-printed using sustainable materials. It can 52

be recycled, customised in terms of colour and size, and more importantly, fabricated anywhere in the world, with a robotic 3D printer capacity. 5.19 During the day, Wanderland’s mobile robots rearrange the space and equipment to host different events. This is carried out in an unintrusive way with optimised routes of reassembly.

5.20–5.26 Eduverse The project reimagines contemporary education as an immersive gamified experience in the metaverse, exploring the endless opportunities this web-connected platform of collaborative learning could open up to students and educators. 5.20 Eduverse avatar customisation. Each student in the Eduverse can customise their avatar and schedule according to their individual curriculum. 5.21 Workspace customisation permutations. Each student is allocated as many workspaces as they need, as space is not an issue in the metaverse. 5.22 Eduverse campus procedural generation. The campus is rebuilt every semester by a procedural generation process, using data from existing cities and also introducing stochastic elements of content creation – from masterplanning grids to building typologies, landmarks and the non-player character (NPC) population. 5.23 Barcelona campus axonometric. In this scenario, the semester’s brief is inspired by the architecture of Barcelona; therefore, the campus is auto-generated to provide the relevant dynamic teaching endpoints in the curriculum.

5.24 Traditional design classes are replaced with dynamic designs that replace buildings in the campus’ urban fabric. Rewards in the form of tokens are offered for the best designs. 5.25 Walking through the Eduverse campus is a novel experience each day. Users can walk through a different city or even through a different era.

NPCs and static information points guide students along the way. 5.26 Interactive history class. How would it feel to learn while immersed in Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion? The Eduverse gives students the opportunity to explore the building’s structural elements and understand its architectural detailing in innovative new ways.

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Material Architecture Lab

Art and Material

RC6

Christopher Fischlein, Guan Lee, Daniel Widrig

Research Cluster 6 places importance on the utilisation of materials and the examination of design processes above and beyond practicality. We encourage design and making within a critical framework that challenges the boundary between art and architecture.

This year we turned to the craft of making artwork for design ideas and production inspiration. Art fabrication is not a new phenomenon but has evolved over time, reflecting changes in artistic practices, technological advancements and cultural values. Making art is a vital part of the design and architectural world, enabling architects to realise ambitious and complex formal projects that push the boundaries of not only what we build but also how we build.

The technological advancements of the 19th and 20th centuries allowed artists to explore new material systems and construction methods. The distinction between artist and craftsman continued to blur as artists began to collaborate with industry experts to create works using techniques like metal casting and glassblowing. How can architecture based on techniques of art production play a role in design experiments? How can craft grow from personal artmaking to a collective and spatial construct? Is it just a shift of scales, both physical and conceptual?

Our year started with a visit to Castle Fine Arts Foundry in Oswestry, Shropshire, a bronze casting foundry founded by sculptor Chris Butler over 30 years ago. The visit allowed students to witness the large-scale casting of metal and the architecture of sculpture making: the creation of wax copies, scaling of models, shelling of moulds, pouring of metal and finally the finishing of metal patina.

This year our projects have included research into future air quality in relation to activated carbon composite, concrete rubble as a building material, bronze casting with burnt-out natural fibre and a rethinking of papier-mâché using clay slip. The projects have sought to transform methods of production for artwork into construction details and building components.

Students ACixty_one Warisa Chaisutyakorn, Andres Cordova Cahuenas, Nour Shalaby, Tereza Zivotska MorphoTextura Lijia Ding, Lemeng Shi, Qiyao Wang, Fangyin Wu Re-Concrete Yue Wang, Zhiyue Wang, Yixuan Yang, Wei Zhang Metallic Fabric Xinyu Tan, Zhiyuan Tian, Yunxuan Xiao, Jingyang Yuan Slip-Mâché Mingyi Xia, Jiaqi Yao, Xiangyu Zhou Theory Tutor Ruby Law Partner Chris Butler, Castle Fine Arts Foundry

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6.1 Ceramic Shell Casting Site visit to Castle Fine Arts Foundry, Wales, UK. Over the past year, Research Cluster 6 have collaborated with Castle Fine Arts Foundry to learn from the fabrication techniques of ceramic shell casting and apply them to their own research.

By solidifying soft materials in wax, encasing them in ceramic and then burning away the wax for metal casting, students have been able to translate intricate and fragile materials into solid and permanent objects.

6.2, 6.27–6.32 MorphoTextura This project examines the intricate relationship between natural materials and age-old weaving techniques. The exploration of lost-wax casting, also known as investment casting or precision casting, reveals the unique properties of wax and its influence on moulding materials. With the incorporation of natural materials such as cotton, wool, fabric and rope, intricate knots and weaves are accentuated, creating augmented 3D patterns. Wax is reintroduced in this process, serving as a binding agent to bolster the pattern’s stability. Subsequently, this composite undergoes a transformation, transmuting the soft material into rigid metal yet preserving its visual nuances. The project seamlessly melds textures, crafts and materials, creating a bridge between timehonoured techniques and modern digital technologies.

6.3–6.8 Re-Concrete The project addresses the challenges around recycling concrete waste and develops methods to achieve full reuse. 3D modelling software aids in optimising the utilisation of concrete fragments sourced from planned demolitions. These fragments undergo scanning and are then compiled in a comprehensive database. Drawing inspiration from the dynamic tensegrity system, a typological approach is taken to assemble the concrete pieces.

Extensive research into nodal connections has been conducted, ensuring the viability of these assemblies.

The overarching goal is to reshape the landscape of concrete reuse, championing sustainable recycling techniques for a greener future.

6.9–6.14 Slip-Mâché The project explores the combination of clay and paper to create a composite material. Upon exposure to high temperatures, the paper component evaporates, leaving a porous structure in its wake. This property allows for the creation of thin shells using papier-mâché techniques and the production of ceramic tiles with porous patterns using laminate methods. The end result offers new possibilities for constructing ceramic buildings, sculptures, landscape features and more.

6.15–6.20 Metallic Fabric Delving into the intricate realm of fashion design, the project focuses on transforming and reinterpreting the attributes of fabric.

By accentuating the decorative textures and functional seams typically reserved for flat fabrics, a series of 3D designs is developed. These designs capture the delicate nuances of soft fabric patterns, translating them into more rigid and durable materials. Through the application of the ceramic shell casting technique, the project unveils a novel morphology influenced by the softness of fabric, but taking the form of contrasting, hard architectural elements.

6.21–6.26 ACixty_one Air pollution poses a major threat to human health, with PM2.5 particles being particularly worrisome due to their ability to penetrate deep into the respiratory system. This project explores the potential of activated carbon as a material to adsorb PM2.5 in urban areas. By combining activated carbon with bioplastic, a new composite material is created that is printable, malleable and recyclable. Extensive research on material properties and fabrication techniques results in an optimised approach that combines 3D printing and scraping. The project proposes a new architectural 64

material that captures PM2.5 from the air and can be used for breathing pods or as modules for polluted London Underground stations, offering a solution to the urgent problem of air pollution and promoting sustainable urban environments.

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Unruly Assemblies

RC7

Richard Beckett, Christopher Whiteside

Research Cluster 7 is an innovative design research studio that considers how advances in biology, engineering and the understanding of the microbiome are affecting architecture. The cluster explores new modes of bio-design workflows and digital fabrication methods, as well as advances in the field of synthetic biology and material sciences. The work questions how these topics can challenge modern approaches to architecture, which have fundamentally sought to separate the human from the non-human world as the preferred condition. Instead, through a multidisciplinary and multi-species approach to design, we pursue new ways of building with living agencies, to create cities that are sustainable, healthy and biodiverse in the age of the Anthropocene.

This year, a specific interest in ‘grown’ composite materials, alongside the use of environmentally driven machine learning models, informed the conception of new building paradigms and the development of novel bio-fabrication techniques. Considering the contemporary understanding of the human as a holobiont as well as the shifting modes of bio-politics, students developed novel biologically driven spatial assemblies to provide for multiple living agencies across a range of building typologies. Our projects explored these living material systems and unruly building typologies for urban living alongside radical solutions addressing issues including urban growth in the age of the Anthropocene, and the need to rewild urban environments with micro-biodiversity.

BioColony investigated architecture as an assembly of biologically active materials, matters and spatial ecologies by curating a dwelling/allotment building typology and integrating live–work–gardening typologies in a series of entanglements of species, genes and timescales. MycoPulp explored the development of low-energy, rapidly renewable composite materials to create an architecture that is part fabricated, part ‘grown’. MycoLoofah developed hybrid composite materials that were ‘grown’ together, comprising mycelium, loofah and grass roots, to explore a more biological, non-permanent architecture. Each of these materials engaged with circular material economies which could reduce the impact of architecture and construction on the climate. They could also serve as bio-receptive substrates for the secondary growth of photosynthetic organisms to contribute to carbon reduction and increased biodiversity in cities.

Students BioColony Kun Chen, Jiaming (Key) Hu, Yuxiao Huo, Xuran Xiao MycoPulp Lokyi Chan, Qianyuan Jin, Xiaoxuan Qu MycoLoofah Hanshu Jia, Arunima Kalra, Anqi Pei Theory Tutor Yota Adilenidou Skills Tutors Juan Cantu, Eleana Polychronaki, Hangchuan Wei

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7.1–7.4 BioColony This project explores architecture as an assembly of biologically active materials, matters and spatial ecologies, curating live–work–gardening typologies as a series of entanglements of species, genes and timescales. Building on the previous bio-receptive design approaches developed by Research Cluster 7, the project looks beyond the material condition and instead defines new ways to plan building strategies to integrate living matter into architecture. The project develops a design methodology using machine learning (ML) models trained on environmental datasets and a proposed platform tool that enables site-specific environmental information to be embedded in any given structure, thus optimising building mass and form for maximal growth of natural diversity. The typology becomes an inhabitable urban landscape of unruly territories that embraces ecological concepts of ageing, erosion and decay as a fundamental paradigm of resilience.

Taxonomies of ecological parts are assembled using environmentally driven ML models to imagine how buildings as ‘biocolonies’ can serve as an ecosystem service for health.

7.5–7.11 MycoPulp The project explores the development of low-energy, rapidly renewable composite materials for architecture that are part fabricated, part grown. Sited within the fields of bio-digital design and engineered living materials, the project utilises waste materials in line with trends towards circular material economies that then serve as a structural scaffold for the secondary growth of mycelium to explore living building elements.

This bio-fabrication approach produces ‘unruly’ composites that are partly controllable in terms of stiffness, thickness and mass, but vibrant and ephemeral in their form and behaviour as they lose or gain moisture and become colonised by time, environment and nature.

Using this approach, the project rejects the modern paradigm of demolition and rebuild and instead explores the adaptive reuse of non-structural building parts using materials that require a reframing of the idea that buildings should be permanent. These composites are imagined as components for non-permanent elements of the building fabric, creating ephemeral biological spaces for buildings that undergo cyclical phases of decay and regrowth/manufacture.

7.12–7.18 MycoLoofah Operating within the discourse of bio-digital design, the project addresses the contemporary built environment challenges of material resource and low urban biodiversity. Western obsessions with permeance and sterility have favoured the development of material composites that are resistant to ageing, decay or biological growth through the use of chemical or synthetic agents. These materials are unable to be reused or recycled and, as the average lifespan of buildings is reducing, mostly end up in landfill.

In line with these ecological and material insecurities, the project explores the use of hybrid living materials as low-energy, rapidly renewable building materials.

Hybrid composite materials are ‘grown’ together, comprising mycelium, loofah and grass roots, exploring a more biological, non-permanent architecture. These materials engage with circular material economies that can reduce the impact of architecture and construction on climate challenges. They can also serve as bioreceptive substrates for the secondary growth of photosynthetic organisms that can contribute to carbon reduction and increase biodiversity in cities.

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Towards a Multi-Material Architecture

RC8

Kostas Grigoriadis

Research Cluster 8 focuses on multi-material design and the wider implications that the use of multi-materials will have on architecture and building construction in the future. We explore new methods of designing and building with material gradients, rethinking componentbased assembly and the standard practice of 20th-century mechanical connectivity. In previous years, the cluster has investigated the use of robotic fabrication for the in-situ 3D printing of building façades and the fusion of materials such as metal and glass to generate componentless, materially continuous envelopes. This year, students researched the origins of materials that make up larger multi-material topologies from recycled sources, and the end-of-life strategies of buildings and structures deployed across London.

The first of the two projects revived unused pocket spaces in the city. The design process consisted of three stages: material research, micro-home design and robotic additive manufacturing. During the first stage, the team explored multi-materiality by synthesising man-made and organic compounds obtained from landfill sites outside London. The resulting bio-compounds of discarded crustacean animal shells fused with discarded plastics were robotically extruded to generate adaptive micro-home designs.

These were inserted in unused pocket spaces to help alleviate the current housing shortage. Post-use, the micro-home materials can be shredded down, and converted into filament for 3D printing of new objects and spaces.

The second project looked into the problem of the masses of plastic and organic materials that go to waste every day, as well as the pressing need for more retail space in London. The project engaged with these issues by proposing a series of micro-retail units at vacant sites across the city. These spaces were robotically fabricated and made of graded plastic fused with oyster and coffee grounds that can be recycled when the structures come to their end of life. In terms of design, lattice geometries derived through topology optimisation were used to generate enclosures that conserved material and made full use of the leftover sites.

Students Cycle of Recycling Zhen Huang, Xinao Zhang, Zhen Zhao Multi-Material Micro-Homes Praful Pradeep, En Yang, Lanxin Yang Theory Tutor Ilaria di Carlo Skills Tutors Samuel Esses, Alvaro Lopez Rodriguez Consultant Martyn Carter

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8.1 Research Cluster 8 Lattice prototypes. A series of 3D-printed and robotically extruded prototypes are developed, studying: density and thickness variation, Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM)-style and hybrid layered/lattice printing, multi-material printing, skin and structural lattice hybridisation and geometric lattice patterns.

8.2–8.10 Cycle of Recycling 8.2 Topological optimisations are recursively iterated to generate an acceptable spatial solution that conforms to site and retail space accessibility criteria. 8.3 Micro-retail space 3D-sectional render. The selected optimisation is converted into a lattice that merges with the skin and floors to form a continuous multi-material entity. There are no discrete parts, just a single topology of blended materials and geometries. 8.4–8.5 Spatial hybrid lattice design process sequence. The project engages with the pressing need for new retail space in London.

It addresses this issue by proposing a series of microretail spaces at vacant sites across the city. In terms of the design process, a bounding box is set, followed by the assigning of support points, loads and obstacle geometries within it. The resulting topologically optimised geometry is converted into a variable thickness and density lattice. Due to the use of volume meshing in the optimisation step, the lattice is volumetric and occupies the whole optimised geometry. A skin is then shrinkwrapped across the lattice and fused to it, with materials distributed across the lattice topology. 8.6–8.7 Spatial hybrid lattice interior renders. The micro-retail spaces are robotically fabricated out of a functionally graded material consisting of polylactide (PLA) plastic fused with oyster shells and coffee grounds. The resulting micro-structures can be recycled at their end of life or biodegraded, as they are made of natural materials.

The multi-material lattice morphologies permeate the interior spaces. 8.8–8.9 Transparent oyster and coffee ground PLA prototypes. Around 18,000 tonnes of waste were generated per day in London in 2021, and a total of 7,500,000 tonnes in the whole year. Part of this waste consists of discarded oyster shells and coffee grounds from cafés and restaurants across the city. These prototypes are fabricated, with PLA fused with oyster shells and coffee ground particles in a speculative attempt to alleviate this problem of wastage. Additionally, load testing by UCL Mechanical Engineering showed that multi-material PLA exhibits higher tensile and compressive strength than pure PLA. 8.10 Hybrid layered and latticed 3D-printed prototype. Standard methods of 3D printing plastics consist of horizontal or non-planar layering, or lattice extrusion. Here, horizontal layering and lattice extrusion are combined in one process to generate a structural skin hybrid. The layered outer skin has a waterproofing function and its embedded internal lattice supports the skin structurally.

8.11–8.19 Multi-Material Micro-Homes 8.11 Various types of multi-material PLA lattices. The materials used in the prototypes are generated by synthesising man-made and organic compounds obtained from landfill sites outside London. 8.12–8.13 Multi-material sectional studies. The project proposes the insertion of microhomes in London’s unused pocket spaces in an attempt to alleviate the current housing shortage. The size and arrangement of spaces within the micro-homes are informed by detailed studies of the ergonomics of campervans. Materials of variable rigidity and opacity are distributed across the lattices forming and enclosing these spaces to regulate light, privacy and the comfort of regions in contact with the body. 8.14–8.15 Volumetric lattice studies. The design method to generate the micro-home spaces first consists of packing spherical geometries. These are then offset inwards and 86

3D-printable lattices fill the gaps in between. The lattices explored here consist of triangular, rectangular and hexagonal grids, infilling equal or variably sized sphere-packing booleans and cell-thickness and size-gradient options. 8.16–8.17 Micro-home crossand close-up sections. Various structures and latticefilling methods were tested and simulated towards generating the project designs. Sunlight analyses and privacy studies, as well as load-bearing simulations, were also part of the design process. The result is an integrated design including skin, a supporting structure and even furniture. Gradients in structural thickness, density and transparency are guided by the simulation data that informs their precise distribution. 8.18 WAAM-style PLA lattice. PLA plastic prototype fabricated using a novel extrusion method based on dot-by-dot 3D printing.

Plastic is typically extruded in a layered manner or in the form of lattice ‘space frames’ consisting of straight vertical, horizontal and diagonal segments. Here, in a method similar to metal WAAM, plastic is extruded in one lump of material per layer to generate the 3D lattice.

8.19 Dual material 3D-printing test. The nodes of this 3D-printed lattice are fabricated in white PLA and the straight diagonal members in black PLA. In principle, a structural type of plastic could also be used in highstructural-load regions and a lower-performing one in structurally neutral areas.

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Architecture for the Augmented Age

RC9

Alvaro Lopez Rodriguez, Igor Pantic

Throughout history, technology has had a crucial influence on the development of society. Different eras have been defined by sets of technological advancements which have had a profound impact on the built environment and construction. It has been proposed that, after the internet age, we are embarking on a new era: the ‘Augmented Age’.1 With this in mind, Research Cluster 9 explores how extended reality (XR) technologies can change the ways in which we design, build and interact with our cities. The cluster explores a hybrid approach to making through the application of alternative strategies for fabrication. Making in XR can enhance traditional craftsmanship by augmenting hand and material skills with the precision and formal possibilities of digital modelling. XR-assisted processes can enhance human labour with data, while also enabling seamless inclusion of intuitive decision-making and a more immersive experience, elements often absent from automated construction processes.

The cluster’s research also includes applications of XR technologies which allow for an immersive experience and interaction with the built environment and the metaverse. Our students investigate how the surge of virtual platforms – which enable users to create, collaborate, explore and engage in economic activity – intertwines with the built environment and how architecture and the urban environment become both the canvas and the enablers of the virtual realm.

Students ActiCiti Lihua Feng, Dorsa Hosseinkhani, Peixuan Li, Yiyuan Ma ARDobe Yubo Wang, Haowen Xue, Yifan Xue, Xuan Zhang Event X Yupeng Huang, Ge Leng, Liuyang Miao MisMif Carl Barrett, Nian Liu, Ziqing (Elodia) Wei Theory Tutor Daria Ricchi Skills Tutor Hanjun Kim

1. Brett King (2016), Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane, Marshall Cavendish International 93

9.1–9.5 MisMif With the continuous evolution of extended reality (XR) technology, the potential for a merged reality metaverse is becoming ever more tangible. The methods of inhabiting these immersive spaces are undergoing a profound transformation, shifting from the creation of entirely virtual realms to integrating virtual media that engages in direct dialogue with the architectural fabric of the physical world. This approach needs to consider the rich historical context, intricate textures and environmental data profiles of physical spaces.

In this context, the project introduces a procedural method that engages with existing spaces through textures and geometries while also establishing a new interface with a digital ecology that overlays the urban landscape. This endeavour opens up new horizons for the convergence of physical and virtual space, fostering a dynamic and immersive metaverse that intertwines the realms of the real and the digital. 9.1 Example of an augmented non-player character (NPC) within the Barbican Centre, London. 9.2 Wearable device for real-life data collection. 9.3 Use of the wearable device for interaction with a particle-based NPC. 9.4 Example of an augmented NPC within Covent Garden, London.

9.5 Example of an augmented interior NPC within Covent Garden, London.

9.6–9.9 ActiCiti The project revolutionises engagement with the built environment through immersive mixedreality (MR) experiences. Using a personalised MR platform, users can transform their perception of the physical world by overlaying digital data, unlocking new levels of customisation and exploration. Blurring the lines between reality and virtuality, the project shapes environments and digs into digital materiality.

It explores the remarkable potential of AI-generated content (AIGC) to extend the performance of materials in digital overlays, enabling the attainment of object properties that surpass the limits of reality. Users become co-creators, fostering creativity, collaboration and a deeper connection to urban spaces. 9.6 Visualisation of the user interface of the ‘ActiCiti’ app. 9.7 Visualisation of augmented architecture in London. 9.8 Example of the interior of an augmented architecture. 9.9 Diagram defining the app user experience structure and functionalities.

9.10–9.13 Event X The project explores the impact of MR technology on architecture by providing a platform for immersive design services and the creation of pop-up event spaces. MR architecture is divided into virtual and physical components. The virtual component is represented through a series of digital overlays, which enable the user to interact with the space in a constantly changing and evolving manner, while the physical elements provide the backdrop to which these overlays are anchored. 9.10 Wave function collapse (WFC) interaction. Variations of the WFC interact with existing space. 9.11 Variations for event spaces based on WFC algorithms. 9.12 An example of the interaction between the digital component and the physical component.

9.13 Visualisation of a remote user attending an MR event.

9.14–9.19 ARDobe Inspired by traditional architecture, this project explores the possibility of using low-tech methods to construct buildings in remote areas with the aid of MR devices. MR technology is deployed as a tool for guided construction during the processes of prefabrication and assembly of building elements.

Traditional formwork typically requires skilled workers for precise assembly and construction, which limits architectural expression, prolongs construction time and increases construction costs. Therefore, this project adopts ground-based inverted moulds and develops an MR application to manage the construction process, including positioning the formwork, controlling the depth, 94

managing material proportions and organising the module fabrication and assembly sequence.

9.14 Catalogue of WFC-generative algorithm tiles.

9.15 Diagram explaining the interconnection of the building systems and materials . 9.16 Visualisation of the augmented reality manufacturing projection.

9.17 Visual interface of the digital platform user interface. 9.18 Building process. Visualisation of the augmented building process for a house model.

9.19 House 1. Visualisation of a fully constructed house model using the ‘ARDobe’ platform.

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Constructing the Phygital

RC10

Federico Borello, Cesar Fragachan

Research Cluster 10 is dedicated to investigating and advancing cutting-edge design and tech-enabled processes in the field of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). By harnessing the power of computation and embracing the latest emerging technologies, the cluster pushes the boundaries of innovation in the industry.

Our research addresses the pressing issue of London’s housing shortage by adopting a tech-enabled and participatory design methodology. Data on the requirements of end users is gathered through various platforms that draw inspiration from the gaming, automobile and aerospace industries. This data-driven approach ensures that the resulting housing solutions are precisely tailored to meet the needs and preferences of future occupants.

The cluster explores the synergies between Design for Manufacture and Assembly practices and industrialised modular construction technologies. By integrating these two methodologies, we aim to develop structure- and production-aware parametric architectural components. This strategic combination allows for the creation of architectural elements that can be efficiently manufactured and assembled, thereby streamlining the construction process, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs. Kit-of-parts are developed and deployed in prototypical scenarios which consist of both private and public spaces to create sustainable mixed developments. The goal is to increase density in urban areas while improving social interactions and providing a better quality of life.

Our research endeavours to foster enhanced community interactions and overall wellbeing by designing spaces that facilitate social connections and promote a sense of community.

In doing so, we address the pressing housing shortage while also contributing to the broader societal need for sustainable and harmonious urban environments.

Students Hive Ruihan Chang, Arjun Kapoor, Taishan Lei, Yang Wu, Hussein Zaarour Oasis Hou Io Chan, Yiding Mao, Xinyi Tian, Zihan Xu, Meiqian Zhang Machiya Adhruv Chadha, Xin Lin, Limin Wang, Xinyue Zhang Theory Tutor Alejandro Veliz Reyes Skills Tutor Jianfei Chu Consultants and Critics Jose Ignacio Alvarez (Stelling Properties), Marco Caprani (Pininfarina Architecture), Giuseppe Conti, Martina Faedda, Enrico Maggi, Giovanni de Niederhäusern

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10.1, 10.9–10.14 Oasis The singular purpose of traditional buildings is no longer sufficient to meet the diverse demands of contemporary society. Their lack of flexibility and limited range of functions hinder their ability to adapt to evolving needs. The currently prevalent standardised modular construction design fails to acknowledge that users are dynamic entities with evolving requirements. The design of such structures should prioritise adaptability in order to effectively support the evolving lifestyles and habits of their occupants. This project is dedicated to addressing the aforementioned issues by implementing modular design principles that emphasise flexibility, adaptable interfaces, standardised repairs, durability and personalisation. Simultaneously, it promotes sustainability and circularity, ensuring a more environmentally conscious approach. 10.1 Close-up view of an urban block, showcasing green roof spaces, sustainable materials and shared amenities for the inhabitants and the public. 10.9 User customisation of the unit balcony design through the ‘Oasis’ platform.

Customisation choices have an impact on the overall context and surroundings. In this example, if a terrace is added to the façade, the windows will transform into floor-to-ceiling glass doors, seamlessly linking the indoor space with the outdoor terrace. 10.10 Automated aggregation of units in a large-scale urban context, ensuring circulation while linking multiple seed points in the urban surroundings. 10.11–10.12 Unit interior space visualisation after the user configuration has been completed, featuring walls with integrated furniture and a multi-material palette. 10.13 Common green spaces situated interstitially within the residential community.

The porous aggregation of units allows the creation of multiple open green spaces where gathering and social interaction are encouraged to form a vibrant neighbourhood. 10.14 Aerial view of an urban proposal, showcasing green roof spaces and timber-clad curvilinear terraces. Sustainable materials, shared common areas, ground floor retail spaces and customisable dwelling units define the vision for the urban blocks of future cities.

10.2–10.8 Hive This project enhances community empowerment by promoting a more equitable and inclusive housing process, encompassing design, supply and delivery. This initiative builds upon existing research and extends its influence through the implementation of a platform-based solution that revolutionises the approach to housing design, construction and occupancy. This transformative platform ensures accessibility to a broader audience regardless of their geographical location, enabling users to create and personalise their living spaces while staying informed about the production processes. The project is dedicated to advocating sustainable and innovative solutions for the housing needs of diverse communities, encouraging users to take ownership of their individual habitats to foster greater agency and participation, promote social equity and facilitate economic mobility. 10.2 Close-up view of the staggered terraces, a result of the aggregation of multiple dwelling units. 10.3 The platform offers a comprehensive interface designed specifically for developers. This enriched overview gives users an insight into every layer of the aggregation. Developers can meticulously assess communal areas, ensuring a balanced equilibrium that culminates in the approval of the final aggregations. 10.4 The overall dwelling unit design is the result of the interior and exterior kits being defined and based on the functions within. These units enhance flexibility of function and adaptability for various contexts, whether urban with diverse geometries or rural with low houses. The provision of multiple options 104

for each customisable layer of the unit gives end users agency to make design decisions and actively participate in the process of construction. 10.5 High-rise urban typology as a result of the stacking of multiple prefabricated units. 10.6 The platform’s participatory approach through the engagement of local communities in the construction process. 10.7 Unit interior space visualisation after the user configuration has been completed. Furniture is designed as a transformable component to better fit specific needs and space requirements. 10.8 Perspective view of a neighbourhood scale proposal featuring a prefabricated kit of parts, factory assembled and deployed on site for construction.

10.15–10.19 Machiya London has undergone substantial and ongoing growth, which presents significant challenges within the construction sector, particularly with regard to the disparity between housing supply and the escalating demands of residents. This situation is further exacerbated by spatial distribution discrepancies and a pronounced separation between employment opportunities and residential areas. The project tackles these pressing issues by devising affordable homes tailored to the specific needs of diverse users. It proposes the utilisation of modular components that can be swiftly manufactured and seamlessly assembled off site within an industrialised setup. Additionally, a kit-of-parts system has been developed to facilitate mass customisation and accommodate various user types, while also allowing structures to be adapted to different site conditions.

These initiatives will help foster the creation of dynamic and thriving co-living communities. 10.15 Street view of a river-facing urban proposal made up of an aggregation of multiple private and public prefabricated modular units. 10.16 Modular components catalogue featuring a digitally manufactured mass timber structure and laminated timber finishes. Furniture and appliances are fully integrated within the individual components and offer an efficient system for fast deployment on site with a wide range of combinatorial spatial opportunities.

10.17–10.19 A roof garden and intertwined public and private spaces generated as a result of the unit’s stacking process. The separation between interior and exterior is blurred into a continuous space featuring mixed functions for its inhabitants, enabling community cohesion and social interaction.

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Architectural Design Thesis Module Coordinator: Mollie Claypool

In this module students write at Master’s level, analysing text to establish content relevant to their individual programme of study.

The vehicle for this is an introduction to key theoretical concepts in architectural design, taught in the first term, which are then taken forward during the rest of the academic year. These concepts are varied but specific to the clusters’ research for that year. The module gives students an overview of the skills required to undertake a theoretical, cultural and historical study at postgraduate level, looking into the issues that underpin a study of architectural design, and introduces students to appropriate lines of investigation.

Students develop their knowledge of the theoretical and historical issues that underpin a study of architectural design and gain an understanding of the skills required to undertake a theoretical and historical study. They then undertake a written essay (including a literature review) with a bibliography and illustrations, examples of which are shown on the following pages.

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Performative Architecture as a Theatrical Performer Itself: A Technological Extension to the Dancer’s Movement Aya Meskawi Thesis tutor: Provides Ng Imagine a scenario where you’re dancing: the boundaries of the space envelop your shifting body and adjust to your choreography congruently. As you move, the elements that comprise your surrounding space learn to share your movement. As a result, the architectural elements become an extension of your performance, connecting you with the audience.

Performance is often seen as a one-sided phenomenon defined by the performer.

However, many elements at work contribute highly to any artistic act. These elements divide into ‘subject’ and ‘agent’. The subject is the free independent element that is the performer, whereas the agent is an additional essential element to the subject.

Another crucial but often passive element is the architectural space that hosts the event. History has witnessed efforts to activate the role of performance spaces towards interactivity, yet architecture today primarily serves as a static background for the overall experience.

This thesis explores innovative means to enhance engagement, performance and spatial quality by foregrounding architecture.

With the advent of soft robotics and technological and computational advancements, architecture can take real-time data, generate form-changing movements and create new sensory experiences. Space can become another layer of skin in an innovative theatrical experience, where space, subject and agent become the new trilogy of performative events. Through both theoretical and experimental investigations, this thesis hypothesises the performativity of spaces as a spectrum ranging from immaterial sensory experiences to shape-changing adaptive systems. Tracing a history of post-structuralist, participatory and technological explorations, performance spaces are comparatively analysed under the frameworks of ‘traditional spaces’, ‘informal spaces’ and ‘spaces as performers’. Through real-life case studies and by conducting user surveys between performers on one side and performative spaces on the other, this thesis analyses the impacts, immersivity and audience engagement of performative spaces.

Principles are abstracted and applied to design a novel adaptive architectural system.

Image: ADOOB showing a rendered state of the performing spaces, 2023. Image by the author 113

Living Soundscapes: On Property and Robotic Architecture in Light of Salomé Voegelin’s Sonic Materialism Çağla Şamcı Thesis tutor: Jordi Vivaldi Piera Violent and exclusionary processes are at the root of property ownership, according to the writings of French philosopher, Bruno Latour. Throughout history, societies have experienced land deprivation and dispossession. Conquests, exterminations and great discoveries have led societies to compete fiercely for land. Humans have claimed ownership of lands, sparking wars and treating nature as a mere object that can be manipulated while asserting themselves as active agents of history.

As humans move further from the Earth’s surface, they risk losing their connection to the land, and with it, a sense of belonging.

Thus, this era demands a re-evaluation of property concepts and a post-humanist approach in architecture that acknowledges the interconnectedness between humans and their surroundings. In short, how can we make things appropriate without appropriating them? How can adequacy be achieved without asserting ownership? This thesis addresses this question by invoking the work of Salomé Voegelin which emphasises that the indivisibility of sound challenges the conventional division between subject and object. According to Voegelin, sound defies easy categorisation and necessitates a re-evaluation of how it is perceived. In this regard, sound reveals an auditory realm that 114

surpasses the confines of location and time, giving rise to interconnected resonant systems within the natural world.

Comparable to the unique vocalisations of birds, sound metaphorically represents the adaptable and porous nature of living architecture, where properties continuously undergo transformation and evolution. By embracing the holistic and ever-changing essence of sound, a more interconnected understanding of living environments can be explored, wherein the concept of ownership expands to encompass collaborative approaches. The case study, ‘Stigmergic Spaces’, challenges the conventional hierarchy by incorporating distinguishability, synchrony and indivisibility in sound. It focuses on adapting to the terrain, perceiving the unique qualities of each space, synchronising with nature and transcending the limitations of standardised components.

Through these principles, the project establishes a new understanding of property termed ‘sonic property’, recognising the distinctiveness of each space and its customisation to the surrounding environment.

By embracing these concepts, the case study fosters a dynamic and inclusive understanding of sonic property, blurring the boundaries between animate and inanimate elements and promoting harmonious coexistence.

Image: The synchronised nature of the process and the concept of adaptive living architecture. ‘Stigmergic Spaces’, 2023. Çağla Şamcı, Yuying Xiang, Hansen Ye, Ziheng Zhou, Huize Qiu, Research Cluster 3

Revolutionary Furniture Design: The Impact of Parametric Architecture Design Method Yuting Yan Thesis tutor: Daria Ricchi Modern furniture designers are limited to drawing inspiration from traditional logical ways of thinking, which can lead to a stagnation of creativity. In the context of the rapid development of parametric architecture, drawing on the logical approaches and inspirations of modern parametric architecture in design and styling and applying them to future furniture design is a new field that deserves in-depth research.

Using parametric architectural design methods to design furniture blurs the boundaries between architecture and furniture design, leading to the emergence of hybrid design practices. Architects are increasingly incorporating custom furniture as an integral part of their architectural projects, creating a unified and cohesive design language that extends from the

macro-scale of the building to the microscale of the furniture elements. This integration enhances the overall user experience and spatial coherence, resulting in a more holistic design solution. The influence of the Voronoi method, pleat method and nomadic method in parametric architectural design is evident in the creation of dynamic, adaptable and aesthetically complex pieces of furniture that embody the essence of mobility, non-linearity and innovative form finding techniques.

This thesis provides an insight into how parametric design methods, initially adopted by architectural firms, have been successfully adopted and utilised in the furniture design process. It also critically examines formal exploration, lost creativity, customisation options and digital fabrication, core aspects of parametric architecture which could be fruitful in applying parametric architecture to furniture design. In addition, it explores the possibilities of parametric furniture design to achieve environmental responsiveness and looks to the future, which heralds an exciting era of limitless creativity and users.

Image: Wanderland table, robot-controlled and add-ons assembled office table, manufactured using 3D-printing technology. ‘Wanderland’, 2023. Ziding Cai, Enci Xie, Yuting (Nina) Yan, Xuanhao Zhang, Research Cluster 5 115

Social Elements in Augmented Reality Games: The Impact on User Engagement and Collaborative Gaming Community Building Yiyuan Ma Thesis tutor: Daria Ricchi Augmented reality (AR), as a variation of virtual environments (VE), is a type of technology that enhances the user’s perception of reality by superimposing virtual objects on top of the real world.

While AR can be applied to virtually any conceivable application area, including business, medicine, tourism and education, the area where it has gained the most traction is gaming.

The majority of games are intended to be played in a social setting with players physically present in the same location or digitally in the same space. Therefore, the social aspects of games are an integral part of their functionality, especially in AR gaming – a popular type of game that allows users more physical movement and social interaction while still utilising the benefits of computing and graphical systems. Research suggests that mobile technology and augmented reality games may improve

communication, and even revolutionise how people collaborate and interact (Koceski and Koceska 2011: 249). In addition to providing full mobility and immersion in the physical/ virtual world, AR games provide an opportunity for social interaction and collaboration among players due to their interactive nature. Location-based mobile augmented reality (LMAR) further enhances this social interaction.

This thesis presents a detailed analysis of AR applications in entertainment and education, highlighting how social elements in AR games influence user engagement during collaborative gaming. The findings from the literature review and case studies have underscored the importance of user communities, social elements and collaborative gameplay in fostering high levels of engagement and creativity, while also cultivating a sense of belonging among players. ActiCiti stands as a testament to the possibilities of AR in transforming gaming experiences and enhancing the interaction between users and their environment. As technology continues to advance, it is crucial to further explore and refine the integration of AR in gaming and urban environments.

Image: Co-creation of digital overlays through sketch input on the ActiCiti platform, 2023. Image by the author 116

Transformation of Spatial Memory in the Baixiang Community Zhiyue Wang Thesis tutor: Ruby Law The thesis explores the transformation of spatial memory during the process of demolition and reconstruction, using the revitalisation of the Baixiang community as a case study. Building on Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy on the unity of image and memory,1 it investigates the symbiotic relationship between spatial change and the evolution of original memories, while also looking at how our memory and imagination shape the process of space transformation.

Though discussions on memory in space abound within phenomenology, exploring the interplay between human experience and the built environment, there is a dearth of research dedicated to employing spatial memory to rejuvenate deteriorating spaces.

The Baixiang community’s spatial memory, situated in Chongqing, China, carries significant cultural value. It is paramount to preserve and blend this invaluable memory harmoniously with the community’s future development.

Frank Duffy’s concept of deconstruction in architectural layers2 resonates with his

theory of shearing layers and proves insightful in safeguarding spatial memory during the community’s renovation. It emphasises the need to discern which memories warrant preservation and which should yield new experiences.

The thesis also delves into the spatial memory of concrete. Analysing concrete’s role as a medium for commemoration reveals its enduring legacy and evolving perception.

While concrete has conventionally symbolised permanence and stability, contemporary approaches challenge this by embracing fluidity, impermanence and timeliness in memorial design. The concept of memory and oblivion, seemingly paradoxical, underscores how concrete, as a medium for memory, can signify both the past and the present, bridging the gap between collective remembrance and evolving perspectives.

By delving into spatial memory, this research sparks innovative strategies for deconstructing and reconstructing the Baixiang community. It addresses both the negative environmental implications and the emotional detachment associated with concrete as a material. Through this exploration, the thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of memory’s pivotal role in revitalising architectural spaces.

1. Gaston Bachelard (1958) The Poetics of Space, Penguin Books 2. Stewart Brand (1995). How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Penguin Books Image: Spatial memories of architectural layers and the Baixiang community, 2023. Image by the author 117

The B-Pro Show 2022

Urban Design MArch

Urban Design MArch Programme Director: Roberto Bottazzi

Urban Design at The Bartlett is a Master’s degree dedicated to the analysis and design of emergent issues in global cities. Students consider cities as privileged vantage points from which to investigate and speculate on the most pressing contemporary conditions, such as the introduction of artificial intelligence, the conflation of digital and physical domains, climate change, gaming culture and everexpanding urbanisation.

The main drivers of the programme’s design investigations are the research clusters, in which small groups of students work closely with dedicated tutors. Each cluster responds to a unique research agenda and brief to develop its own sophisticated design proposals. Within their clusters, students are able to investigate a particular set of urban concerns and are introduced to advanced computational methods to analyse and generate new urban programmes and morphologies. Each cluster acts as an incubator for new spatial ideas in which design and digital technology merge, giving rise to proposals which consider new ways of inhabiting and experiencing urban environments.

The range of topics covered by the different clusters includes the impact of big data and machine learning algorithms for design, biocomputing, planetary urbanisation and speculations on what virtual cities may look like. Within each cluster a lively and creative conversation is promoted through tutorials, workshops, lectures and exchanges, providing each student with access to new ideas and methodologies that they can expand upon in their final project and thesis.

The variety and richness of the research agendas pursued by students are underpinned by an integral interest in the role that digital technologies play in shaping our urban environment. The Bartlett Prospective (B-Pro) lecture series, journal, workshops in digital technologies and dedicated theory modules all support students in their research.

Programme Administrators Tung Ying (Crystal) Chow, Tom Mole

Image: ‘Peat Revitalisation’, Jiacong (Jecci) Chen, Napapa Soonjan, Yuanhao Wei, Shi (Rock) Zheng, Research Cluster 16 120

Copious amounts of fictitious capital flowed into housing finance to fuel demand, but only a part of it ended up in new housing production.

Stimulating demand by taxation and public policy gimmicks and other incentives (such as increasing the volume of sub-prime mortgages) does not necessarily elicit an increased supply: it merely inflates prices and stimulates speculation.

An additional 23 percent of forced moves were due to landlord foreclosure, with building condemnations accounting for the remaining 5 percent.

This has intensified the breaking points around which urban social movements have been rallying, suddenly validating their claims and arguments about the lack of sustainability and the destructiveness of the neoliberal growth model.

Organizations such as the Social Forums or Attac14 have taken the message of global justice to the local level, where they campaign against welfare cuts, rights for migrants as well as workfare workers and build alliances with local unions, social service organizations, and churches.

Our ideas allow us to tame social life, to order it according to typologies and theories.

They have made the loss of social, economic, and political rights painfully tangible not just for traditionally disadvantaged and marginalized groups, but increasingly also for comparatively privileged urban residents, whose notion of the good urban life is not realized by increasing privatization of public space, in the upgrading of their neighborhoods, or the subjection of their everyday lives to the intensifying interurban competition.

It excavates a local history and an architectural heritage that is charged with nationalist and romanticist connotations.

It was hard to hear over the noise: the grumble of diesel engines, the jackhammer whirring of the water pumps, the sizzle of water meeting heat, the splitting of wood under axes.

By distributing agency across social and material entities, such that both human and non-human forms of agency may be considered coevally, assemblage thinking diversifies the range of agents and causes of urban inequality, while potentially multiplying the spaces of critical intervention (219).

Severe limits on the use and amount of funding available and the relative lack of dues or grassroots fundraising have combined to functionally limit NWCOs ability to organize at a mass scale.

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If uniqueness cannot be established by appeal to "terroir" and tradition, or by straight description of flavor, then other modes of distinction must be invoked to establish monopoly claims and discourses devised to guarantee the truth of those claims (the wine that guarantees seduction or the wine that goes with nostalgia and the log fire are current advertising tropes in the United States).

But cracks in the system are, as Leonard Cohen once sang, "what lets the light in.

Marx's point is that the interest that is paid comes from value production somewhere else-taxation or direct extractions on surplus-value production, or levies on revenues (wages and profits).

Suburbanization (alongside militarization) thus played a critical role in helping to absorb the surplus in the post-war years.

In the Chinese case, it is often populations on the rural margins who are displaced, illustrating the significance of Lefebvre's argument, presciently laid out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction that once existed between the urban and the rural was gradually fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development under the hegemonic command of capital and the state.

13 Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship, and belonging, of a coherent urban politics, already threatened by the spreading malaise of the individualistic neoliberal ethic, become much harder to sustain.

Many of the foreclosures (over a million during 2010) turn out to have been illegal, if not downright fraudulent, leading a congressman from Florida to write to the Florida Supreme Court Justice that "if the reports I am hearing are true, the illegal foreclosures taking place represent the largest seizure of private property ever attempted by banks and government entities.

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So the slum-dwellers either resist and fight or move with their few belongings to camp out on the highway margins, or wherever they can find a tiny space.

Most of those hillsides are now covered with high-rise towers that show no trace of the brutal processes of land clearance that permitted their construction.

A flourishing cultural economy sector regularly triggers local spatial upgrading and restructuring processes that contribute to increasing sociospatial inequality and polarization within cities.

David and Anna s working-class home was one of those places that seemed to belong to everybody.

The spectre of political economy At t outset, it might appear that radica urban political economy and the ne theoretical idioms associated with assemblage urbanism could coexist a even mutually transform each other methodological orientations, descript categories and objects of analysis (Castree 2002; Farías and Graham 20 McFarlane 2011a).

The Turkish population, many of whom are now Berlin-born, have suffered many indignities, and have largely been forced out from the city center.

Its logic represents the synchronicity of objects and people that can be assembled around a given point.

Even though the waiting time for a two bedroom apartment is up from two years in 1982 to ten years in 2008,9 the very word housing shortage does not appear in the current policy vision of Amsterdam.

As they made their way to the bar and grill, past the robotic jungle sounds from all the machines, Sherrena smiled impishly and said, I hope you don t have nothing planned for the morning.

More and more conflicts erupt that spark more and more struggles, in which different groups come together in new campaigns and coalitions.

However, the CRA explicitly expects banks to use conventional measures of risk in granting loans, and only a small fraction of the loans facing foreclosure have resulted from CRA-related loans; the majority came from loans pushed by banks and brokers simply concerned with making a profit from an even greater market, not with satisfying a housing need previously subject to racial discrimination.

For example, the ability to coordinate flows throughout a commodity chain to a workers' collective (from raw materials to finished products) depends on the availability of power sources and technologies, such as electricity, cell phones, computers, and the internet, that are procured from that world in which the capitalist laws of value creation and circulation predominate.

The new friends were circling back to the ghetto but not fully committing to it.

Under what conditions might those in marginalized social locations come to recognize the arbitrary foundations of prevailing systems of exclusion as well as interests in common with those who are differently marginalized?

Actants in ANT, famously, are human as well as non-human, animate as well as inanimate, material as well as ideational, large and small, those things called natural, cultural, and social.

The chain of supply both into and out of the cities entails a continuous movement, and does not entail a break.

However, without a sustained account of this context of context, the analysis remains radically incomplete.

Second, critical perspectives within planning and development studies have evolved as parallel, yet largely disconnected, domains; little attention has been devoted to exploring the potential for mutual enrichment.

On the supply side of gentrification, capitalist real-estate developers and investors invest in the upgrading of such urban districts housing stock and built environment.

Micro-credit in its social incarnation (as originally envisaged by the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Yunus) has indeed opened up new possibilities and had a significant impact on gender relations, with positive consequences for women in countries such as India and Bangladesh.

Since the mid 1980s, neoliberal urban policy (applied, for example, across the European Union) concluded that redistributing wealth to less advantaged neighborhoods, cities, and regions was futile, and that resources should instead be channeled to dynamic "entrepreneurial" growth poles.

The neoliberal protection of private property rights and their values becomes a hegemonic form of politics, even for the lower middle class.

Industrialization was at first concentrated in the special economic zones, but then rapidly diffused outwards to any municipality willing to absorb the surplus capital from abroad and plough back the earnings into rapid expansion.

Since the slumdwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively prove their long-term residence on the land, they have no right to compensation.

Capital accumulation on the land through real estate activity booms as land is acquired at almost no cost.

Violence is required to achieve the new urban world on the wreckage of the old.

It was once said that the poor are constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.

What Lamar had after the rent was paid went to household necessities (soap, toilet paper) and the phone bill.

Madden, and David Wachsmuth The field of urban studies is today confronted with significant theoretical, conceptual, epistemological, and methodological challenges.

Therefore, we are evicting her.

This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth.

But all polices are not the same .

At seventy-one, she was a taut and unfrail woman with a shock of cotton-white hair, a face crisscrossed with wrinkles, and no teeth.

Furthermore, the fact that risk can be spread so widely encourages even riskier local behaviors, because the risk can be transferred elsewhere.

The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after World War II did to the whole New York metropolitan region what Haussmann had done to Paris.

As Mayor Giuliani has made clear, the desire to counteract "anarchy" with repression runs the gamut of public space uses from rallies and demonstrations (as with the police department's violent response to both the "Million Youth March" and the Matthew Shepard memorial march in 1998),8 to ridding the streets of unlicensed peddlers, to a crackdown on public "vice" throughout Manhattan, to destroying community gardens so as to hand over the property they occupy into the waiting arms of private developers.

In Seoul in the 1990s, the construction companies and developers hired goon squads of sumo-wrestler types to invade whole neighborhoods and smash down with sledgehammers not only the housing but also all the possessions of those who had built their own housing on the hillsides of the city in the 1950s, on what by the 1990s had become highvalue land.

Nonetheless, both districts are still characterized by an agglomeration of artistically creative workers and cultural economy firms.

Establishing the legal foundations for simple, enforceable, and prudent mortgage contracts is a good start.

This rediscovery of the urban was also closely intertwined with the dynamics of globalization, which has been closely associated with new forms of centrality and agglomeration.

But when the landlord nally came over with his toolbox, he sawed holes all over the bathroom walls and did something to the pipes that caused water to leak in.

After selling his insurance company, Shields had begun looking for a way to get into real estate.

Why not, if the profit motive is to blame for everything that s wrong in contemporary cities; why does abolishing the profit motive not produce ideal cities?

The numbers are similar in Kansas Ci Cleveland, Chicago, and other cities

The tenant was sitting on her stoop in a long-sleeved annel shirt, hushing a colicky baby and talking with her mother, who was leaning against a car.

Both registered a debilitating split between practice and theory; or a death of practice compensated by a new life in theory, itself conducted largely in academia rather than the realm of politics.

Today, this dialectics is articulated in a new form insofar as the less controlled, relatively noncommercialized interstitial spaces within the metropolitan cores are now almost completely disappearing.

After merely sporadic demonstrations in scattered cities and few nationally coordinated efforts in the years following the financial meltdown, protests have erupted forcefully in many state capitals as, since late 2010, the crisis has been used to not only cut back on services and public sector wages and benefits, but also to attack collective bargaining rights of public sector unions (Nichols 2011).

These had provided, during the previous phase, a material base for much of the alternative movement activities even if this was not widely admitted at the time.

Relatedly, such approaches do not adequately grasp the ways in which contemporary urbanization continues to be shaped and contested through the contradictory, hierarchical social relations and institutional forms of capitalism.

This is the reason why Florida s theory of the creative class has been taken up as a message of hope in many cities, including established urban centres of the culture industry, as well as cities that are confronted with economic decline in traditional manufacturing and service sectors and associated labor market pressures.

While it remains to be seen if the subaltern classes of China or India will offer a break from their rule, the political-economic nature of what appears here to be a deplorable but inevitable triumph of instrumental reason is in fact better theorized in classical Marxist terms: i.

In response to these developments, I would like to suggest that planning theory would do well to heed the cautions offered by feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser who develops a theory of justice that engages a politics of recognition in conjunction with a politics of redistribution (see Fraser, 1997).

Now, 20 years later, housing associations and governments argue that their own policies are supposed to promote livability.

Indeed, the culture industry (which represents by far the largest part of so-called creative industries) might be characterized as one of the leading sectors of the twenty-first century (Scott, 2000) as changing consumption patterns are fostering a growing demand for cultural products and the culture industry has become the central supplier of content for the new media business, the capitalist economy s expanding marketing activities, and the accelerated proliferation of commercial entertainment through the commodification of cultural forms.

This instability is particularly acute for artists due to their subsistencelevel incomes and their precarious tenure in the steeply inflating property markets of the inner city (Hutton, 2008: 32).

Refuting exclusionary displacement by saying that this group would be unable to access gentrified housing too is an interesting defence, but not one sensitive to a litany of studies which document high levels of forced mobility for poor renter households (via evictions): [R]enters, who have far less security of tenure than homeowners, are disproportionately represented among involuntary movers.

In short, critical urban theory involves the critique of ideology (including social scientific ideologies) and the critique of power, inequality, injustice, and exploitation, at once within and among cities.

Indeed, on this historic occasion more than a handful of artists, architects, and planners under the auspices of its unique conjunction of art, technology, and politics aligned their vocation with that of the revolution.

Given the extreme destructiveness of contemporary financial markets (Huffschmid et al.

D I see no reason why it should not be construed as both a class struggle and a struggle for citizenship rights in the place where working people lived.

It is problematic to classify under the same rubric occupational groups that are engaged in technological research and development activities and the artistically creative occupations of the cultural economy alongside the group of creative professionals.

Their thinking was condensed not into a question but a slogan: Architecture and Revolution!

This proposition can be tested empirically by analyzing the impact of diverse occupational groups on various dimensions of regional economic success (Krätke, 2011).

By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable.

Milwaukee renters whose previous move was involuntary were almost 25 percent more likely to experience long-term housing problems than other low-income renters.

'1\.

" By the time they were done they owned five of them and the market was falling and they couldn't make any of the payments:'29 Property prices can't and don't rise forever.

Many city neighborhoods and even whole peri-urban communities in the United States were boarded up and vandalized, wrecked by the predatory lending practices of the financial institutions.

And that order must be explicitly geographic: it centers on the control of the streets and the question of just who has the right to the city.

For us, the Nakbah is well and truly alive but look at these kids and the way they return our villages to the public eye, to the plans and maps this is the beginning of our awdah (return).

When the bank lends to a consumer to buy a house and receives a flow of interest in return, it makes it seem as if something is going on in the house that is directly producing value, when that is not the case.

Various histories written for the city tend to minimize its Arab past by emphasizing the Ottoman or British regime (while ignoring the region s population), and generally leap over the 1948 war and the eviction of the city s Arab population (for typical examples see Cohen, 2006; Gradus, 1993, 2008).

David Harvey with David Wachsmuth1 At times of crisis, the irrationality of capitalism becomes plain to see.

We all know the subsequent history of the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War (abundant signs of which were there in 1942).

Again and again, vulnerable populations suffer massive losses losses that have a way of emerging among the capitalist class as a massive accumulation of wealth.

In 2013, 1 percent of poor renters lived in rent-controlled units; 15 percent lived in public housing; and 17 percent received a government subsidy, mainly in the form of a rent-reducing voucher.

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The Berlin economy as a whole is comparatively weak even while the creative industries are expanding in the words of the city s mayor, Berlin is poor but sexy.

Quentin sported a G-Unit leather jack a straight-billed black cap, and a larg pinky ring.

But we could implement this proposal by redirecting spending away from the banks and other financial institutions and towards guaranteed minimum incomes, empowerment of workers in negotiating procedures, and legislation on the length of the working day.

But not if they are walled off from the city around them, with their interiors, however bustling, invisible to the surrounding neighborhood.

The informal economy thrives in most cities but often chaotically, clogging streets, competing unfairly with local businesses, and limiting the hope of upward mobility to marginalized members of society.

In this process, urban space loses some of its essential elements, but especially its most important characteristic the possibility of unexpected, unplanned encounters and interactions.

The Nieuwmarkt neighborhood had been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and the Nazi occupiers closed it off and turned it into a repository for Jews that were to be deported to concentration camps.

There is, of course, a multitude of diverse urban struggles and urban social movements (in the broadest sense of that term, including movements in the rural hinterlands) already in existence.

In headquarter cities and financial centres, economic development hinges to a large extent upon the appropriation of wealth that was created through productive activities in other regions.

Such processes of exchange and cooperation are likely to become even more important in the future, because the differences between the urban struggles as well as the problems and deprivations confronting each are immense (see below).

I had overheard Arleen explain the sanctions to Sherrena and had accompanied Arleen as she met with a caseworker to sort out the details; but because this was something I could corroborate with a few emails and phone calls, I did.

At that factory, the women workers in 1911 worked 14 hours a day and had Saturdays off; at the Hameem factory, they work 12 14 hours seven days a week.

The courtroom didn t look like the kind you see on television, those open-air theaters with balconies, large ceiling fans, and people crowded into wooden pews.

Sherrena gured both Kamala and Lamar would ask for their rent to be returned, and she was right.

The threat of discontent, especially when coupled with fear of unrest from the deprived and the working class, has always worried those on top ( A specter is haunting Europe ).

You just gotta roll it down a little bit.

Despite pollution, the river is currently used as a play area for children, a laundry area for families, and gathering area for nearby residents.

Lord, please, please let this be something minor, Sherrena prayed, holding on to the door handle as the Suburban careered through the back roads that lead to Eighteenth Street.

Meanwhile, some 2 or perhaps 3 million peoplemainly a mix of single-womanheaded households, African-Americans in central cities, and marginalized white populations in the urban semi-peripheryhave been or are about to be rendered homeless by foreclosures.

They include proposals for mediation conferences between lenders and borowers to rewrite mortgages; stricter requirements for disclosure of terms and risks; capital reserve requirements for banks; more careful processing of foreclosures by banks; imposition of standardized credit requirements for mortgages; allowance of extended time to move for evictees; and similar.

Against this, the actually eXisting city, the arguments of the "little Arnolds," with their overweaning concern for order and "civilization," with their defenses of the geography of privilege, begin to seem paltry and mean-spirited at best.

For Marcuse, critical theory entailed an immanent critique of capitalist society in its current form: it is concerned, he insisted, with the historical alternatives which haunt the established society as subversive tendencies and forces (Marcuse, 1964: xi xii; italics added).

Over the years, he had stayed in touch with several nursing pals, and some had moved into positions of in uence.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, African-American familiesseeking freedom and good jobs participated in the Great Migration, moving en masse from the rural South to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.

Besides her friend Lora, who had moved from Jamaica thirty years ago, Sherrena was the only black person in the room.

After buying houses on the cheap from nervous white homeowners in transitioning neighborhoods, private investors would sell thesehouses on contract to black families for double or triple their assessed value.

Arleen put rubber bands on the bottom her jeans, but that only made the kid laugh harder.

Smith thus provides a sophisticated account of what is often called the distributive paradigm of social justice.

Just 50 years later, this proportion has risen to one-half and is expected to continue to grow to two-thirds, or six billion people, by In many cities, especially in developing countries, slum dwellers number more than 50 percent of the population and have little or no access to shelter and other basic services like electricity, clean water, and sanitation.

Shops, restaurants, meeting places, and venues for cultural and social exchange set the stage for urban life.

Third, McFarlane sees the assemblage idea as activating a more general critical imaginary (219) and political sensibility containing a distinctive image of the desirable city-to-come.

Vanetta almost never drank, but that night she bought a bottle of New Amsterdam gin and passed out next to her children.

Could it be precisely here, faced with the extraordinary challenge of mapping a worldwide yet internally hierarchized and differentiated urban ensemble (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]), that the conceptual and methodological gesture facilitated through assemblage approaches becomes most productive?

Indeed, cities and metropolitan regions have become places of strategic importance for neoliberal policies, and key institutional arenas in and through which neoliberalism is itself evolving (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Leitner et al.

Increasing unemployment and poverty, a new housing need, riots in housing estates, and new waves of squattings changed the make-up of the urban movements.

A corresponding set of urban strategies and policies have come to form the new general guidelines of urban development the metropolitan has become mainstream.

Stages of urban movements from the crisis of Fordism to neoliberalism The macro trends of the past 40 years have fundamentally transformed both the environment the cities and political milieus in which movements operate, as well as the movements themselves, at first slowly, almost imperceptibly, but in hindsight rather drastically.

The city, in other words, is as much a locus of class movements as is the factory.

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These interviews, conducted immediately after tenants court hearings, provided a snapshot into Milwaukee s evicted population.

I ain t let nothing happen to you.

Even when there were key movements in the factories (the Flint strike in Michigan of the 1930s or the Turin workers councils of the 1920s), the organized support in the neighborhoods played a critical but usually uncelebrated role in the political action (the women s and unemployed support groups in Flint and the communal houses of the people in Turin).

The financial sector no longer has a merely supporting function within the capitalist economy; rather it has become the dominating, driving force of a new capitalist model of development, whose influence is spreading to all spheres and subsectors of the economy.

Consider, for example, that in January of 2008, Wall Street bonuses added up to $32 billion, just a fraction less than the total in This was a remarkable reward for crashing the world s financial system.

The first two decrees of the Parisian communards in 1871 were, interestingly, the suspension of night work in the bakeries (a labor process question) and a moratorium on rental payments (an urban daily life question).

Three contributions in the positive gentrification mould have recently informed media interpretations and policy/planning circles in the United States, and have even attracted attention beyond their national context.

Many readers are surprised to see that landlords are one of them, and wonder if that is a residual category or a continuing category.

Just as we have outlawed discrimination on the basis of race or religion, discrimination against voucher holders would be illegal under a universal voucher program.

After the Civil War, freed slaves saw in landownership the possibility of true liberation, but during Reconstruction wealthy whites maintained a virtual monopoly on the soil as lands seized from or abandoned by Confederates were restored to their original owners.

It had clean, wheat-colored carpet, unblemished white walls, mini blinds over person-length windows, a generous bathroom, and a working stove and refrigerator.

In such circumstances, any district in or near London, however dingy or unfashionable before, is likely to become expensive; and London may quite soon be a city which illustrates the principle of the survival of the fittest the financially fittest, who can still afford to work and live there.

Finally, in the third row, ANT subsum the entire conceptual apparatus an explanatory agenda of urban studie

Lefebvre (1996) further argues that the right to the city entails a just claim to centrality and difference.

It has totally dominated the policies of presidents over at least four decades, if not longer, no matter whether individual presidents have been its willing agents or not.

It s much easier for them to think that it was mine than his, Scott re ected.

At the same time, the right to the city has also developed traction with international NGOs and advocacy organizations, some of whom have taken to work on formal covenants and even a world charter for the right to the city.

In a nutshell, the dealer economy associated with the neoliberal model of capitalist development is not creative in any meaningful sense of the word; it actually constitutes a serious threat to economic development.

Attention is focused on the city of Chongqing, where a purportedly radical shift away from market-based policies back onto a path of state-led socialist redistribution backed, interestingly, by a great deal of Maoist-inspired rhetoric has been underway for some time.

In California, the streets of whole towns, like Stockton, were likewise lined with empty and abandoned houses, while in Florida and Las Vegas condominiums stood empty.

Even though these coalitions do frequently succeed in preventing, or at least modifying, crass neoliberal urban development projects, their struggles often end up saving some oases and protected spaces only for the comparatively privileged protagonists, spaces which increasingly become instrumentalized in creative city branding efforts in the competitive entrepreneurial urban policy game.

Then she said, Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.

Arleen was able to call on two dozen places before heading back to Thirteenth Street.

Reinforced by institutional controls like appellation contrôlée, the French wine trade insists upon the authenticity and originality of its product, which grounds the uniqueness upon which monopoly rent can be based.

The CRA has thus been accused by defenders of the real-estate industry of requiring banks to modify their normal handling of risk to satisfy the act, and thus in turn meant to make more risky loans than they wanted.

Nicholls, 2003) where movements foster linkages that enable them to serve as a counter force to the state rather than as its extension.

If they give Momma the punishment, what you supposed to do?

As Marcuse (1964: xi) writes, In order to identify and define the possibilities for an optimal development, the critical theory must abstract from the actual organization and utilization of society s resources, and from the results of this organization and utilization.

The actually existing right to the city, as it is now constituted, is far too narrowly confined, in most cases in the hands of a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape the city more and more after their own particular needs and hearts' desire.

She toured a dirty apartment with cracks down the walls and grease on the ceiling on a block with abandoned homes and gang gra ti.

The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast and in the meantime dream of getting out.

Four days after the baby came, Belt Buckle called and told Pam and Ned that their application had been approved.

First, Scott learned that all those AA meetings he had sat through and all those group therapy sessions, which he hated even more, didn t count toward his nursing license.

The only piece of furniture in the place was an old upholstered rocking chair someone had left behind.

Nevertheless, even with this partially co-opted memory generation, Bedouins have been developing an alternative consciousness, identity, and subjectivity that is gradually moving away from the notion of equal and assimilated Israeli identity.

Someone found a tambourine and started pounding it.

Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that processes of gentrification and displacement have spread tremendously in recent years while also becoming more differentiated.

Hey, Deano!

NOBODY WANTS THE NORTH SIDE The Lodge sat on the corner of Seventh and Vine Streets, near downtown.

2 For a discussion of Lefebvre s conception of the right to the city, see also Purcell, 2002; Gilbert and Dikeç 2008; and Schmid, 3 Until recently, there have been relatively few books dealing with urban social movements see, for example, Mayer et al.

And the more di cult ethical dilemma is not how to respond when asked to help but how to respond when you are given so much.

Beersheba s Arab city is widely called Turkish by the Israeli public, as are all City and District documents.

Substantiation of the concept must also steer away from the common, liberalized, and mainly legal or moral notion of rights, extracted out of its historical and material context.

Crystal spent the following day on the phone, trying to nd someone who would open their doors to her.

In some ways, China s development mimics and exaggerates that of the post World War II United States.

Returning to Florida s comprehensive creative class aggregate, we might conclude that there is class struggle within the creative class : the creative professionals of the realestate business are organizing the dislocation of the original population of low-income artists and creative periphery firms by the upper strata of the supercreative core (yuppies, bobos, and upscale firms of the creative industries ).

By and large, povertyresearchers had focused narrowly on public housing or other housing policies;either that, or they had overlooked housing because they were more interestedin the character of urban neighborhoods their levels of residential segregation or resistance to gentri cation, for example.

In fact, one of the more striking trends in recent scholarship has been a proliferation of policy-oriented suggestions on how we might manage gentrification, rather than stop it (for an exception, see Ley and Dobson, 2008).

Three stories of cream brick, it had 170,000 square feet and 232 large windows.

Trying to be helpful, he had found a broken shower rod and was hitting Crystal with it.

The unevenness largely reflected the differentiated income streams that flowed to different segments of the working class.

When people asked, Why real estate?

Roosevelt s words, but to protect it.

Even though this form of depoliticization of the right to the city is particularly visible on the scale where global NGOs operate, its cause is hardly to be found in the upscaling of a formerly grassroots, locally-based claim to the higher realms of global political arenas and institutions.

Rodriguez, a pudgy Mexican man with thick hair, identi ed di erent units piled in his small store with a stick resembling a teacher s pointer.

The radical implication of this contribution by Lefebvre to Marxism is spelled out in both Critique of Everyday Life and The Urban Revolution: there can be no social(ist) revolution without an urban revolution, no urban revolution without a social(ist) revolution, and neither without a revolution in everyday life.

Bishop Dixon teased Crystal about texting during the service, and Crystal countered by asking the old man if his teeth ever fell out when he wasgiving the blessing.

She found a refrigerator somewhere else and talked the guy down to $ She borrowed the money from a friend, promising to pay it back the rst of the month, and nished the day shopping at Aldi.

Hanging up, the landlord said that it had been his partner on the other line and that he had just rented out the bigger and nicer unit.

But we can think about the different social formations that do exist right now, and consider how they might enter into political activism.

Those who had been foreclosed upon had to find accommodation elsewhere: tent cities began to form in California and Florida.

In the advanced capitalist world they have become ever more prominent over the past thirty years because of changing labor relations imposed by neoliberal corporate restructuring and deindustrialization, and their political role has also become more prominent.

Later, the preacher s wife and anoth white woman from the All Bible Bapt Church, Vanetta s congregation, wou join them in knit sweaters and thick glasses.

He stayed at his mother s small but digni ed home, visited his grandmother in the nursing home, played video games with his teenage nieces, and watched his sister model her new wedding dress.

As Bender (2010: 305) suggests, such approaches risk engaging in an indiscriminate absorption of elements into the actor network with the effect of levelling the significance of all actors.

Royal.

Ned had an outstanding warrant, no veri able income, and a long record that included three evictions, felony drug convictions, and several misdemeanors like reckless driving and carrying a concealed weapon.

Sumood is widely practiced by the Naqab Bedouins, who have remained on their land, refused forced urbanization, and have preserved many of their traditions.

Radicalization and the Bedouins How does the processes of articulation actually take place on the ground ?

On one side of the pillar there is a poem of Jacob Israël de Haan on the nostalgia for Amsterdam of Jews who had migrated to Israel.

Carol s apartment was a small and plain one-bedroom unit renting at $525 on the northern edge of the North Side.

Equity, then, refers not to equal treatment of every individual but to treatment that is appropriate or to public policy that does not favor those who are already better off at the beginning (2010, p.

Four days a week, Scott worked in one of the Guest House s satellite shelters, an unmarked three-story home with bay windows, tucked in a quiet South Side neighborhood.

Its ceiling sagged from an upstairs leak, and a thin blackish lm coated its oor.

The ultra-rich, after all, are just as fiercely protective of their residential commons as anyone, and have far more fire-power and influence in creating and protecting them.

Their eviction and conviction records pushed them out of white neighborhoods and into an area that families living on the North Side dreamed of moving to.

But as recognized by a group of critical scholars, much more work is needed to put flesh on the bones of Lefebvre s concept, academically and more importantly materially and politically.

First, using government housing databases to measure displacement precludes the propitious role of the government in the phenomenon being measured, as García-Herrera et al.

As Lefebvre stated succinctly, theory must be steeped in practice in order to become effective.

It is the state s view that people need to know when you use a gun to take things from other people, you go to prison.

The Milwaukee Eviction Court Study was an in-person survey of 250 tenants appearing in eviction court over a sixweek period in January and February 2011 (66 percent response rate).

Trisha s small one-bedroom apartment, which was in bad shape to begin with, began to buckle under the weight of eight people.

These social groupings, though all are affected by contemporary forms of dispossession and alienation, occupy very different strategic positions within the postindustrial neoliberal city.

The Placemaking approach builds on the abil¬ity of local institutions to create great community places that bring people together and reflect community values and needs.

It is thus a non-heroic struggle, aimed at survival in the personal and collective sense.

9 Among the most important reasons for the increase in waiting time are the shrinking of the social sector, the growing number of displacees with urgency status (and hence priority), and the virtual standstill of housing production.

The letter went on to inform Sherrena that she would be subject to a special charge for any future enforcement costs for any of the listed violations that occurred at her property.

The lines distinguishing Bedouins fro other Palestinian ethnicities are blurred and constantly shifting (Parizot, 2004, 2005).

It was a nauseating, painful, stretchedout day Scott s rst drug-free in years.

They trash the place anyways.

Reach out your hands this way and pray!

Crystal and Vanetta agreed to look for an apartment exclusively on the Hispanic South Side.

Through passing references, they began learning about the other s resources Vanetta received $673 a month from welfare and $380 in food stamps as well as their character and temperament.

When the Hinkstons looked out their back window, all they saw was a vacant lot.

It would be nice to get away from these black motherfuckers, Crystal said.

The cops picked them up a few hours later.

To think of the just city under such conditions is frustrating but also necessary and stimulating.

As the judge weighed the facts of the case, he cited several 911 calls Vanetta hadmade when D Sean got rough.

On the other hand, access to urban resources is increasingly controlled and appropriated by global metropolitan elites.

After a few questions, Doreen shut the door and told herself not to answer it for the rest of the day.

When Jori wanted something most teenagers want, new shoes or a hair product, she would tell him he was sel sh, or just bad.

Sitting on a scratchy, overwashed comforter on the edge of the bed, Pam breathed slowly and talked to her baby.

Three months later, while rooting around for loose change, David and Anna Aldea s twelve-year-old daughter found a syringe in Scott s swimming trunks.

Now, to advocate the decommodification of housing is neither to get carried away in some romantic haze that is divorced from empirical reality, nor to cop out of practical solutions to the immediate problem of gentrification and displacement.

And I don t like children like that.

Vanetta s dark-brown skin matched Crystal s, and she had a smoky, loungesinger voice that she almost never raised at her kids.

In 1930, the death rate for Milwaukee s blacks was nearly 60 percent higher than the citywide rate, due in large part to poor housing conditions.

For their intellectual guidance and support, I also thank Elijah Anderson, Javier Auyero, Jacob Avery, Vicki Been, Rogers Brubaker, Megan Comfort, Kyle Crowder, John Diedrich, Mitchell Duneier, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Russell Engler, Joseph Piko Ewoodzie Jr.

Florida deals with the specific attraction factors of cities for the members of the creative class and recommends that political decision makers supply a high standard of living and leisure amenities for the creative class, since this group is said to attract further creative activities and is thus of great importance to future regional development (Fritsch and Stützer, 2007: 15).

Those powers could then be used to regulate and control capital and money flows, to institute non-market (and noncommodified) systems of exchange through rational planning, and to set in place an alternative to the capitalist laws of value determination through organized and consciously planned reconstructions of the international division of labor.

And with capital accumulation occurring at a compound rate of growth (usually at the minimum satisfactory level of 3 percent), so these dual threats to the environment (both "natural" and built) and to labor escalate in scale and intensity over time.

The fourteen-story Majestic was built in 1908, originally for o ces and a vaudeville theater.

She had prescriptions for Lyrica and Celebrex but didn t always have enou for the copay.

The language of tongues was spoken in a cadence the shape of a heartbeat: a small entrance, followed by a spike, then a quivering trailing o .

The Guest House furnished the apartment with a dark brown love seat and matching couch, a few lamps Scott preserved by leaving the plastic wrapping on the shades, and a full-size bed that Scott hardly used falling asleep on the couch had become a habit.

The responding o cer injected him with Narcan, sending him into a convulsive withdrawal that landed him in the ICU.

It was only after they had tried for over fty apartments that Crystal and Vanetta began reluctantly scouting in the inner city.

The only remaining visible reminder of that night was a makeshift memorial Kamala and her family set up: stu ed animals and photographs tied to a tree with a cotton sash cord.

The latter group is thus characterized as the driving force behind economic and technological development.

Discussions at the SUF revolved around real utopias, at the WUF around best practices (Marcuse 2010: 32).

On this basis she sees a role for planning in fostering agglomeration economies that build linkages among diverse economic activities in neighborhoods and communities, while also embedding such support for local capacities within city-wide development strategies aimed at providing universal access to infrastructure, financial services, logistics management, skilled labor, and so on.

Other people thought I was a police o cer or, in the trailer park, a spy for the alderman.

I kind of gured that was going to happen when he got here.

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In confronting this issue, the major figures within the Frankfurt School also developed an innovative, intellectually, and politically subversive research program on the political economy, social-psychological dynamics, evolutionary trends, and inner contradictions of modern capitalism (Arato and Gebhardt, 1990; Bronner and Kellner, 1989; Wiggershaus, 1995).

(p.

The social agents of the contemporary finance-dominated regime of accumulation are indeed continuously creating financial innovations and new financial products, but the latter have served mainly to destabilize economic development in the Western industrialized countries and beyond, and to damage the development potential and innovation capacity of the real economy sectors (such as manufacturing industries).

The extended forms of contemporary gentrification such as the Media Spree project function as a vehicle for transforming whole areas into new landscape complexes that pioneer a comprehensive class-inflected urban remake (Smith 2002: 96).

The need for such reforms is hard to question; the most recent scandal has revealed that banks presenting affidavits as to facts to courts in mortgage proceedings had them signed by robo-signers, who have no knowledge of the facts whatsoever but simply sign one document after the other as they are bidden, often at the expense of hand cramps.

At stake, more generally, is the process by which urban space as such is exploited.

If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.

One further response has been to create new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests and, through the application of money power, assure that control over the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favors corporate capital and the upper classes in the shaping of the urban process.

So that there is no misunderstanding, those deprived even of the material necessities of life are as entitled to, and in need of, the fuller life to which the alienated aspire as are the alienated, and the sources of dissatisfaction for both arise out of equally organic and essential human needs.

The sad point here, of course, is that the processes Engels described recur again and again in capitalist urban history.

To be clear: it is not the dream that created the crisis, as Joe Nocera s article in the New York Times was headlined.

Would they prefer the middle classes to abandon the inner cities and flee to the suburbs as they did in the 1970s and are still doing in the US, or return to the inner cities?

Competition, as Marx long ago observed, always tends towards monopoly (or oligopoly) simply because the survival of the fittest in the war of all against all eliminates the weaker firms.

The important starting point in developing a concept for any public space agenda should be to identify t talents and resources within the community -- people who can provid historical perspective, insights into how the area functions, and an understanding of what is truly meaningful to the local people.

With no luck and night coming on, she sighed and called Minister Barber, who found an older couple in the congregation who agreed to help.

The magnitude of this phenomenon are revealing: during 2007, for example, Israel demolished some 197 homes, and by the end of 2008, nearly all of them were replaced by new structures (see http://www.

As theyapproached the house, they saw Little outside in the snow, pawing at the door.

So, what kind of symptoms are you having?

It said she owed $2,50 the result of her second and third causes hearing.

Or, does the assemblage approach offer a new ontological starting point that displaces or supersedes the intellectual project of urban political economy?

By not consulting print or online listings, Crystal and Vanetta constricted their options to what they could see with their own eyes, often from a foggy bus window.

We have attempted to bridge this gap through the concept and practice of trans-local campaigning.

Under what conditions, moreover, might overt critique and resistance arise and pose a challenge to the stability of hegemonic projects?

This abstract space is different from "absolute space" (understood as a content- To Go Again to Hyde Park less container) because abstract space was and is socially produced under particular universalizing social relations.

Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole o cers, employers, social workers, or pastors.

Most unrecognized Bedouin localities existed before 1948, but the state s denial of their land rights placed them in a legal category of trespassers on their own land (Amara, 2008; Human Rights Watch, 2008).

When he was seventeen, he left his foster family, dropped out of high school, and started selling crack.

According to Berlin s government report on the cultural economy (Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, 2008), the city s cultural economy workforce (including employees, entrepreneurs, and self-employed freelancers) amounted to 160,000 persons in 2006 and contained a share of 10 percent of the city s total workforce.

But then again, many of the revolutionary movements in capitalism s history have been broadly urban rather than narrowly factory based.

The urban is a constant reinvention, it may assume very diverse forms, and the purpose here is not to propose yet another range of normative models.

Wisconsin s largest city is not every city, but it is considerably less unique than the small clutch of iconic but exceptional places that have come to represent the American urban experience.

Soon they upped the ante, takingincremental but expedited steps toward establishing a relationship of reciprocity.

However, in order to do so, those communities cannot exist in total isolation; neither can they have a purely confrontational relation with everyone around them.

11 1 122

Over the past decade, the creative scene of explorers and regenerators has again relocated, now moving on to the districts of Friedrichshain and (back) to Kreuzberg, from which it has r

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So Lamar sold $150 of food stamps for $75 cash, the going rate in Milwaukee.

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Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, onethat protects people from the pro t motive, not to destroy individualism, in Franklin D.

Our theory is enriched by deep practice and deep theory is needed to move us beyond the economic, political, and environmental crises of today.

These are: (a) the relationship of planning to imperialism and globalization; (b) resistance and the cultural politics of agency; and (c) the contributions of transnational feminism to a praxis of solidarity and collaboration.

Benjamin not mentioned at all in The Urban Question (1977 [1972]) by Manuel Castells or Social Justice and the City (1973) by Harvey found material evidence of dreams for a liberated life as well as their non-actualization by the logic of capital in the everyday life of the city especially in his major unfinished work, Passagenwerk.

Maybe to fully e ace the recent memory of being broke, or maybe just for the hell of it, Sherrena and Quentin took themselves to the casino on a Wednesday night.

Thesis 6: Marxist urban theory = excrescence of capital How much time is it going to take to recognize that the subtitle of Capital (Critique of Political Economy) had to be taken literally?

The solidarities arising from a reflexive, interpersonal relational comparison themselves constitute a social change process, insofar as they involve the formation of new political subjects able to engage in critical activism.

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2 This claim applies not only to the contemporary conjuncture: urbanization has always been an open system insofar as its basic patterns and consequences cannot be derived from any single theoretical framework or causal mechanism (Sayer 1992).

I think there is an important role for critical urban theory to play in broaching these questions and the imperative is doubly strong for planning theory given its orientation to praxis and potential role in supporting and promoting mobilizations for urban justice.

If the highly influential publication in New York of Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson s The International Style cataloguing MOMA s (Museum of Modern Art, New York) watershed architectural exhibition a year before CIAM s Charter of Athens in 1933 dates the death of modernism and the birth of modernization in the realm of urbanism, rather than the misleading timing suggested in The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977).

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It was a cramped and windowless space, paper-cluttered and lit by a naked bulb screwed into the ceiling.

Now this would not be the first time that the Left has saved capitalism, and we may not want to do it.

Inherent in this is a radical politics but also severe limits in moving our political demands beyond very specific issue campaigns.

mes nd es.

Yet the social relations, institutions, structural constraints, spatio-temporal dynamics, conflicts, contradictions, and crisis tendencies of capitalism do not vanish simply because we stop referring to them explicitly especially under conditions in which their forms are undergoing deep metamorphoses, they arguably still require explicit theorization and analysis in any critical account of the contemporary global urban condition.

However, as we detail below, our own orientations for such an endeavor diverge considerably from those that have to date been proposed by the major authors advancing an ANT-based framework.

This growth dynamic is further enhanced due to a situation of comparatively easy market access for micro-firm start-ups, particularly in the cultural economy sector.

The only positive thing I can say is happening out of all of this is that I may get a huge chunk of money, she said.

Even if Arleen signed over her entire welfare check each month, she would still be short.

2 Gillian Hart (2001) offers the useful distinction here between big D Development as intentional practice (e.

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Recall how Venturi summed up the distinction between the dull modernist city and the joyous Las Vegas Strip: Building for Man versus Building for men (markets).

What s the rent at that place?

Sherrena judged the block stable because it s been vacant one whole year and not one fucking window is broken and because the people lock it down.

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The definition of value-producing labor, which grounds Locke's theory of private property, no longer holds for the individual, but is shifted to the collective laborer.

While there are strands of assemblage theory that have successfully articulated powerful, even radical, visions of alternative futures (see Bennett 2010), it seems impossible to pursue the latter without engaging with the fundamentally political dimensions of human agency.

So the question of what is to be done is nowhere near as dramatic as we might like, and it is tightly tied together with the fact that the who doesn t yet have the vision to push Keynesianism in a more socialist direction, to push Keynesianism towards a class perspective different from that which is being articulated via the Party of Wall Street, via a global capitalist class that is prepared to crash the system in order to preserve its power.

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Once they moved in, black families had all the responsibilities of home ownership without any of the rights.

That much I can say.

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In effect, individuals maintain, extend, and socialize their private property right through value-creation and supposedly free and fair market exchange.

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The search for it leads global capital to value distinctive local initiativesindeed, in certain respects, the more distinctive and, in these times, the more transgressive the initiative, the better.

In McFarlane s account of informal housing in Mumbai, the building materials are highly polysemic and promiscuous.

In planning a plethora of publications emerged in the 1990s celebrating cultural diversity and hybridity as resources for critique and transformation (Sandercock, 1998a, 1998b, 2003; Healey, 1992, 1997).

Authors working in this manner look to ANT as a way to reconceptualize the fundamental character of the (urban and non-urban) social world.

Within such a framework, moreover, there is no immanent principle for distinguishing relevant and irrelevant actants, whether of a human or nonhuman nature.

Ostensibly opposed to essentialism of any sort, ANT sees the world as immanent, contingent, heterogeneous, and ontologically flat, disclosing no other levels, final explanations, or hidden core.

In a 2004 article for Antipode, Marcuse likens the contemporary manifestation of imperialism which he calls globalism to orientalism.

Few addressed the persistence of utopia with such originality as he did in the tradition of historical materialism, as something to be actualized by means of a dialectical articulation of unrealized dreams of the past and unconscious ones of the present for a better world with the new technologies ( new nature ) of modernism.

Second, how might we account for the fact that Bedouin women both resist and support the existing system of power, without resorting to analytical concepts like false consciousness, which dismiss their own understanding of their situation, or impression management, which makes of them cynical manipulators?

It is impossible to point to a specific set of empirical findings or conclusions to be drawn from actor network studies, although diverse aspects of human/ nonhuman networks have been investigated.

But the transformative moment arises only when the women collectively come to recognize how their modes of collaboration in development practice have overlooked their different relationships to oppression and in so doing have deepened those oppressions and compromised their shared mission of women s development and empowerment.

A second wave of work in critical development studies attends more specifically to the discursive production of ideology.

Rankin Planning theory shares with critical urban theory an orientation toward normative political questions and a politics of the possible (Lefebvre, 2003) insofar as it does not just analyze and predict, but also develops criteria for judgment and advocates change.

Beyond those broad contours, however, it is fair to say that only a thin slice of planning theory takes up the normative commitments of critical urban theory: to challenge the violence of capitalism, to seek out the agents of revolutionary social change, and to interrogate the ends in relation to the means of practice.

Yet for the bulk of what passes for postmodern thought in the planning field, the agenda of difference has little to do with deconstruction as such; the inspiration for it, if it can be called that, comes rather from liberal-populist valorizations of ethnocultural identity, more often than not aligned with state-sponsored ideologies of multiculturalism.

In the latter cases the critical emphasis usually falls on the socially constructed if not historically contingent nature of our social and cultural identities, and therefore the political possibility of also questioning them, in order to deconstruct in particular those categories such as race, gender, and sexuality that demarcate lines of domination in the realm of social relations.

He would drag the thing to the middle of the room and smack it around.

What emerges in practice is little more than mainstream multiculturalism within which difference is aestheticized voided of its political economic determinants, depoliticized and presented as a palatable spectacle for consumption and commodification (Goonewardena and Kipfer, 2006).

The chapter is organized into three sections that take up key domains in which I believe planning theory can draw (or has drawn) productively from critical development studies to strengthen its capacity to envision and defend the right to the city.

Second, shifts in the ideology of planning from rational comprehensive to advocacy, and so on can be tied to the cyclical fixing of capitalist urbanization in particular constructed landscapes.

Notes 1 For comments on earlier drafts of this paper, heartfelt thanks go to Neil Brenner, Martin Danyluk, Stephanie Gris, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer.

Foremost here is class struggle, among other struggles, already operating at urban, national, and global scales, which assumed the dominant form of inter-imperialist rivalry between the two World Wars contemporaneous with modernism, ushering in powerful forms of nationalism, which consolidated corresponding structures of the capitalist state fascist and Keynesian, above all.

Working in the Gramscian tradition of cultural politics, Scott (1987) sees infrapolitics and hidden transcripts weapons of the weak as the foundational form of politics, the roots of more overt, collective social mobilizations.

Debates on the relationship of such politics to struggles against capitalism between Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, Slavoj i ek, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and others have, in fact, contributed some of the most original insights into radical urban theory in the past two decades.

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Yet they flood the left-liberal discursive space of our mongrel cosmopolis, currently in blissful union with the creative class, some three decades after the decidedly more unhappy marriage between feminism and Marxism.

Bound Infinity/ In-Between This is so if only because the forces of capital have to struggle mightily to impose their will on an urban process and whole populations that can never, even under the most favorable of circumstances, be under their total control.

What initially looked like a good opportunity to put their precarious alternative practices onto more stable footing created, over time, a split between the more and more professionalized, more or less alternative (development and service delivery) organizations on the one hand, and groups, whose needs were not addressed by these arrangements and who, in turn, radicalized.

The extension of urban theory in such directions assumes paramount import in the current imperial conjuncture, as the far-flung order of our global social totality appears to be at a moment of geo-political economic reformatting, if not crisis, to enquire into the possible roles assumed by cities and their subjects in a new world system.

Lefebvre s insights on the urban therefore offer an invaluable starting point for radical urban theory to focus its theoretical horizons and sharpen its political vision, as shown for example

by Kristin Ross engagement with the problematics of gender and colonization in her penetrating study of French postwar modernization:Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1995).

Recognition of their mutual implication in the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender oppressions then forges a solidarity among the Sangtin Writers that enables them to collectively challenge class-based injustices within their own development organization, and ultimately to catalyze an entire social movement rethinking of the nature of expertise within the women and development sector in India.

As such, everyday life also ought to be the central concern of any radical urban theory not simply content with offering us vivid descriptions of cities and capital, but also intent on producing a new concept of politics beyond the exhausted attachments to party, state, and parliament, not to mention social capital, civil society, or citizenship, none of which are adequate to the struggle for the right to the city.

As was arguably also the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when debates on the urban question (Castells 1979 [1972]; Harvey 1973; Lefebvre 2003 [1970]) destabilized inherited Chicago School ontologies, established paradigms of urban research now appear increasingly limited in their ability to illuminate contemporary urban changes and struggles.

A progressive response to today s morethan-financial crisis (Marcuse, this volume) depends on the capacity of people to recognize their material struggles and their emotional discontent in collective rather than individual terms, and here, too, we can think about insights from critical development studies in articulating a role for planning theory.

In Lefebvre s work taken as a whole, we thus find a new conception of totality presented in terms of levels of the social, each of which possesses their own dynamic scales, and among which the urban level now plays the most decisive mediating role.

At the same time, however, among many of the major practitioners of assemblagebased approaches, there appears to be considerable confusion as to whether such categories should be mobilized to deepen, extend, transform, or supersede the analysis of capitalist structurations of urbanization.

In Buck-Morss words, his radical contribution to the superstructural encounter between new technologies and the oneiric desire for a better world consisted in asking how to bring forth both technology and imagination out of their mythic dream states, through making conscious the collective s desire for social utopia, and the potential of the new nature to achieve it by translating that desire into the new language of its material forms.

3 Benjamin quotes these words of Marx in the famous Konvolut N (section of method) of his Passagenwerk; this translation is from Buck-Morss 1989: 4 This text was originally published in Italian in the journal Posse and then circulated on multitudes-infos@samizdat.

The distinctly postmodern phenomenon of cultural studies or what is simply called theory illustrates but a logical extension of this tendency after the disappointment of the radical political aspirations of the more or less left intelligentsia in the West after The city as such did not figure prominently in the canon of Western Marxism, it should be noted Benjamin, Lefebvre, and the Situationists stand as the signal exceptions that prove this rule.

The postmodern contribution to urban planning rests largely on elaborations of difference, but only occasionally with reliable reference to the concept of differénce proposed by Derrida and his poststructuralist students harboring a considerable diversity of theoretical and political sensibilities.

But the approach lacks any structural engagement with problems of social justice or any consideration of how tactics interpolate strategy (Ruddick, 1996).

Economic statistics cannot answer the question: What is socialism?

Bunge argued strongly for the rights of resident communities over "foreign invaders" (such as outside capital, suburban commuters, etc.

(Henri Lefebvre 1972: 70)2 What happened to radical urbanism after the revolution was derailed by state socialism and taken off the political agenda in the West by militaryKeynesianism mirrors the fate suffered

by Marxism under the same circumstances.

(Buck-Morss 1989: 124 5) In their own ways, Lefebvre and Debord also understood the city as the arena for the revolutionary fusion of aesthetics, politics, and technology, especially by proposing the concept of everyday life, which even today seems quite alien to political economic renditions of Marxism.

To this end we may distinguish between subversion and resistance as overlapping zones of practice (Shakya and Rankin, 2008).

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The rise of the dealer class, however, also includes other occupational groups that fall within Florida s category of creative professionals.

Sassen (2006), for example, uses assemblage to refer to a particular historical interrelation of territory, authority, and rights, while Graham and Marvin s Splintering Urbanism conceives of infrastructure networks as sociotechnical assemblies or machinic complexes rather than as individual causal agents with identifiable impacts on cities and urban life (Graham and Marvin 2001: 31, original emphasis).

Quite different strategies of contestation were adopted in struggles to enhance the participation of less privileged and socially disadvantaged groups: especially in the neglected inner-city districts and suburbs of the West, which in some cases developed into territorial traps, there were many waves of struggle against social exclusion.

Urbanization has gone global through the integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility and deregulation in order to debt-finance urban development around the world (Harvey 2008: 30).

In spite of their shared critique of the respective urban development policies, the coalitions do involve tensions, for example between classic movement activists on the one hand and cultural producers on the other.

But to do so we will need to draw upon toolssuch as military interventions, international standard-setting, and trade policy-that to date have been used for other purposes.

had recentlybeen released from prison, where he was serving time for weapons possessionand tampering with a rearm.

But three of the four main supply routes into La Paz pass through El Alto, and the power to choke them off became important in the struggles that occurred.

Exclusionary displacement: this refers to those residents who cannot access housing as it has been gentrified/abandoned: When one household vacates a housing unit voluntarily and that unit is then gentrified or abandoned so that another similar household is prevented from moving in, the number of units available to the second household in that housing market is reduced.

I didn t even tell my pastor that my momma did crack at this time, and my pastor walked in the aisles, laid her hands on me and said, Momma did crack.

When he had started it back in 1958, there were only one or two eviction moves a week.

She never once told them, or even O ce Susie, how she was planning on getting caught up.

Rent regulation, for instance, is accepted in times of war or national emergency, or when the housing shortage reaches crisis proportions; but why only then?

When it does come it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.

In the ensuing years, Larraine would come to believe that Glen had been poisoned by his cellmate.

Some of it can be understood in conventional terms as a search on the part of mobile capitals (with financial, commercial, and production capital having different capacities in this regard) to gain advantages in the production and appropriation of surplus values by moving around.

John, the older of the two deputies and the one who most looked the part broad shoulders, thick jowls, sunglasses, cop mustache, gum gave the door a knock.

You can take it out on Sherrena.

And once again I can t say how you feel because you don t have a mother, but once again I can .

I would reformulate them to be an exigent demand by those deprived of basic material and legal rights, and an aspiration for the future by those discontented with life as they see it around them and perceived as limiting their potentials for growth and creativity.

They were there and this was especially true of the black poor simply because they were allowed to be.

His father had learning disabilities and anger issues, and Jafaris was beginning to exhibit similar characteristics at school.

From that perspective, the crucial line to be drawn in the sand of architecture and urban planning through the last century runs not between what are often casually referred to as modernism and postmodernism ; it runs between those who found out how a revolution could be avoided and those who fought for architecture and revolution.

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In such contexts, many statistical correlations between diverse populations of the respective territory are detectable for instance, between the stock of hot-dog stands, high technology firms, drug dealers, financial products dealers, and so forth but the latter often have no sociological significance of any kind.

A new articulation may find inspiration in the much talked about concept of the right to the city (Brenner and Elden, 2008; Harvey, 2008; Kipfer, 2007; Lefebvre, 1996; Mitchell, 2003; Yacobi, 2006).

She o ered Carol the option of arranging a vendor payment with W-2, which would automatically deduct rent from each month s check.

As noted from the outset, for many Bedouins the Nakbah is not just a distant memory, but a living reality, given the state s persisting policies of dispossession and forced removal.

The demand comes from those directly in want, directly oppressed, those for whom even their most immediate needs are not fulfilled: the homeless, the hungry, the imprisoned, the persecuted on gender, religious, racial grounds.

They work under different conditions (often of low-wage, temporary, and insecure labor in the case of construction and urbanization).

Before bed, he got prednisone, a steroid, through a PARI Proneb Ultra nebulizer with plastic tubing and an airplane-cabin mask.

Everyone around me was making it but me.

She remembered a woman s voice telling her: There s just no way to say it, but Glen died.

The programs had a progressive component: preventing discrimination in housing, including mortgage provision, because of race, and the red-lining of minority neighborhoods.

A graphic covering much of the page indicates in detail just what might be in store for New York's public space (and by extension those of other American cities): face-recognition cameras on lamp poles; police or security officers on every corner; dogs and their handlers roaming the squares and parks; reinforced, more bunker-like buildings;

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During this process both deprivation and identity have combined in the struggle to construct a new orientation.

Initial results have been presented at an exhibition in conjunction with the twentieth INURA conference held in Zurich in 2010 (see www.

Thesis 3: modernization = modernism revolution History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the pubic with the same.

There was a pile of trash on the oor, mainly Beaker s empty Maverick cigarette boxes and chocolate-milk bottles, and dirty dishes were piled in the kitchen sink.

Patrice s middle child, Jada, was banging on di erent things with an empty Mountain Dew bottle.

But in the nal week of May 2008, he found himself on the verge of losing them.

02 INSPIRATIONS AND ANTECEDENTS OF TACTICAL URBANISM Before the city was the hamlet and the shrine and the village: before the village, the camp, the cache, the cave, the cairn; and before all these there was a disposition to social life that man plainly shares with many animal species.

Second, for over 20 years, TWU had focused on the lowest and most Latino/a strata of the working class.

Until they are, intermediate steps can be proposed that will move in the direction of such fundamental action (see the discussion of critical alternatives, below), and reforms can be proposed which can be both effective immediately and open the door to more thorough approaches.

She worked up the courage and walked down to the o ce in sweatpants and a stained black eece.

The Council was formed as a response to constant claims by the authorities, typified by the previous powerful head of the ministry of the Interior Southern District, Shalom Danino, who noted in 1994: it is well known that the Bedouins have no leadership one can never tell what they want they speak in 100 voices (Sheva, May 24, 1994, p.

After she was noti ed that her abatement plan was rejected, Sherrena stapled a copy of an eviction notice to her next letter to the police.

Specific historical structures produce determinate constraints on the possibility for social transformation, as well as determinate, if often hidden or suppressed, openings for the latter.

Thus, if the right to the city is once again demanded today, the question immediately arises as to which city this right refers to.

On the one hand, this tendency leads to rent and land value being treated as derivative categories of distribution rather than the central theoretical categories for integrating geography, space, and the relation to nature into the understanding of capitalism.

Since the foreclosure crisis, Sherrena had been buying properties throughout the North Side at a rate of about one a month.

The consequences are clear in many cities whole neighborhoods and quarters lack basic services to realize their urban citizenship, forming new urban colonial relations, as detailed later (for earlier accounts, see Davis, 2006; Fernandes and Varley, 1998).

The only hope then is that the exterminators will either turn upon their masters (as they have sometimes done in the past) or be defeated a rather unlikely outcome except in particular circumstances such as those in Afghanistan in the course of a militarized struggle.

Sherrena followed the commissioner back to her o ce, a stately wood-paneled room lined with law books, framed certi cates, and family photographs.

For both, their enforced onedimensionality eats away at their humanity, and from the same source, but it does it in different ways.

The conversation with the Milwaukee PD had spooked her; she decided to have the sheri s remove Arleen and deliver Crystal an eviction notice.

Because me being hurt, me being lied on, me being talked about, me being abused.

Kamala s other two daughters walked out themselves, before the re got out of control.

Her boyfriend, who had answered the door Antoine, a bony man with slickedback hair leaned against the wall, just beyond the edge of the light.

Or do they barely walk in the front door before asking to rent, showing a surprising lack of interest in the details?

Elinor Ostrom seeks to disrupt some of the presumptions in her book, Governing the Commons.

Glen snatched a container of prescription pills, and Larraine, thinking he might swallow the whole lot, grabbed his arm.

She took down her curtains and remembered some dirty clothes that were in Crystal s closet.

Sherrena had seen some of her properties double in value during the housing bubble, and she knew the in ated assessments wouldn t last forever.

As the landlord changed the locks with a power drill and the movers pushed the contents of the house onto the wet curb, the children began to run around and laugh.

Likewise, it is very well possible to imagine a city that is sustainable, yet replete with inequalities.

How can I comfort you?

If these problems continue, she wrote, I will ask her to vacate the premises.

She wanted a new television, not some worn and boxy thing inherited from Lane and Susan.

He put his nose inches away from Crystal s face and cocked his st back.

The urban experience The third dimension in the production of space is what Lefebvre calls spaces of representation.

Second, the struggle rarely entails heroic confrontations with the authorities, nor does it produce comprehensive strategies or finely defined agendas.

So you re willing to do a stipulation if she s gone before the rst?

Like Emergency Assistance, this service was reserved more for the unlucky those who had been laid o or mugged than the chronically rent burdened.

This moment right now, Sherrena re ected, it s going to create a lot of millionaires.

After they nished laughing, Sherrena said, I love you, Ricky.

the sed.

By the end of the nineteenth century beer production and consumption in Britain had been regionalized to a considerable degree, and remained so until the 1960s (foreign imports, with the exception of Guinness, were unheard of).

They didn t talk much about girls and refrained from calling Lamar a monkey s ass as they had been doing since he shaved his mustache.

So, I know God got a calling on my life, but if I don t allow him to use me to do that calling, how can he do it?

Otherwise potential opposition will be forever locked down into a closed circle that frustrates all prospects for constructive change, leaving us vulnerable to perpetual future crises of capitalism, with increasingly deadly results.

When she wandered into the kitchen, she discovered that Jori hadn t been able to remove the stove piece, but he did cut the electrical cord.

The Bedouins are constructing a new collective identity through the discourses and materiality of physical development.

Those on SSI were sprinkled throughout, as were the older folks who went to bed with the chickens and woke up with the chickens, as some park residents liked to say.

In policy circles, vouchers were known as a publicprivate partnership.

A sob broke through her blank face when she opened the refrigerator and saw that the movers had cleaned it out, even packing the ice trays.

They also pose the question of how much the current interest in local cultural innovation and the resurrection and invention of local traditions attaches to the desire to extract and appropriate such rents.

One-third devoted at least 80 percent to it.

e d ike.

But one does not have to focus on such "total institutions" (as Foucault has called them) to see that the ability for (or right 00 representation is continually frustrated everyday for innumerable individuals and groups.

He d then swallow or inject the drug and reapply the empty patch, as his patients moaned softly in bed.

To show that the definition of these concepts reflects power relations is one crucial enterprise for critical urban analysts.

Lefebvre is quite clear on this: it is not the right to the existing city that is demanded, but the right to a future city, indeed not necessarily a city in the conventional sense at all, but a place in an urban society in which the hierarchical distinction between the city and the country has disappeared.

It illustrates the new politics of gray spacing emergence from the struggle for informal development at the periphery of peripheries, by the Bedouins vis-à-vis the ethnocratic Jewish state, but also in relation to surrounding Jewish communities and other Palestinian communities known in the Naqab region as Northerners.

Whatever pleasure he took from being at the casino had to do with seeing Sherrena happy.

Tim drove the van, and when Dave went out on moves, he sat in the passenger s seat.

And then the following week, another one seventy- ve.

The whi of shit hits you in the face when you open the door .

I search around until I nd somebody [who will].

Since cases were grouped by plainti s (landlords), a caller made sure Sherrena s other tenants weren t there.

Arleen held her breath and tried the lights, smiling with relief when they came on.

It was a bitterly cold night, and the warmth of their bodies was fogging up the kitchen windows.

A few months after Laura moved in, Ned left her, Pam, and the other girls with a woman they had just met in the drug scene.

I do good work at reasonable prices.

One possibility then is to let those needing housing borrow the money to pay for it, since they are not able to pay for it out of wages; that would be one solution, and was the one adopted.

Within the state apparatus we can distinguish a state-finance nexus.

In the car, Sherrena paused to rub her neck, and Arleen lowered her forehead into the palm of her hand.

In the hallway outside Room 400, Doreen explained that she wasn t trying to scam Sherrena by moving out quickly; she was looking for housing to plan for tomorrow.

But it also meant people could air problems; swap food, clothes, andinformation; and nish one another s sentences about lousy jobs or social workers or prison ( They put gravy On everything!

By this I mean that pattern of behavior within urban governance that mixes together state powers (local, metropolitan, regional, national, or supranational) with a wide array of organizational forms in civil society (chambers of commerce, unions, churches, educational and research institutions, community groups, NGOs, and so on) and private interests (corporate and individual) to form coalitions to promote or manage urban or regional development of one sort or another.

As late as 1960, rentin major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommodations.

Less examined, however, is precisely what the relationships between markets and power-driven development are.

After a few trips, Jori ate his pride and put on Crystal s sand-colored coat.

I m sick of the bullshit, Sherrena said, sick of this motherfucking shit .

Why invest in low-profit production when you can borrow in Japan at a zero rate of interest and invest in London at seven percent while hedging your bets on a possible deleterious shift in the yen sterling exchange rate?

Struggling with variations of race class gender suicide, an extension of Amilcar Cabral s (1974) formulation of class suicide, is an ongoing effort.

Pam and Ned had met in Green Bay, after Pam s father asked Ned to tune up his Harley.

She wore a walking cast and looked over her large glasses with eyes the color of oodwater.

For Larraine Jenkins in W She took care of her rent.

He concluded that the plumbing system was old and vulnerable and advised Doreen to catch everything she could from going down the sink.

Then she looked at Arleen and told her that she and her boys could stay until they found a place.

Utopias as long as they contain a rational core, which I would maintain these ideas do are the (as yet) impossible real or, in other words, the real that is (as yet) impossible because it is as yet unfeasible.

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For while such political economic approaches clearly excel at explaining how the city came to be what it is, they are less adept at saying what a good city may look like, and how we might go from the city we have to the city we love.

Icy air lled his mouth, and it felt like his gums were hardening into one of those plastic molds of teeth in the school nurse s o ce.

Her best hope of staying, she believed, was to convince Beaker to pay his back rent.

More historical and materialist concepts can do better than proposing the tautology: evil people architects, planners, terrorists do evil things.

NWCOs, who largely come out of a tradition of electoral abstinence, do not have experience with even limited forms of power at this scale.

It remains for revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based in exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species.

The Federal Housing Administration often required only a 5 percent down payment, which most working tenants could cover with their tax refund.

His mother counted: One two three At ten, Jafaris exhaled, took a breath in, and smiled.

When the social workers behind the glass asked her, Well, don t you have family that can help?

A hand had been extended, and Arleen needed to act quickly before anyone changed their mind.

One landlord s loss was another s gain.

s an k as ry

When publishing companies charge for access to articles in the scientific and technical journals they publish, the problem of access to what should be common knowledge open to all is plain to see.

It only takes a minute, honey.

House demolition campaigns are launched on a regular basis (see abu-Saad, 2008; Meir, 2005; Swirski, 2008).

In the current crisis, as with its smaller and more localized predecessors over the past 40 years, the problem is not fundamentally one of excessive returns to labor, as it was in the 1970s.

Sherrena turned around and saw that Arleen had poked her head into Room Sherrena stepped into the hallway and walked up to Arleen, who was tucking her face underneath a red hoodie.

Quentin s seat was leaned so far back he was resting more on his hip than his rump.

21 Many cities have launched programs providing artists and creative workers with intermediate use of vacant space until investors are found to develop them, benefitting both empty city coffers and creative types that are in desperate need for space.

And we still got people calling.

African American households were the most likely to have these problems as were those where children slept.

She was in the fur-lined Coach boots with matching purse she had bought in Jamaica.

The housing associations initially only catered to specific groups like members of unions or other professional associations but they gradually opened up access to the general public.

It has the power to gain wider political support than terms that explicitly target the better-off (2010, p.

When his sons were at school, Lamar listened to oldies while he cleaned and drank instant co ee with sugar.

To policymakers, the former was painful, and nothing could be done to stop it short of triage.

One of their original contributions to Marxism consisted in developing an historical materialist concept of everyday life, a notion hitherto resident most influentially in Heidegger s philosophy of being, in spite of having been understood politically as the testing ground of the October Revolution by Lenin and Trotsky.

The Japanese boom of the 1980s ended with a collapse of the stock market and plunging land prices (still ongoing).

Almost all the trailers were lined up in the same direction and set a couple steps apart.

This being a Church of Christ, there was no organ or piano; no acoustic guitar.

The critical literature includes an abundance of insightful critical concepts accounting for the power of elites to assimilate, co-opt, and tame the subaltern.

They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.

Theo was known in the park as a never sweat, a lazy slob who didn t work.

Lefebvre s positive conception of the urban as differential space time should be understood as referring to a concrete utopia (Stanek, 2011).

Radical urban theory begins at this extraordinary moment of modernism energized by the vanguard as much as the avant-garde, by experimenting with the roles of architecture and urban planning in revolutionizing the totality of society.

Planning theory and critical urban theory have a lot to say about organized resistance by already-constituted, marginalized social groups, and, in the case of planning theory, about the need for advocacy on their behalf or inclusionary, participatory processes that interject their demands and interests into planning processes.

If she sensed your attention starting to drift, she would touch your elbow or thigh to pull you back in.

23 At this point in history, this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work (Harvey 2008: 39).

Such an urban space would constitute the social basis for a transformation in everyday life that is open for manifold possibilities for a radically different world.

Ultimately, this means the rearticulation, in a radically new context, of the long-standing demand for the right to self-determination a right that is indispensible for the creation of a different society.

The concept of difference as defined by Lefebvre must therefore be clearly distinguished from other, postmodern definitions.

You re not in it for the future but for now.

A woman on the other end was saying that, during her break, she had walked out of her ten-dollar-an-hour temp job at Landmark Credit Union.

I don t want you to have to either.

Some who rent for illegal operations forget to pretend they have the same interest.

al.

In our view, however, this approach offers no clear basis on which to understand how, when, and why particular critical alternatives may be pursued under specific historical geographical conditions or, more generally, why some possibilities for reassemblage are actualized over and against others that are suppressed or excluded.

Prediction is hazardous, not least because urban space continues to serve simultaneously as the arena, the medium, and the stake of ongoing struggles regarding the future of capitalism.

This politics initiated a global shift toward a neoliberal paradigm, which in its initial roll-back phase7 ground away at Keynesianwelfarist and socialcollectivist institutions.

Whereas Castells followed a form of structural Marxism derived from the work of Louis Althusser, Lefebvre developed a heterodox and open critical theory inspired by many sources, especially by the German dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche and by French phenomenology (see Schmid, 2010).

In the United States right now there are signs that elements of the managerial class, which has lived off the earnings of finance capital all these years, is getting annoyed and may turn a bit radical.

Ain t got no money.

Eventually the mouse would just lie there motionless, and Little would look at it with cool disgust, wondering why the creature didn t get back up.

With the Nakbah also appears the awdah (the return) which signals for most Palestinians the hope of historical correction.

This converts, in turn, into monopoly rents on properties, which makes Hong Kong very attractive to international financial investment capital working through property markets.

Larraine s plan could work only if a local nonpro t organization, her family, or her church came through.

but ellnd a rs

While Jori was all knees and elbows, Jafaris had a round chest and de ned shoulders, with high cheekbones and cornrows that always needed redoing.

This is due largely to the massive urbanization of the global South, but also due to increasing levels of socioeconomic polarization in major parts of the world.

The protests, even those around public transport, schools, child care, and other public services, all contested the cultural norms of the institutions of collective consumption, their price, their quality, and the limited options to participate in their design.

Notes 1 I am aware that the school known as critical theory comes at the critical from a different direction, but it is one which, I believe, inevitably leads to this position.

The government no longer considered the large stock of social housing as a universal provision for the general population but as an impediment to a well-functioning housing market.

Betty had piled her tables with magazines and old mail and canned food and bottles of soy sauce and candy.

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When the work was done, Larraine gave each boy $5 and sat alone in Beaker s trailer, swatting away fruit ies.

PART TWO OUT ORDER SOME CARRYOUT Larraine was up before the sun, dashing cool water on her face.

Bieck Management replaced Lenny with a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

The new maintenance man quit after a week, saying, I mean, ninety-nine percent of the houses in here are just too far gone .

he is in e rt na of

The deputies would knock on the door to announce the eviction; the movers would follow, clearing out the home.

The bathroom drawers bore a resemblance to the nuts-and-bolts aisle at the hardware store, with all the travelsized tubes of toothpaste and bobby pins and hair ties and nail clippers grouped together in their own respective compartments.

And then the sheri will come.

The criterion for the just city is not the extent to which there is scarcity but how scarcity is distributed.

The financial crisis seems to be spreading, to engulf more and more people, to cause more and more unemployment, insecurity, hunger, and want, a greater and greater dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, with inequality, luxury in the midst of poverty, illiteracy, substantive as well as linguistic, selfishness in place of solidarity, isolation in place of love.

The eldest child, a seventh-grade boy, tried to help by taking out the trash.

Some claimed never to have received notice or pointed out, accurately, that the notice did not announce a date or even a range of dates when the eviction would take place.

The oldest among them was Tim, lean and sour-faced with reddish-brown skin, stubble, and a fresh pack of Salems in his front pocket.

Then they would cross the Menominee River Valley and course through the predominantly Hispanic streets of the near South Side before ending their day in the trailer parks on the white far South Side.

Even the appearance of modern government in these states is sometimes a fa<;ade, as if the leaders are reading from a script.

If you re going to talk, discuss your case outside.

We may see the rise of cross-border organizations as the reductions in remittances spread the crisis to places like rural Mexico or Kerala.

That is the problem to which we have to collectively respond, and it does us no good to imagine that there is a vanguard of the proletariat that is going to lead us out of this mess.

These rallying cries stand as shorthand memos for the respective collective identity of the actors, their target, and their concerns, i.

Instead, critical theorists demanded an interrogation of the ends of knowledge, and thus, an explicit engagement with normative questions.

Though still weak, the subaltern are shifting their strategies by partially (it not completely) disengaging their behavior, identity, and resource-seeking from the state, and by developing an alternative vision to civil integration as citizens in an inclusive state.

Social mixing was achieved in the 1980s as a byproduct of a more general development towards just urbanism which equalized the access of different income groups.

She was on SSI, and wouldn t be able to help even if she were willing, which she wasn t.

New Year s at the latest.

For the first time on a significant scale, the agitation resulting from the aspirations of the alienated were linked, if tenuously and in constant tension, with the demands of the materially exploited: the claims of the students to the claims of the workers (see Marcuse 2008).

I don t want to buy em for em.

But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or purchasing a rst home for that tenant, it was a real barrier on the already di cult road to self-reliance and security.

But in order for that to happen, we have to deal with one of the most difficult aspects of the current situation.

For Lefebvre, difference is a multidimensional concept that arises from gaps in the fabric of everyday life and from political struggles.

This started with the steadily employed population, but by the late 1990s it had to go further because that market was exhausted.

So your landlady at this point wants you to move out.

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The second program was the Homelessness Prevention Program, o ered through Community Advocates and mainly federally funded.

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This creates boundaries that divide urban groups according to their status; a process of separating urban incorporation and creeping apartheid whereby the meaning of urban citizenship depends on arbitrary features such as ethnicity, place of birth, or class.

She had to repeat herself a few times before Lamar could understand that she was saying Tummy hurt.

He makes more than a million dollars on this park.

Tenants in eviction court were generally poor, and almost all of them (92 percent) had missed rent payments.

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Often, implicit distinctions and invisible boundaries play important roles here that are hidden to the outside observer.

Key elements of critical theory: four propositions There are, of course, profound epistemological, methodological, political, and substantive differences among writers such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas.

A lot of people say, Tobin, he s an asshole.

What you say?

Human settlements existed for thousands of years as vernacular responses to practical everyday needs, long before any centralized, top-down citymaking endeavor was established.

She still owed $350 plus a late fee but said she d have the rest of the money tomorrow.

It works out better.

A lot of people have been laid off in the financial services in some instances they have even had their mortgages foreclosed.

What is at stake here, they rightly argue, is a rather more complicated relationship across scales in which local initiatives can percolate upwards to a global scale and vice versa, at the same time as processes within a particular definition of scale interurban and interregional competition being the most obvious examples can rework the local and regional configurations of what globalization is about.

Initially only married couples qualified for housing that was distributed through the municipality but in the 1960s the growing group of single-person households and unmarried couples also qualified.

While urbanization has accelerated and generalized, there is also strong, albeit diffuse, evidence in many places that urban spaces are being reclaimed.

Moreover, the focus of critique in critical social theory has evolved significantly during the course of the past two centuries of capitalist development (Benhabib, 1986; Therborn, 1996).

Poor black women were locked out.

This was a common practice outsider landlords hiring people from the community, usually their tenants, to manage property.

But remember I m that same bitch that opened up my door and let you stay here even though I didn t know you from Adam and Eve.

Susie pushed for Pam and Scott to be kicked out, but she would also run down the Cadillac and yell at Tobin if she thought he was overcharging someone or moving too slow xing a porch railing.

Before the summer of 2010 was in full swing, the Green Alliance had won the local battle to expand the road closure for the entire months of July and August.

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RC11

Julian Besems, Alex Borrell

Research C uster 11 focuses on the d g ta as a way of th nk ng an nstrument for abstract on and a means of exp or ng We shy away from the Boo ean true and/or fa se answers We are genera sts us ng our computat ona teracy to nav gate the spectrum between wor ds and po nts of v ew Th s year we exam ned urban env ronments through the ens of cu ture see ng c t es as p aces that are co ect ve y mag ned created ma nta ned and nhab ted by us – humans We v ewed the urban by ook ng at the cu tura nformat on that resu ts from the act v t es and nteract ons that take p ace w th n We n t a y exp ored from afar through art c es fi m terature mus c pa nt ngs performance poetry photography and theatre The c ty was treated as a product of th s cu tura nformat on and we embraced ts ncomprehens b ty by re at ng to t through the d g ta p enty – a seem ng y nfin te stream of e ements These e ements and the r co ect ve p en tude prov ded us w th an opportun ty to re ate to and understand the c ty on ts own terms from a bound ess comb nat on of perspect ves So how do we re ate to the vast med a andscape through nstruments of computat on? Our a m s not to opt m se but to exp ore the cont nu ty and nfin ty of what s ts n between We see space as uncountab e and therefore nfin te yet the spaces we occupy are u t mate y bound They are bound not on y by geometry but a so by convent ons and the narrat ves that nform them We can compare th s w th the nfin ty that s ts between two who e numbers Even though everyth ng n between one and two s bound by them there s an nfin te doma n of numbers of a d fferent nature rat ona or rea between them n th s fash on we worked th s year to deve op the means to understand what k nd of spaces we wanted to descr be We took cu ture to be that wh ch occup es space t can on y take p ace n what s occup ed by peop e Space tse f s not a geometr ca ent ty – t s the backdrop where a act v t es take p ace t s where we breathe hear speak see nteract pause p ay cry and re o ce

S uden s C es as a P ocess o Confl c s Be ween Top-Down and Bo om-Up Dongchen Du Ru a X ong C y n Reve e Chang He Man A hok Ko ha Ave ne Thoma L ng un Zhou Memo y and s Pub c Senses Luyao Chang X ng F eda Feng L ngyu Zha Ree o Rea Kex n Gao Yue ng Peng Ru nan X Theo y Tu o Ph ppe Mo e Sk s Tu o s Ju an Be em Cee P e k Jo Pu enee Consu an s and C cs Ad Bokha Robe o Bo azz Ecem E g n Tom Ho be on Ludge Hove ad Ago no N ck Jo ge O ozco M o Roman E zabe h Se by

With hard work, thrift, and intelligence, a society ca

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11.1–11.4 Cities as a Process of Conflicts Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up A city is a complex system, and Istanbul, which straddles the two continents of Asia and Europe, is a city that embraces complexity at a number of different levels. Throughout history, urbanists have analysed, manipulated and predicted cities from anthropological, sociological, phenomenological and psychological perspectives. Nonetheless, designing cities remains a contentious issue that generates ongoing debate. Despite urban methodologies achieving a level of success in certain contexts, their universal applicability has resulted in the rejection of other levels of complexity. As the shared property of citizens, the urban experience is simultaneously collective and individual and is made up of diverse points of view. In light of recent advances in artificial intelligence, novel avenues of expression have emerged and people can articulate their ideas using descriptive language. As a result, ideas are refined and text descriptions have become the primary medium through which people can express themselves. Within the context described above, the project questions the idea of the city. It provides an urban ‘installation’ that can transform abstract urban experiences and ideas into theories and spaces. The project also embraces the complexities and challenges of urban planning and integrates the concepts of cybernetics, smart cities and machine learning (ML) in addressing these intricate issues of urban environments.

Drawing from the theories of Jane Jacobs and other influential urban thinkers, the project highlights the importance of finding a balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches in urban planning. Utilising advanced tools such as Self-Organising Maps (SOM) and incorporating diverse perspectives, the project develops a dynamic and comprehensive approach to urban planning.

11.5–11.10 Reel to Real When talking about Istanbul, people may envision spies racing on rooftops in James Bond films, young people wandering through narrow streets, YouTubers perusing a variety of goods in the Grand Bazaar or the silhouette of the city skyline as seen from the Bosphorus Strait. Abundant images of the city, which reflect its complexity and diversity, are presented across the media. The project curates cinematic versions of Istanbul’s urban spaces to showcase multiple faces and reintroduce these spaces in a ‘fragment palace’.

Four cinematic genres are selected for building Istanbul’s library, where both real and fictional spaces of the city are depicted. In this library, any input video can be matched with four different versions of Istanbul with similar content. Because films inherently possess a narrative quality, the reconstructed cinematic spaces are not a mere replication of reality but are imbued with a strong contextual significance. The focus of the lens, activities of characters and editing methods imply potential characteristics and apply contexts to reconstructed filmic geometries. The reconstructed geometry of the palace is formed through a series of frames along a timeline path. While walking along the path, different focuses are placed on different segments of the geometry. As the segmented geometry is cropped and placed along the timeline with the same relative positions to the camera, viewers can experience the film while walking the timeline path.

11.11–11.14 Memory and Its Public Senses Rapid development often means that cherished memories of a city have faded or been forgotten. This project is interested in ‘repainting’ the forgotten spaces within the city of Istanbul. Many cities across the world look very similar and reflect a certain homogeneity in their evolution. One of the reasons behind this is that the urban environments we grow up in shape our perception of how 124

a city should be designed. We must instead try to think outside our conventional understanding of the city and approach it in new and innovative ways. Our memories of the city are collected through our five senses. This project focuses on three of these – sight, sound and touch. It uses the qualitative notion of memory as a mechanism, and sensory data as an instrument, to repaint the forgotten spaces in the city. In contrast to conventional design projects, this project is not a proposal but a design research experiment. Instead of working within the confines of a physical context, the project works within the realm of datasets, utilising ML techniques. To be more precise, the entire design is situated within latent space formed by encoding the environment through collected data. All the design steps taken are based on the latent state encodings of the surrounding environment. The final stages of the project transition from the abstract computational realm back into the tangible world, reintegrating the design in its physical context.

11.15–11.17 City in Reverie Objects play an important role as tangible markers that chalk out the story of our lives. They possess layers of invaluable associations and meanings. Moments, thoughts, actions, decisions, desires and memories are instilled in them and their very presence evokes compelling responses. A city can be read through its objects. They are storytelling devices and represent a collective repository of shared values and experiences. Istanbul is a city coloured by the richness of the past along with the charm and resilience of the present. The dialogue between the old and the new allows for eccentricity, which contributes to a city’s character and energy. Observing and engaging with the objects on the streets of Istanbul allows us to delve deeper into social, political and economic systems which make up a comprehensive image of the city. The intent is to create spaces that celebrate the memory and culture of Istanbul by incorporating these objects into its design.

A key observation of this project is the realisation that spaces become vibrant and dynamic when the objects occupying them are allowed to communicate.

Throughout the design process, mundane objects are shown to possess an unexpectedly powerful influence.

Often overlooked and underappreciated, these everyday artefacts carry histories, emotions and associations that collectively shape the city’s essence. Their significance lies not in their individual materiality, but in the stories they hold and the memories they evoke. By acknowledging the power of these seemingly ordinary objects, we can better understand the nuanced and intricate layers that contribute to a city’s identity.

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Videogame Urbanism

RC12

Luke Pearson, Sandra Youkhana

Research Cluster 12 sees videogames as an alternative form of computation that emphasises a collaborative design practice through creating inhabitable worlds and participatory tools.

Our culture is increasingly shaped by our experience of, and participation in, virtual environments. Videogame urbanism explores how urban designers and architects can make a positive and fundamental contribution to the design of virtual worlds to reflect their social importance. Such worlds represent both an opportunity and a challenge for architecture and urbanism.

This year, our cluster challenged the notion of what a ‘virtual city’ is, and what it could be. To do this, we first studied some of the most seminal virtual cities, to understand what makes them so uniquely engaging and spatially immersive. These included virtual cities inspired by the past, present and future; cities in turmoil and disrepair; and cities which do away with the form of a city altogether.

Our research shows that, while virtual worlds give people a creative voice, they can also amplify the complex social, political and historical forces that form our physical cities.

By making playable videogame applications in Unreal Engine, we used videogames as a platform for both imagining new societies and providing the tools to engage people in their foundation. Through these, we prototyped new forms of virtual city to question how much, or how little, they may need to correspond to the typical urban forms we see in the physical world. We explored how urban designers can use virtual environments to enhance our understanding of real-world cities, and what social benefits our designs might have.

Despite virtual worlds being synthetic environments built from scratch, there is often a trend to mirror things we know from reality.

But to what degree do virtual spaces need a real-world reference point to be meaningful places for those that use them? Could embracing the unique qualities of virtual space allow us to reimagine what is possible in reality?

Students Chinese Cyberpunk Manifesto Piaoyang Liu, Xingyu Liu, Tingwei Xiong, Yuang Zhang Citypedia Ngan Hong Chang, Ruiqi Chen, Xixuan Lu, Shuning Xu Founding City Jiayi (Jasmine) Hu, Ayca Ozturk, Nancy Pacheco Sanchez Interscale Jing Cao, Yuxian Chen, Qinni Ge, Yiqi Ji The Last of the Barbican Weichen Sun Virtual Taohuayuan Yunlong Zheng Theory Tutor James Delaney Skills Tutor Luke Pearson

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12.1–12.6 Chinese Cyberpunk Manifesto This project is an interrogation of the Cyberpunk science-fiction genre, which frequently amalgamates spatial and cultural elements from different Asian countries for the construction of fictional worlds through a Western lens.

While Cyberpunk remains a popular fictional genre, it has faced accusations of Orientalism, particularly in the spatial design of its worlds. The game proposes a new future for a Chinese Cyberpunk city that more authentically references architecture from China as part of a new Cyberpunk language, allowing the past, present and future city to co-exist at the same time.

The city draws inspiration from fictional visions of the future, contemporary Chinese urbanism and public space as depicted in Zeduan Zhang’s famous scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival (dated 1085). Using the scroll to define a route for their journey, players navigate through three versions of the same city in different time periods, overlaid to highlight the urban transformations. By moving buildings back and forward through time and space, the player curates their own vision for a new Chinese Cyberpunk city that combines nuanced readings of traditional, contemporary and future Chinese architecture. Players create a city as a ‘manifesto’ based on their personal desires and readings of spatial culture.

12.7–12.11 Citypedia This project develops an architectural creation game that allows players to discover how different urban patterns are generated and how they affect the organisation of architecture. Players create their own unique city by combining patterns and form, drawing out configurations of city blocks and rearranging building typologies. Drawing from research into historical city forms, the game allows players to experiment with cities using orthogonal, radial and Voronoi grids, which are recomputed in real time and procedurally regenerate as the urban patterns change.

Through these player-led experiments, different skylines and city formations are generated, creating palimpsests built upon previous design decisions. At the scale of buildings, players can use a series of tools to reshape the individual units, with changes cascading through the existing unit typologies. By using a combination of procedurally generated and player-driven systems, the project allows for the playful exploration of the unexpected quirks and spatial frictions that cities collect over time. It examines how cities can be planned with an overall vision in mind, but inevitably find themselves transformed and disrupted over time, with their future forms defined by ever more granular and emergent forces.

12.12–12.13 Virtual Taohuayuan This project embraces the poetic landscapes of Taohuayuan as the inspiration for a game that takes a series of underutilised sites in China as areas for agricultural development. Through an interactive game environment, players can prototype different agrarian approaches for cultivating the site, from traditional to modern, much like a farming simulator. The game tracks the environmental, economic and productive qualities of these designs, allowing players to learn more about more sustainable approaches to farming through play.

12.14–12.15 The Last of the Barbican This project imagines a dystopian future for London where the only nature left in the city is preserved in the conservatory of the Barbican. By embodying different natural forces such as clouds, rain and wind, the player can use weather systems to reverse London’s environmental disaster by greening the city and cleaning the air.

12.16–12.17 Founding City The project questions the relationship between architecture, memory and digital information. We often think of physical memory and 134

digital memory in different terms, one accepted as being incomplete and fragmentary and the other as a true and accurate record. In this context, the project is a game that explores both our memory of place and what digital memory means in the context of saving and recalling a virtual world. The game is inspired by approaches to urban ruination in three different countries: Turkey, Mexico and China. While the contemporary architecture of modern cities might be somewhat globally interchangeable, each culture’s traditional forms of building speak deeply about its society. This project is built upon a collaborative game world, where players draw from contemporary and historical architecture from these cities to ‘repair’ ruins using collected fragments and preserve their memory in new architectural forms. This game promotes an approach to preserving cities by working with the old and new urban fabric, while challenging the exactitude of digital files and virtual worlds, suggesting that our recollection, or the game’s ‘save’ file, might always remain incomplete.

12.18–12.21 Interscale This game demonstrates how seemingly small design decisions produce global impacts, affecting how we work towards a sustainable future.

Players engage with a series of cities, including London, Manila and Chongqing, that are facing critical environmental issues and respond to air, water and land contamination through multi-scalar design tools. Through a ‘long zoom’ game structure, the player navigates back and forth between molecular, urban and planetary scales to instigate changes at one level that have spatial and environmental consequences on the other. Through the real-time simulated environment of a game, players can explore imaginative futures for the city through concurrent prototyping at multiple scales. By greening the molecular structures of concrete particles, opting for natural ventilation strategies in cities and reducing plastic waste, players are given design agency to explore the city’s future impact on the environment at both the macro and micro levels, discovering how sustainability strategies create different impacts on climate, space and time. At the end of the game, players receive information on the planetary future they have produced, so that they can understand the implicit impact of their design decisions across multiple scales, but this also hints at the challenges faced by both the player and global citizens.

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Machine Learning Urbanism: Cities Beyond Cognition

RC14

Roberto Bottazzi, Eirini Tsouknida, Tasos Varoudis Research Cluster 14 explores the implications for urban design of the availability of large datasets and the algorithmic processes able to analyse them, examining how these factors might shape the future of cities.

Though the contribution of machine learning (ML) methods to the exploration, classification, management and creation of massive, granular and diverse datasets is relatively recent, its impact is already palpable and profound. In fact, ML methods can not only compute massive datasets but also, more importantly, foreground correlations between datasets representing different media or aspects of city life that are not intelligible by human cognition. Such correlations can eventually be used to think of urbanism as a broader discipline engaging various media and modes of expression, straddling different disciplines to generate novel experiences and spatial and programmatic configurations. By deploying these new algorithmic instruments, urban designers can operate across diverse scales, temporalities, media and disciplines to conceive a whole series of interventions ranging from events to large physical structures.

The research developed in Research Cluster 14 utilises data to investigate phenomena and environments that do not traditionally pertain to the purview of urban design: identity, language and accents, mental and physical wellbeing, food and the distribution of cognitive attention in urban environments. Through experimentation with ML methods, students create complex correlations bridging the physical and ephemeral, personal and collective, and natural and artificial divides. The aim is to invest data practices with the ability to change the perception that urbanism is primarily a quantitative, objective discipline and, therefore, rethink how we design and inhabit cities.

The testbed for such research and design experiments was London. Over the year, students mixed large-scale territorial studies in which the whole of the capital was investigated with small-scale and personal investigations centred on the individual and their perceptions. The central theme connecting all projects developed was the notion of publicness. Urgent themes, such as those of individual identities, the relation between human and non-human actors and mental health, were mediated through algorithmic processes to rethink how we can live together.

Students Accent Fusion Xuming Cai, Muskaan Mardia, Yiwen Qian, Yiheng Xu Attenomy City Manan Kinjal Hingoo, Qiutong Huang, Philip (Flip) Meijaard, Jiahui Xu Equiticity Tejaswini Deshmukh, Shriyansh Jain, Aalok Joshi Food-Topia Yanjie Lu, Gracia Muljono, Yawei Zhang, Qiuyi Zhang ND2 Yiran Luo, Yi Yue, Xiru Zhang Theory Tutors Roberto Bottazzi, Eirini Tsouknida, Tasos Varoudis Skills Tutors Margarita Chaskopoulou, Vasileios Papalexopoulos Consultants and Critics Andy Bow, Klaas De Rycke, Zachary Fluker, Andreas Kolfe, Rolandas Markevicius, Frédéric Migayrou, Peter Neckelmann, Annarita Papeschi, Andrew Porter

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14.1, 14.5–14.8 Accent Fusion With its 270 nationalities, London is home to individuals from all over the world each expressing their sense of identity and belonging through a variety of accents. Linguistic and cultural diversity must be celebrated, not erased. The project utilises machine learning (ML) models to generate an urbanism of accents transforming the immaterial qualities of sound into physical artefacts. The scheme proposes a new public space for Battersea Power Station by creating a marketplace that brings people from various cultural backgrounds together and enhances their sense of belonging. 14.1, 14.6 ML models are trained to generate sound-to-form building morphologies. The massive catalogue of morphologies generated combined different fonts in a playful reflection of London’s cultural diversity.

14.5 By employing text-to-image models, 3D modules are transformed into functional parts of the scheme based on the project’s key themes, ranging from urban furniture to architectural structures. 14.7–14.8 Renderings show 3D modules and structures organised to provide a new public market for Battersea.

14.2–14.4 Attenomy City The project translates the notions of attention economy and intelligibility to urbanism by proposing a hybrid transportation hub design around people’s perceptions. By redesigning Euston Station, the research analyses how horizontal and vertical movement affects our experience of the city. 14.2 The most dramatic element of the project is the large roof, which spans different parts of the site.

The roof performs a number of roles: it guides pedestrians as they cross public areas and controls environmental conditions. Its overall effect is, however, much greater than any of its functions. Its dynamic features perform a spectacle affecting the users’ experience. 14.3 The section through the different layers of infrastructure crisscrossing Euston Station shows the complexity of the site both in terms of managing flows and designing the spatial and environmental experience for users as they move from the underground platform to open public space. 14.4 The overall view of the scheme shows its main components: the large roof, the vertical dynamic and the main public areas. The final proposal combines the typology of the park and the transport hub.

14.9–14.13 Equiticity The project utilises ML models to rethink streets as sensory experiences that can improve our mental wellbeing. The project proposes a linear intervention from Vauxhall to Westminster that crosses and connects diverse parts of London. 14.9–14.11 The project utilises soft elements such as colour, texture and landscape to change the perception of space and care for its users. The correlation between moods and design interventions is managed by an ML model trained on morphological, environmental and sentimental data relating to London. 14.12 Isometric view of the selected site, stretching from the residential areas south of the Thames to the commercial region of Westminster. The project provides a series of ‘urban rooms’ – thirdspaces that break the urban continuity and provide sensorial rest. 14.13 The image shows the super-sampled output of the three stacks of data that are used for the image-toimage translation and to determine the site selection. The super-sampling technique is used to render at a higher resolution than the output device, creating a recursive method for designing small urban interventions based on the complexity and richness of large urban environments.

14.14–14.18 ND² The Mayor of London has launched a massive £3.1m tree planting fund. The project employs ML models to determine areas suitable for rewilding and considers how the distribution of such a large collection of objects can be charged with urban and aesthetic intentions. The proposal targets the shopping centre, 146

a building typology that is losing its relevance and could be rethought of as a site for urban rewilding. 14.14 Trees, programmes and structures are distributed based on their urban and ecological role. More appropriate landscape features and installations are designed to enhance the visual experience of pedestrians and facilitate use. 14.15–14.16 The planting strategy infiltrates the existing shopping mall to create a new, hybrid public space that combines the features of an urban park with existing spaces for commerce. The interventions extend vertically to the existing residential towers to provide green landscaping and control indoor temperatures.

14.17 Introducing animals to the area can enhance biodiversity and elevate the experience for individuals.

Species such as deer, foxes, rabbits and squirrels are particularly suitable choices, contributing to the optimal transformation of the rewilding site. 14.18 Roof gardens provide open space for horticulture lessons and education. The project converts commercial spaces into social and educational areas for the local community.

The gardens operate as forest schools for children from local schools, giving them the chance to learn how to grow food.

14.19–14.22 Food-Topia The project utilises ML methods to envision new public spaces designed around food.

By proposing a series of food ports, the proposal mixes spaces for the production, storage and consumption of food with automated landscapes. Tested in Rotherhithe, the system can in principle be applied to any open space in London. The design mixes sharp geometries to accommodate robots with the soft, deformed edges of the pedestrian network which organise the entire scheme. 14.19 Diagram showing all the different building types, such as storage areas, hydroponic towers and low-rise pavilions for food distribution and consumption.

14.20 Unlike the automated planting areas, the central section of the landscape connects communities through social activities. The information centre in the sunken plaza monitors data across the food port in real time to enable digital production, distribution and consumption.

14.21 The use of digital platforms for consuming food has changed how cities operate. The project reflects such transformation by proposing a 24-hour landscape coupling food consumption, parks and public spaces.

This night rendering shows a view of the hydroponic towers, shadow kitchens, markets and restaurants.

14.22 The masterplan shows the distribution of food ports in Rotherhithe based on the data analysed. The network connects food ports through robotic tracks.

Finally, the network also includes a phone app which allows users to interact with the different services on offer.

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Pervasive Urbanism: Mediated Ecologies of Affect

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Ilaria Di Carlo, Annarita Papeschi, Soungmin Yu Triggered by emotive and affectual responses, aesthetic experiences are believed to be at the base of cognitive processes and rational thinking. Following this line of thought and taking into account the theory of the umwelt – in which a specific model of the world exists in correspondence with each given creature’s sensory apparatus – we can deduce that our environment consists of an ecology of different forms of intelligence, each one with its own affectual vision, and that humans are just one form of biochemical intensity.

This is an interpretation that is echoed in the work of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who describes the birth of the collective subject – the transindividual – as an ontogenetic and metastatic process of psychological and affective events, thus offering a sensual, affectual and ecological interpretation of the social process of becoming collective.

In exploring new conceptualisations of collaborative design processes as digital and material affectual contaminations, Research Cluster 15 investigates the epistemology designed by the intersection of post-humanist aesthetics and automated cognition, formulating a design-research practice that uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore the emerging relationship between digital networks, cities and citizens.

Central London, with its array of attractions and diverse cultural offerings, constituted the terrain for our initial explorations this year. Our projects sought to identify the mechanics behind urban experiences at key touristic and cultural attractions such as Chinatown, the Southbank and Borough Market. Methods explored an immersive reading of the city, and included situated sensing, behavioural simulation and analysis of photographic social media via machine learning.

Populated by hybrids of living and non-living matter, the resulting designs compose a visual and formal archive that, customised via artificial intelligence image-to-image diffusion methods, was redeployed in new contexts and design scenarios, including augmented experiences and reprogrammable infrastructural schemes. Exploring collaborative protocols of information exchange, automated decision-making and adaptability – with a particular focus on how this might be enabled via material intelligence and special organisational logics – the resulting designs were developed as interconnected proposals that establish deep local connections to their context, metabolising fragments of the collective site imaginary and the local spatial intelligence.

Students Fractal Aestheti(c)ity Akbar Agniputra, Zhaoyan Feng, Daijia Ke, I-Lin Wu Linguistic Landscapes Meiying Chen, Chunyu Liu, Mei Meng, Yiyan Xu Post-Digital Proxemics Naixiang Gao, Siyi Huang, Xinjie Zhu Theory Tutor Ilaria Di Carlo Skills Tutor Vincent Nowak Consultants and Critics Yota Adilenidou, Tommaso Casucci, Marcella Del Signore, Valina Geropanta, Tom Holberton, Alican Inal, Nikoletta Karastathi

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15.1–15.2, 15.8–15.11 Post-Digital Proxemics The project explores the experiential process of food consumption in urban contexts, with a particular focus on street markets.

Taking London’s Borough Market as a case study, the project identifies the visual and olfactory cues behind the rich food experience on offer, exploring the role of fluctuating perceptions and emotive responses to proxemic behaviour, with methods that draw on situated sensing, behavioural simulation and social media analysis. The project creates a visual and formal archive that, customised via machine learning (ML), is redeployed in new contexts. The final proposal explores the making of an augmented experience for Lloyd Park, East London, where the collective enhanced aesthetic experiences become the means for creating contextual links to the site. 15.1 A view of the proposal for Lloyd Park through the augmented reality (AR) lens. 15.2 Bird’s-eye view of the built proposal. Borough Market’s spatial, material and colour palette is reintroduced in Lloyd Park. 15.8 A still frame from the simulation of the overall collaborative design process. Contributors are invited to take pictures at key locations. The results are processed and interpolated via ML using the visual archive of Borough Market to create new spatial and formal organisations.

15.9 A perspective of the proposal for the Lloyd Park market through the lens of the AR experience. 15.10 The same perspective as the built proposal. 15.11 From top to bottom: Flickr-based popularity analysis of Borough Market; Flickr post sentiment analysis; representation of galvanic skin response data as sampled on site through Arduino sensing.

15.3–15.7 Fractal Aestheti(c)ity The project explores the correlation among fractal aesthetics, visual perception and emotional responses in urban settings. An initial evaluation of the immersive fractal aesthetic experience based on Google Street View imagery indicated the essential role of vegetation in the generation of positive emotional responses. The proposal distributes a network of green corridors in Central London, exploring the potential of green infrastructure to act as a service system for both cultural distribution and environmental regulation. The system has a self-supporting hydroponic structural design which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to learn adaptive strategies of deployment from its context.

The proposal articulates a series of elevated pedestrian walkways that rejuvenate the existing pedway network and improve the overall connectivity on the site. 15.3 Sentiment analysis (left) maps the sentiment score of the social media dataset. Fractal analysis (right) illustrates the fractal dimension score calculated by box-counting pictures from Google Street View. 15.4 The visual memory of places is transformed into 3D space using AI to produce depth maps and point clouds. Fractal logic is subsequently implemented to grow the network and connect the point clouds. 15.5 The diagram illustrates the relations between the proposed structure, the overall organisation of the hydroponic system and the vegetation growth on a prototypical segment of the proposed walkway. 15.6 The green corridors connect to the existing pedway network and underground station, improving the overall connectivity of the site.

15.7 Intertwined within the existing urban fabrics, the network of proposed walkways provides multiple public space typologies – pedways, rooftop gardens and riverside promenades – rejuvenating the local pedestrian connectivity while providing a network of new inclusive spaces.

15.12–15.16 Linguistic Landscapes Originally a successful global model for integrated cultural and business facilities, Chinatown London’s relevance has significantly declined in recent years. Responding to the new set of expectations defined by the younger 158

generation, the project reimagines Chinatown as a new beacon of cultural and economic representation for the Chinese community. 15.12–15.13 The notion of linguistic landscapes is first explored in Soho, using methods such as language and image recognition through ML. The final proposal reorganises Chinatown as an augmented urban experience in Canary Wharf, exploring the creation of a large-scale network of Chinese follies built from the visual and spatial archive of the original Chinatown.

Clichéd images are transformed using image-to-image and image-to-point cloud workflows. 15.14 The diagram illustrates how the workflow is disrupted and hybridised by sound samples captured on site. 15.15 Immersive virtual world experiences, with point clouds, sound image projection and folly all visible at the same time.

15.16 A night render of a real-world folly.

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Urban Morphogenesis Lab

DeepGreen City

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Filippo Nassetti, Claudia Pasquero

Research Cluster 16 investigates bio-design in the age of artificial intelligence. The brief this year, titled DeepGreen City, explored the application of biological and artificial intelligence to the redesign of the urban sphere. A selection of contaminated natural and artificial landscapes from across the world were chosen for our case studies.

Students worked in groups to develop four distinct and site-specific projects. Each of the following aesthetic and morphological explorations was intended as a measure of ecological intelligence, contributing to the redefinition of the role of design in a time of climate change.

Peat Revitalisation radically challenged the traditional concept of the ‘urban’ and proposed a collective living scheme for Indonesia’s peatlands. The habitat was chosen as the experiment site for collective dwelling due to the peatland’s endangered status and its significant role in restoring carbon content. Indonesia’s peatlands stand at the frontier of the climate crisis in that they suffer from annual flooding and peat fires during the wet and dry seasons respectively.

The project employed artificial and biological intelligence to collect data from potential flood and fire zones, and to form an efficient mycelium bio-structure.

Cerulean addressed the urban heat island phenomenon by fostering a biodiverse ecosystem to promote harmonious co-existence between micro- and macro-organisms. The introduction of shading trees reduced thermal stress, while energy efficiency was enhanced by urban climate and built environment characteristics.

Breath Underground specifically targeted air pollution originating from the London Underground. Through rigorous field investigations and in-depth data analysis, the project explored and constructed underground spaces to effectively mitigate environmental issues by harnessing the air-purifying capabilities of moss.

The objective of Abandoned Mine Restoration was to reimagine abandoned mines as urban structures by fostering dynamic collaboration among human and non-human entities. To achieve this, the project harnessed the bio-intelligence of bio-materials such as mycelium and moss. Mycelium, through the process of ‘bio-remediation’, effectively improved soil conditions by breaking down organic matter and absorbing heavy metals to form intricate networks. Additionally, moss aided air purification by absorbing airborne pollutants.

Students Abandoned Mine Restoration Ayham Hameed, Shradha Kohli, Lingying Lai, Liuyang (Andre) Wang Breath Underground Song Han, Ziyu Han, Tonghui Zhou, Li Zhu Cerulean Aagam Mundhava, Prashant Phirke, Prasad Sandbhor Peat Revitalisation Jiacong (Jecci) Chen, Napapa Soonjan, Yuanhao Wei, Shi (Rock) Zheng Theory Tutor Emmanouil Zaroukas Skills Tutors Sheng Meng, Filippo Nassetti

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16.1–16.4, 16.6–16.8 Peat Revitalisation 16.1 Woven structure, internal view. The proposal restores, improves and develops peatlands environmentally, economically and culturally by using alien-like perspectives, including artificial and bio-intelligence, to expand and form structures. The structural system utilises the Indonesian practice of purun weaving and combines it with mycelium to improve peat conditions. The project creates a space for co-existence between humans and non-humans.

The decay of these organic purun–mycelium structures will contribute to the process of peat formation to create a nourished and fertile peat swamp forest in Indonesia.

16.2 Collective peatland landscapes. The local community is the main force behind the project’s construction. The unique weaving structures will attract tourists and create new economic opportunities for the local community. The project connects locals to the wider world and improves the space economically and environmentally. 16.3–16.4 Indonesian peatlands are facing destruction due to human activities, climate change and monoculture farming. The project diminishes the degradation of the peatlands by introducing new organic structures with mycelium. Bio-intelligence can help transfer nutrients to local vegetation, consolidate soil, reduce erosion from flooding and decrease the spread of forest fires. Through peat revitalisation, Indonesia’s peatlands can recover their biodiversity and become nurturing habitats for local species.

16.6–16.7 One-to-one behavioural model. This 1:1 scale prototype explores the nature of purun and tests its flexibility, buckling point and humidity requirements.

This data is processed to make sure the project is feasible. By deploying traditional Indonesian handweaving patterns, the structure is inclusive of the residents and could therefore create jobs and contribute to the local economy. 16.8 Morphological studies of structural logic. The morphology is generated by a set of algorithms, where the growing pattern is defined by control parameters such as terrain information and hand-weaving parameters.

16.5 Abandoned Mine Restoration Structural prototype, morphological studies. This visionary endeavour considers the inherent topographical characteristics of the site, using them as foundational elements to guide the design process. By seamlessly integrating the contours and terraces of the landscape, the prototype transforms into a living canvas that encourages multidimensional interaction. The structural morphology utilises the local material and technique of bamboo weaving and combines with mycelium and moss to improve the mining site conditions in Cerro de Pasco, Peru. These interactions breathe life into various interactive pockets dotted across the expanse, forging spaces where diverse entities, both human and non-human, can harmoniously converge.

16.9–16.11 Breath Underground 16.9 Structural studies.

Based on the pattern formed by slime mould simulation, the parametric algorithm multicellular machine forms an organic ecological structure in the underground space, with the growth and multiplication of a variety of mosses.

16.10 Underground ecosystem. By working together with moss, underground habitats enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) have the ability to purify underground air pollution. Underground space construction combined with non-human intelligence breaks the boundaries between humans and non-humans, creating an organic space full of imagination and possibility.

16.11 Robotically 3D-printed clay substratum. Utilising clay 3D-printing technology to construct underground building structures creates a unique stacked form.

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technology, biological intelligence and AI allows us to draw from natural systems and apply mathematical and parametric models to the design process.

16.12–16.14 Cerulean 16.12 Ecotone neighbourhood.

The project uses a combination of AI and bio-intelligence to address the urban heat island effect and sea-level rise in cities like London. Through innovative approaches, the project creates a resilient ecosystem that reshapes flood-prone lands and generates new morphologies.

The resulting system creates multispecies spaces for various entities, fostering a biodiverse ecosystem where humans and non-humans co-exist harmoniously.

16.13 Biodiverse ecotone clustering. Cerulean is a groundbreaking approach that addresses the future effects of climate change while mitigating contributing factors and uniting diverse organisms within an inviolable environment. It is envisaged as a beacon of hope towards a more collaborative and sustainable ecosystem.

16.14 Terra-scape. The Midjourney AI programme has ingeniously transformed petri dishes into urban ecosystems using its text-to-image technique. The base image by French researcher Audrey Dussutour from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) showcases an experiment featuring slime moulds in petri dishes. The resulting image portrays diverse petri dish worlds, each reflecting the complexity and patterns of an urban ecosystem. This amalgamation of science and AI offers a thought-provoking glimpse into the symbiotic relationship between nature, technology and urban life.

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Relational Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Planetary

RC18

Zachary Fluker, Enriqueta Llabres-Valls Research Cluster 18 investigates how urbanisation alters the Earth’s biochemical cycles in the context of planetary urbanisation, through which global ecology has become a capital-driven process. A capitaldriven Earth system is one in which many agents interact in a nonlinear way, returning to different levels of organisation and hierarchies, each ruled by their own laws.

Our cluster’s research begins with an understanding of the Earth’s primary biochemical cycles – nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous – as a complex dynamic system. We identify the relevant scales and rules of law that would lead us to select a relevant site and research question, ranging from the global to the molecular. Our design methodology embraces the non-linear nature of the Earth system, leading to a much larger spectrum of disciplinary niches. It employs various design approaches, from flow modelling and data mining to interactive platforms, to engage a wide audience with questions about environmental change and evolution.

The goal of our research is to understand the impact of current urban trends on the Earth’s biochemical cycles, which have resulted in extreme weather patterns and biodiversity loss. The new urban models proposed by our students encourage positive behaviours and correct negative environmental externalities caused by urbanisation.

This academic year the cluster has focused on global actors and how their production chains affect urban environments in different parts of the world. Our projects began by looking at production chains to propose interventions to address the negative effects of their economic activity. These interventions reduced the city’s environmental footprint by closing the gap between cities as global consumption centres and the remote landscapes that supply these cities. Students designed ways of incorporating forms of production and recycling as part of the vibrant urban agenda for the 21st century.

Their projects, detailed on the following pages, investigate how emergent urban concepts related to digital technologies, such as the metaverse and digital twins, can help to achieve this purpose.

Students Cotton Re-Growth Yanlin Bao, Peiyao Shen E-Tourism Infrastructure Xinru Li, Yuhan Xue Fast Fashion Cycle Lanjun Wang, Jiatong Wu, Siyu Zhang Parabox of Cities Akshaya Chinnaraju, Arokia Maria Minisha Valanteen, Pujitha Vasudevan Retrofitting Coca-Cola Landscape Daxu Wei The Urban Cell Xiaotian Kong, Chuyin Qi, Bo Wang, Qianying Wang Urban Stimuli Pramod Balaji, Mengxue Du, Yanli (Yoli) Li, Tianqi Lin Theory Tutor Huang Sheng-Yang Skills Tutors Dimitra Bra, Tony Lee, Huang Sheng-Yang, Yue Zhu

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18.1, 18.3–18.4 E-Tourism Infrastructure The project investigates the environmental implications of the palm oil trade, focusing on Sumatra, Indonesia. E-tourism infrastructure is positioned at the border between the tropical forest and the oil palm plantation.

The infrastructure explores the possibility of an urban digital twin to raise awareness of environmental developments in remote areas. 18.1 World map showing palm oil trade links. 18.3 Data analysis showing the location of oil palm plantations and tropical forests.

18.4 Bird’s-eye view showing the e-tourism facility on the border between the tropical forest and the oil palm plantation.

18.2, 18.7–18.8 Cotton Re-Growth The project rethinks the fast fashion industry based on circular economy principles. The proposal sits in Manchester, once the centre of the cotton industry, and combines a programme of vertical farming, design, fabrication and recycling. The project’s main architectural feature is a roof that integrates vertical farming, water storage and solar energy in the structure’s design. 18.2 View of the cotton farm factory. 18.7 Detailed section showing the integration of the vertical cotton farm in the roof structure.

18.8 Masterplan showing the vertical cotton farm.

18.5 The Urban Cell The project explores the urban implications of a redistributed energy production system.

The design starts with the premise that citizens can produce and trade energy, leading to the possibility of exploring new architectural typologies. The project reflects on new urban icons and examines how environmental awareness can bring new public spaces into the city. This image shows the micro energy hub, a mixed-use facility with e-charging stations and a community centre.

18.6 Retrofitting Coca-Cola Landscape This project investigates Coca-Cola’s production chain and the environmental implications of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles. The urban proposal sits in one of Manila’s most significant landfills. The project proposes a new infrastructure for this landfill that helps to reuse and repurpose PET plastic. This image shows data analysis of the Manila coastline, where wastewater discharges into various water bodies.

18.9–18.12 Urban Stimuli The project investigates the urban transformation of the coffee bean belt and the role of the Starbucks Corporation in transforming vast areas of rainforest in the tropics. The project proposes a vertical farm in Manhattan, New York, dedicated to producing and distributing coffee. Midjourney was used as a participatory tool to engage the public and produce a digital landscape bringing together the rainforest and coffee. 18.9 Dataset sample for the pix2pix-trained model. 18.10 Aerial view showing the coffee plantation in the Lower East Side, Manhattan. 18.11 Coffee plantation plan programme resulting from the pix2pix-trained model. 18.12 Masterplan programme data result from the pix2pix-trained model.

18.13–18.17 Parabox of Cities The project investigates the use of metaverse environments for urban planning and for tackling the urban heat island effect. The metaverse proposes a data bank and an infrastructure for the social exchange of design solutions. The project explores applying this idea to retrofit the HSBC building in Canary Wharf. 18.13 Interface layout showing the display of the HSBC digital twin. 18.14 Aerial view showing the new façade for the HSBC building. 18.15 Isometric view showing the HSBC urban heat island effect dataset before the new façade. 18.16 Isometric view showing the HSBC urban heat island effect dataset after the new façade. 18.17 The façade before and after.

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is the highly automated distribution centre known as ‘The Cube’, where procurement and production teams work in tandem. This project proposes a new version of The Cube, situated in Canary Wharf. The project investigates the use of machine learning to inform new plan patterns that integrate recycling and consumption in a vertical building. Aerial view showing The Cube 2.0­.

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Urban Design Thesis Module coordinator: Emmanouil Zaroukas

The Urban Design thesis is a written project that helps students create a novel set of concepts, ideas and arguments that will broaden their worldview and augment their urban design explorations.

Students are encouraged to move beyond the disciplinary boundaries of urban theories, venturing to computation, logic, data mining, artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, biology, ecology, video gaming, online platforms, economic theories and politics, to formulate a novel theoretical argument that affects and is being affected by the design studio.

The thesis is a critical and focused inquiry into a specific research area that invents new directions through which the design studio can be augmented. The autonomy of the thesis allows a genuine investigation into other disciplines and complements the design studio without being subsumed by it.

Students are required to study, work and produce in a varied intellectual context created by the overall richness of the Urban Design MArch programme’s structure of research clusters. They are consulted and supervised by History & Theory tutors. The product of the research is a written study, which has a structured critical argument based on a valid hypothesis.

The thesis provides each student with the capacity to design by other means and to produce innovative theoretical orientations that can influence the course of their design work.

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Designing Cities for Dopamine: Incorporating Reward and Pleasure in the Urban Environment Tejaswini Deshmukh Thesis tutor: Provides Ng Urban design embodies the influence of political, social and economic conditions and must constantly adapt to address prevailing challenges and circumstances.

Due to the current pervasive presence of social media, images have become commodities; the attention economy is a hypodermic needle that administers a constant supply of digital dopamine.

This ocular-centric culture dominates our sensory systems and leads to detachment and isolation. How can we design the built environment to counter the physically isolating nature of a dopaminergic society?

This thesis analyses the social design of both virtual (social media) and physical (urban spaces) platforms, and studies user psychology by dissecting pleasure and dopamine in relation to attachment studies.

By using architectural phenomenology and place attachment theory, it comparatively analyses the urban spaces of Bangalore and Varanasi, India’s IT hub and oldest city

respectively. The analysis focuses on addressing social isolation issues and whether the design of the city can balance reward and pleasure through dimensions of time and space.

The findings provide insights into how social media virtually fosters interpersonal bonds and self-identity. Similarly, Varanasi, with its organic spatial structure, facilitates a positive environmental image and enhances users’ emotional and social bonding. Varanasi is known for its ghats – riverfront steps that lead down to the banks of the Ganges. The distant vista of the ghats that celebrate both life and death and whose architecture connects perspective to detail and material to space, maintains the genius loci. Contrastingly, a weak spatial system can disorient individuals.

Bangalore’s transformation from a ‘Garden City’ to the ‘Silicon Valley of India’ was influenced by the IT revolution, and has induced a sense of placelessness. This thesis discusses and highlights these seemingly banal yet critical phenomenological factors of urban landscapes, brings to light the issues surrounding today’s ocular-centric culture and reflects on how we may enhance the social capacity of empathy and compassion during rapid urban development processes.

Image: Equiticity: Sensorial Experience in the Third Place, 2023. Tejaswini Deshmukh, Shriyansh Jain, Aalok Joshi, RC14 191

Cultural Soundscape Design from the Perspective of the Chinese Community: London’s Chinatown as a Case Study Yiyan Xu Thesis tutor: Ilaria Di Carlo The cultural characteristics of a city are not only limited to its aesthetic significance, but also, more importantly, include its social significance. Today, multicultural and cross-cultural communication is increasingly common, and the blending and collision of different cultures has become an inevitable trend. Chinatowns are common around the world, often attracting large numbers of visitors as tourist attractions, and represent the gathering of exotic ethnic cultures.

However, the creation of Chinatowns is usually a stereotyped, top-down, controlled urban design process with Chinese cultural elements embedded at a purely visual level.

The Chinese community experiences such cultural areas as deliberate, solidified and non-immersive. From the perspective of cultural inclusiveness, this only creates

superficial representation, which is not conducive to cross-cultural communication and socially democratic development.

How can a different Chinatown be created to reflect its true diversity?

This thesis breaks from the typical visualled design approach and instead starts by exploring the sound landscape to create a more immersive and interactive experience.

It recognises the important and equal social identity of the Chinese community as foreign residents, explores and strengthens the cultural perception of the community with the purpose of building the Chinese language landscape, and enhances the community’s sense of identity and belonging in a foreign society. One of the tools used in this thesis is a deep learning language recognition model to help analyse the urban sound environment from the perspective of a language landscape. Another tool used is the virtual reality (VR) technology of language trigger mechanism and linked vision, which can amplify user feelings.

Image: A sound and visual real-time programming environment created using vvvv software, providing interactive experience with 3D point clouds for users when wearing Oculus VR glasses. Linguistic Landscapes, 2023.

Meiying Chen, Chunyu Liu, Mei Meng, Yiyan Xu, RC15 192

Towards an Era of Speculative Design Jiacong (Jecci) Chen Thesis tutor: Emmanouil Zaroukas

Urban_Moods Peiyao Shen Thesis tutor: Sheng-Yang Huang

Amid the global climate crisis, we have reached the era of the new normal1, with an increasing awareness of the significant impact exerted by non-human forces. This recognition calls for a fundamental shift in attitudes towards our presence on Earth.

If we are to depart from the prevailing anthropocentric worldview, which places human interests above all and views non-human elements merely as objective resources, adopting a more inclusive perspective becomes imperative. Nowadays, the rapid progress of machine reasoning aligns with the extensive utilisation of algorithms to process vast datasets and aid human design endeavours. This thesis conducts a comparative analysis between two models of machine reasoning – traditional deductive reasoning and innovative speculative reasoning – examining their respective roles in shaping human development within the realm of artificial intelligence.

While deductive reasoning has historically adopted a human-centric approach bound by fixed scientific knowledge, speculative reasoning draws its strength from embracing unfamiliarity, embodying the essence of productive imagination. This approach is fuelled by the willingness to be receptive to diverse and non-human influences.

Focusing on the social media used by London’s youth, this thesis analyses the emotional performance of the local populations and responds to the relationship between these at different levels of data.

This is a new research direction in the study of psychology and geography and presents a new angle for developing the use of social media data. Starting from these entry points, following a quantitative and qualitative analysis process, the results of the study demonstrate the significant value of social media data in this new area of research that represents the influence of urban environments on emotions at a small scale and in fine-grained regions. This research will help advance the process of urban design in subtle ways to positively change people’s emotions. As the emotions of city residents are closely linked to the built environment, carrying out a systematic study summing up the emotional analysis of social media content combined with the physical environment, can help create more emotionally positive cities.

1. Benjamin H. Bratton (2020), The New Normal, Strelka Press Image: Peat Revitalisation, 2023. Jiacong (Jecci) Chen, Napapa Soonjan, Yuanhao Wei, Shi (Rock) Zheng, RC16

Image: Emotional Geography: A multidimensional dissection of hidden emotions in the urban environment, 2023. Image by the author 193

The Bartlett XR Studio, 22 Gordon Street.

Photo: Richard Stonehouse

Architectural Computation MSc/MRes

Architectural Computation MSc/MRes Programme Directors: Manuel Jiménez Garcia, Philippe Morel ‘At its core, intelligence can be viewed as a process that converts unstructured information into useful and actionable knowledge.’

Demis Hassabis, Financial Times, 21 April 2017 The Bartlett’s Architectural Computation MSc and MRes programmes engage and advance the main technologies through which tomorrow’s architecture will be both designed and constructed.

The programmes are designed to provide students with the depth of understanding needed to utilise computation fully in the context of design, research and industry. Students investigate computation as a technology that is responsible for driving fundamental shifts in industry and society by changing the way we produce and think.

They develop technical knowledge, such as computer coding, not only as a skill to be practised, but also as a framework for thought. A broad theoretical understanding of the algorithms and philosophies of artificial intelligence (AI) and related domains supports this technical knowledge. Theory modules position the use of computation in the design process, ranging from analysis in space and structure, to the use of AI techniques in learning about design performance and the role of computation in creativity. Practice modules allow students to develop their personal interests within a range of themes, such as technologies of interaction (augmented reality and virtual reality), cybernetics, physics simulations, AI, automation and robotics manufacturing including 3D printing. A stream of skills-based modules teaches research skills and programming, guiding students through the multiple possibilities that computation offers in design environments.

Throughout the year, students engaged with a wide range of digital media and tools to develop their projects through studio modules, workshops and lectures. The modules and theses produced research projects that included exploring computational methods for interaction and automated construction; the generation of architectural forms using AI; data visualisation applications for the built environment; and computational workflows for adaptable habitats, among others.

Students Amal Algamdey, Sajid Awal, Anthony Chatay, Neelam Chellani, Vaishnavi Deo, Xiaofan Dong, Abhinav Goel, Wenxuan Hu, Rungrawee Jaratwilatwanit, Dhruvinkumar Kataria, Yihan Lin, Cen Ma, Georgina Myers, Elena Petrova, Kostantina Psatha, Ayush Shekhawat, Pournami Sujeev, Wing Hang Daniel Tang, Jose Tashakori, Malihehossadat Vasfinejad, Jiacheng Wang, Jiadi Wang, Olivia Wang, Shuhai Wang, Yue Wu, Zhikun Wu, Dawei Yang, Yue Yang Staff Vishu Bhooshan, Tommaso Casucci, Adam Davis, Khaled Elashry, Sherif Eltarabishy, Ava Fatah gen Schieck, Sam Griffiths, Sean Hanna, Marcin Kosicki, Petros Koutsolampros, Philippe Morel, Vasileios Papalexopoulos, Stamatios Psarras, Valentina Soana, Martin Traunmueller, Martha Tsigkari Postgraduate Teaching Assistant Dingyi Wei Programme Administrators Tung Ying (Crystal) Chow, Tom Mole Consultants and Critics Jamil Al Bardawil, Shajay Bhooshan, Federico Borello, Taizhong Chen, Alberto Chiusoli, Jianfei Chu, Michail Desyllas, Alessio Erioli, Henry David Louth, Yutong Xia

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AC.1 Amal Algamdey ‘Pix2Navigate: Navigating Semantic Spaces’. Following the studio project entitled ‘Dissolving Reality: Machine View from the Road’, investigating the co-existence of human and artificial agents in architectural design, this thesis suggests a new kind of semantic navigation through a web-based and game-like interface. Its originality lies in the combined use of a word- and image-based search with input and target images that uncover unique visual signifiers.

AC.2 Yue Yang ‘Breathing Skin’. Interacting with sound in real time, the pneumatic soft robotic system explores the architectural potential of sound-controlled soft robotic kinematic systems. The system works according to four scenarios, taking into account the intensity and frequency of sound.

AC.3 Sajid Awal, Xiaofan Dong, Yihan Lin ‘Augmenting Performance in Cyber-Physical Space’. The project explores the augmentation of performance in cyberphysical space while taking into account the issue of privacy for the audience. Rhino.Inside is used to incorporate voxels generated by Grasshopper from the intersection of the cone of vision of the audience, which is then blurred in Unity using Kawase blur and the universal render pipeline (URP), a Unity plugin. To augment the performance, an existing machine learning (ML) model, MediaPipe Pose, is used to generate a skeleton of the performer by plotting 33 landmarks of the human body in real time. Finally, agent-based modelling is used along with Perlin noise and an attractor to generate the augmented performance. The output is tested out in HoloLens from the audience’s perspective.

AC.4 Ayush Shekhawat ‘Structural Synergy: Structural Design Guided by Crowd Dynamics’. This project explores the relationship between crowd movement and structural design, keeping in mind the process by which users navigate space and how structural elements contribute to changes in movement patterns. Columns and other structural elements are treated as obstacles to navigate around. The project goal is to develop a seamless bridge between Unity’s NavMesh agent simulations and Karamba3D (a structural analysis engine) to generate a consistent feedback loop where the agents influence the positioning of all columns. A database of different layouts and their fitness in terms of ‘slab deflection’ (structural fitness) and ‘crowd congestion’ (crowd fitness) is stored and analysed to reduce congestion in key spatial areas.

AC.5–AC.6 Dhruvinkumar Kataria ‘Multi-Objective Evolutionary Optimisation of Façades’. Building upon the studio project, the objective of this thesis is to propose beneficial layouts for designing office buildings in India to achieve optimal energy efficiency and user satisfaction.

This is done by prioritising visual comfort, thermal balance and daylight optimisation. Multiple performance metrics classified as either static or dynamic are developed to assess daylight over time.

AC.7 Dawei Yang ‘3D Model Texture Generation Utilising Stable Diffusion’. With the development of ML and text-to-image algorithms like Stable Diffusion, AI-generated content (AIGC) has attracted a great deal of attention. However, current 3D AIGC algorithms do not achieve results as satisfying as in 2D. This thesis provides a new solution to generate textures for 3D models based on Stable Diffusion and ControlNet, utilising the four-view depth or normal map of 3D models to generate the four-view images of those models, then processing projections for each view separately. In this way, the consistency of different views can be guaranteed.

AC.8 Anthony Chatay ‘Equilibrioception: Impossible Geometry Study’. The project explores impossible geometries and questions how they impact the ways in which users understand and navigate virtual environments.

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AC.9 Vaishnavi Deo, Georgina Myers, Jiacheng Wang, Yue Wu ‘Architectural Shape Design from Text Prompts’.

AI form generators are gaining traction in the world of architecture. Moving beyond images, architects can now use AI to generate 3D architectural designs from text prompts. ML algorithms learn from sample data to create complete 3D models. Recognising that existing datasets and ML models were not tailored to architectural nuances, the project proposes bespoke architectural datasets and a novel approach using vision-based neural radiance fields (NeRFs).

AC.10–AC.12 Pournami Sujeev, Jose Tashakori, Jiadi Wang ‘Monolithic Doubly Curved Shell Roof: Design and Digital Fabrication’. This project delves into the challenges of achieving double curvature in architectural design. At the forefront of this exploration is a novel approach that incorporates 3D printing on biaxially oriented polystyrene (BOPS) plastic sheets. By printing precise patterns onto BOPS sheets which are subsequently heated, the unique interaction between the shrinkage of the plastic and the stability of the printed material results in a naturally yielding, doubly curved form. Additionally, the project employs procedural geometry to optimise and streamline the design process.

AC.13–AC.15 Neelam Chellani, Abhinav Goel, Elena Petrova, Konstantina Psatha ‘Modular Housing: Participation and Industrialisation’. To address the need for more residential buildings, the project leverages the power of combinatorics and fabrication-aware digital timber. Liveable units with discrete elements are combined to form single dwellings, then aggregated into multi-level habitats. 3D graphic statics are used to form stable column designs, assembled with optimally sliced 3D-printed non-standard nodes.

AC.16–AC.17 Wenxuan Hu, Rungrawee Jaratwilatwanit, Shuhai Wang ‘Aerobot: Adaptive Deployable Pneumatic Linear Structure’. The project develops a lightweight material robot for the design of temporary structures and spaces that can change shape and are deployable, easy to transport and respond to environmental changes or design intentions. The aerobot can be operated manually or automatically through humidity sensors connected to an application programme.

AC.18 Vaishnavi Deo, Jiacheng Wang, Yue Wu ‘Text-to-Developable Geometry’. The project explores architectural geometry through the generation of images from text prompts. It delves into depth-map generation using monocular depth estimation, specifically with the MiDAS algorithm. The project also introduces the concept of developable surfaces and presents two algorithms for optimising 2.5D geometry.

AC.19, AC.21 Olivia Wang, Zhikun Wu ‘Fabric Tensformer’.

This project develops an innovative tensile robotic architectural system that presents a new vision of lightweight and sustainable architecture. It combines the energy efficiency and flexibility of tensile structures with the precision and freedom of movement offered by rigid ‘three degrees of freedom’ (3DoF) robotic arms.

AC.20 Cen Ma ‘Architectural Sketch to 3D Form: A Human–AI Collaborative Design Workflow Powered

by Multi-Modal Machine Learning’. Translating handdrawn sketches into digital 3D models is a common practice in design. Nevertheless, the process of 3D modelling is time-intensive, and the interfaces of 3D modelling software often prove cumbersome. In response to these challenges, this research proposes a new approach and interface. In the proposed workflow, users can sketch on a canvas and the corresponding 3D model will be automatically generated and displayed alongside their hand-drawn work.

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Bioscope installed at St Andrews Botanic Garden, UK, 2023.

Photo: Brenda Parker

Bio-Integrated Design MArch/MSc

Bio-Integrated Design MArch/MSc Programme Directors: Marcos Cruz (The Bartlett School of Architecture), Brenda Parker (UCL Biochemical Engineering) Our Bio-Integrated Design (Bio-ID) programmes bring together advanced computation, biotechnology and digital fabrication in the context of climate change to create a radical and sustainable built environment. They take these life-changing phenomena as the foundation for exploring sophisticated yet also critical design solutions, which will help to shape our future society.

Taught collaboratively by The Bartlett School of Architecture and UCL Department of Biochemical Engineering, Bio-ID proposes a new sense of materiality with emergent hybrid technologies that form innovative products and environments, infused with natural and synthetic life. With two different Master’s programmes – MArch and MSc – working in tandem, the work of each student balances laboratory research, computation and advanced manufacturing.

The programmes are hands-on, combining design and scientific research. Emphasis is given to the translation of phenomena observed at a microscopic level into architecturally relevant scales. Nature plays a central role, beyond that of a model or inspiration; it is in itself the medium of a new, multi-layered design approach that is biologically, materially and socially integrated.

Bio-ID brings together a multidisciplinary community of students, including architects, designers, urban planners, artists and landscape architects studying the MArch, and bio-scientists and engineers studying the MSc.

Students Year 1 Xinrui Cai, Rashneet Chhabra, Maria Creuheras Gonzalez, Aitch Hunt, Gayatri Jain, Edward Khoury, Sophie Kirkpatrick, Fang-Yu (Fran) Liu, Rida Mughal, Nathanael Myers, Isik Ogutcu, Andrita Orbandi, Keren Permutti, Farida Radwan, Daisy Rani Xavier, Natalie Rizk, Sophia Saleki, Sahda Salsabila, Choi Wing Tse, Yumeng Wei Year 2 Hansa Baliga, Sameera Bommisetty, Man I Che, Hana Cvelbar, Rita Espinha Dos Santos Abreu Morais, Alexa Guerra Cam, Satyam Gyanchandani, Tanvi Khurmi, Jennifer Levy Girardin, Itamar Lilienthal Ladelsky, Mounika Maddipatla, Dana Molzhigit, Laetitia Morlie, Ajitesh Murmu, Sharifunnisa Mynasabgari, Natalia Piorecka, Shylaja Regunathan, Yifan Shi, Simeng Sun, Karishma Tuladhar, Kenneth Wilson Rozas, Junyu Yang Images (clockwise from top left): Urban MYCOskin Wall model of a mycelium-reinforced recycled textile composite, Rita Espinha Dos Santos Abreu Morais, Jennifer Levy Girardin, Natalia Piorecka; Build Up, Break Down, Grow Anew Impact-printed soil prototype incorporating immobilised P.fluorescens bacteria for bioremediation, Itamar Lilienthal Ladelsky, Laetitia Morlie, Kenneth Wilson Rozas; ProBioGenesis 3D printing of a bagasse/ clay composite with integrated S.coelicolor bacteria to promote growth on bioreceptive façades, Hana Cvelbar, Mounika Maddipatla, Sharifunnisa Mynasabgari; Frameless Fibres Robotically woven wall prototype with biomineralised reinforcement, Hansa Baliga, Sameera Bommisetty, Shylaja Regunathan; Hygroflex Robotic hydrogel extrusion on recycled timber for an environmentally-responsive roof, Satyam Gyanchandani, Yifan Shi; Blue Garden Biomaterial landscape to promote regeneration and seaweed growth at a coastal site, Alexa Guerra Cam, Man I Che, Tanvi Khurmi; EcoMesh Algae culture and environmental enrichment, Simeng Sun, Karishma Tuladhar; Viva Ornaments Façade with algae-infused 3D printed ceramic tiles, Dana Molzhigit, Junyu Yang 210

Tutors Hercules Argyropoulos, Clare Brass, Marcos Cruz, Marie Dorn, Pradeep Devadass, Kostas Grigoriadis, Andreas Körner, Paolo Bombelli, Alexandra Lacatusu, James Lawrence, Tony Le, Jingyuan Meng, Brenda Parker, Ian Robinson, Javier Ruiz, Anete Salmane, Prantar Tamuli, Harry Watkins Theory Tutors Hector Altamirano, Martyn Carter, Sam Esses, Ayelen Francheschini, Will Goodall Copestake, Ella Hetherington, Nikoletta Karastathi, Andreas Körner, Hannah Laeverenz-Schlogelhofer, Jingyuan Meng, Laura Nica, Tin Oberman, Vasilki Panagiotidou, Vijay Pawar, Abishera Rajkumar, Michael Sulu Programme Administrators Zoe Lau, Drew Pessoa Critics Dana Bauer, Andy Bow, Mark Garcia, Vijay Pawar, Peter Scully, Theodore Spyropoulos, Michael Sulu, Fiona Zisch Partners Barking Riverside, Haddonstone Ltd, IAAC Barcelona, London Festival of Architecture, PGIM, St Andrews Botanic Garden, Tate & Lyle, UCL Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering

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Our Programmes 214 Short Courses 215 Public Lectures 216 Exhibitions & Events 218 Bartlett Shows Website 219 Alumni 220 The Bartlett Promise 221 Staff, Visitors & Consultants 222

Our Programmes The Bartlett School of Architecture currently teaches undergraduate and graduate students across 29 programmes of study and one professional course.

You will find below a list of our current programmes, their duration when taken full time and the directors. More information, including details on open days, is available on our website.

Undergraduate Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1) Three-year programme, directed by Ana Monrabal-Cook Architecture MSci (ARB Part 1 & 2) Five-year programme with a year placement in practice, directed by Sara Shafiei Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies BSc Three or four-year programme, directed by Elizabeth Dow Engineering & Architectural Design MEng (ARB/RIBA Part 1, CIBSE, JBM) Four-year programme, directed by Luke Olsen Postgraduate Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) Two-year programme, directed by Professor Marjan Colletti & Dr Kostas Grigoriadis Architectural Computation MSc/MRes 12-month programmes, directed by Philippe Morel & Manuel Jiménez Garcia Architectural Design MArch 12-month programme, directed by Tyson Hosmer & Gilles Retsin Architectural History MA One-year programme, directed by Professor Peg Rawes Architecture & Digital Theory MRes One-year programme, directed by Professor Mario Carpo & Professor Frédéric Migayrou Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA One-year programme, directed by Professor Edward Denison Bio-Integrated Design MSc/MArch Two-year programmes, directed by Professor Marcos Cruz & Dr Brenda Parker Cinematic & Videogame Architecture MArch A new one-year programme beginning in 214

2023–24, directed by Professor Penelope Haralambidou & Dr Luke Pearson Design for Manufacture MArch 15-month programme, directed by Professor Peter Scully Design for Performance & Interaction MArch 15-month programme, directed by Dr Ruairi Glynn & Dr Fiona Zisch Landscape Architecture MA/MLA One-year (MA) and two-year (MLA) programmes, directed by Professor Laura Allen & Professor Mark Smout Situated Practice MA 15-month programme, directed by Dr James O’Leary Space Syntax: Architecture & Cities MSc/MRes One-year programmes, directed by Dr Kayvan Karimi Urban Design MArch 12-month programme, directed by Roberto Bottazzi Advanced Architectural Research PG Cert Three-month programme, directed by Professor Nat Chard Architectural Design MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Professor Jonathan Hill Architectural & Urban History & Theory MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Professor Sophia Psarra Architectural Space & Computation MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Ava Fatah gen Schieck Architecture & Digital Theory MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Professor Mario Carpo & Professor Frédéric Migayrou Architectural Practice MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Professor Murray Fraser Professional Studies Architecture (ARB/RIBA Part 3) 10 to 23-month programme, directed by Felicity Atekpe

Short Courses The Bartlett School of Architecture welcomes young students from around the world to participate in summer short courses. Our summer school also offers a large number of scholarships aimed at assisting students in their studies.

or model, informed by their experiences.

Online students work in groups and individually under the instruction of The Bartlett’s highly skilled teaching staff, using online drawing platforms and collaborating with students from around the world.

The Bartlett Summer School 14–16-year-olds (on campus) Our summer school for children aged 14–16 has been designed for younger students looking for a brief introduction to The Bartlett School of Architecture and to develop their understanding of architecture at university level. The one- to two-day courses offer an introduction to the specific skills an architect needs, while also allowing students to work collaboratively.

Year 12 Sutton Trust Summer Schools (on campus) This Access and Widening Participation UCL short course is free of charge. It is run and organised by the widening participation team in UCL and the Sutton Trust. The course is delivered in collaboration with a team from The Bartlett faculty. It is a fully immersive student experience with participants spending five days learning and socialising together. Students undertake a critical investigation of their daily routines in an architectural context through walking, looking, drawing and making.

The Bartlett Summer School 16–18-year-olds (on campus and online) Our short courses for 16–18-year-olds introduce students to the study of architecture and creative practice at degree level.

On campus students visit architectural exhibitions, offices and sites of interest before working on a collaborative drawing

Visit our website to find out more and to see this year’s pop-up workshops.

Contact bartlett.shortcourses@ucl.ac.uk

At work in the B-made studio 215

Public Lectures Visit our Vimeo and YouTube channels to watch a selection of our recorded lectures – search ‘Bartlett School of Architecture’ to find us.

The Bartlett International Lecture Series Attracting guests from across the world, our International Lecture Series has featured almost 600 distinguished speakers since its inception in 1996. Lectures in this series are open to the public and free to attend.

Lectures this year featured: — Image and Making: Ten Years of Process, from Milan to Mars Asif Khan (Asif Khan Studio) — The Caring Exception: Building the Oasis in the Concrete Jungle Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno (The Bartlett School of Architecture) — Machine Intelligence and Practice Futures Phil Bernstein (Yale School of Architecture) — David Olusoga – MoHoA Conference David Olusoga (Broadcaster, Filmmaker and Historian) — Empty Space Carla Juaçaba (Carla Juaçaba Studio) — Continuous State of Reinvention Kjetil Trædal Thorsen (Snøhetta) — In the Black Fantastic Ekow Eshun (Curator) — F51 Urban Sports Park – Generational Regeneration Guy Hollaway (Hollaway Studio) — A Human Approach to Design Lisa Finlay (Heatherwick Studio) — End Time: Reflections on Design, Modernities and the Anthropocene Edward Denison (The Bartlett School of Architecture) — Continuity and Discontinuity in Colonial and Postcolonial Modernity Nnamdi Elleh (University of Witwatersrand)

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Prospectives The Bartlett’s B-Pro history and theory lecture series continued to offer a platform for the presentation, discussion and theoretical reflection on the links between digital thought, architecture and urban design. Speakers included: — Matias del Campo (University of Michigan) — Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin) — Anna Longo (Collège International de Philosophie) — Déborah López Lobato and Hadin Charbel (The Bartlett School of Architecture) — Lea Sattler (École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris La Villette) — SKYGGE – Benoit Carré (Musician) Landscapes in Dialogue Landscapes in Dialogue is a public lecture series from the Landscape Architecture programmes. The series comprised curated but informal talks from practitioners and academics. Speakers from a range of disciplines were invited to reflect on their work in progress, working methods and the process of working with landscape. Speakers included: — Martí Franch Batllori (EMF Landscape Architecture) — Céline Baumann (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) — Joost Emmerik (Amsterdam Academy of Architecture) — Jonathan Evans (MASS Design Group) — Liza Fior (MUF Architecture/Art) — Cannon Ivers (LDA Design) — Thierry Kandjee and Sébastien Penfornis (Taktyk) — Tiago Torres-Campos (Rhode Island School of Design)

Situating Architecture Situating Architecture is an architectural history lecture series affiliated with The Bartlett’s renowned Architectural History MA. It is open to both current students and members of the public alike and explores the powers and effects of architecture today. Invited speakers show how historical and theoretical practices materialise different architectural meanings from poetics to ethics, housing to infrastructure, politics to technologies.

— Luca Csepely-Knorr (Liverpool School of Architecture) — Sam Grinsell (The Bartlett School of Architecture) — Ievgeniia Gubkina (UCL) — Jonathan Hill, Megha Chand Inglis and Stelios Giamarelos (The Bartlett School of Architecture) — Léopold Lambert (The Funambulist) — Frank Kelsall (Historian) and Timothy Walker (Historian) Bartlett Research Conversations The Bartlett Research Conversations series featured research presentations from students undertaking the Architectural Design or Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD programmes. Students were joined by senior academics from across the school, including PhD programme directors and supervisors, alongside members of the wider Bartlett and UCL community. This year research was presented by: — Omar Abolnaga — Yichuan Chen — Zhenhang Hu — Jessica In — Ryan Kearney — Te-Chen Lu — Patricia Rodrigues Ferreira Da Silva — Elin Söderberg — Mike Tanaka — Jonathan Tyrrell — Sandra Youkhana

Space Syntax Laboratory Research Seminars This academic seminar series featured researchers sharing their findings, discussing their ideas and showing work in progress from The Bartlett’s Space Syntax Laboratory.

Guests to the series included: — Siqi Chen (Shanghai Institute of Technology) — Fánel Contreras (Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería) — Martin Fleischmann (University of Strathclyde) and Dani Arribas-Bel (University of Liverpool) — Michal Gath-Morad (ETH Zurich) — Daniel Koch and Ann Legeby (KTH School of Architecture) — Gustavo Maldonado Gil (Rappi) and Christina Lenart (KTH Stockholm) — Burcu H Ozuduru (Gazi University’s Faculty of Architecture) — Kerstin Sailer and Rosica Pachilova (The Bartlett School of Architecture) — Yao Shen (Tongji University) — Yichang Sun (The Bartlett School of Architecture) — IIgi Toprak (Istanbul Technical University) — Gözde Uyar and Åsmund Izaki (Woods Bagot) — Soungmi Yu (Zaha Hadid Architects)

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Exhibitions & Events The Bartlett plays host to a variety of events, ranging from conferences and book launches to workshops and international symposia. In addition, a vibrant programme of exhibitions runs throughout the year.

These events offer a diverse exploration of innovative ideas and current issues, with inspiring speakers from across the globe.

The seventeenth annual PhD Research Projects Exhibition, 21 February – 7 March 2023 featured the work of students from across the faculty developing or concluding their doctoral research. The LAMSA crochet pop-up led by PhD candidate Natalie Garland ran concurrently, raising funds for those affected by the Turkey-Syria earthquake

Structural Stone Renaissance Symposium, 12 October 2022 organised by Klaas de Rycke and Oliver Wilton saw innovators in the field of stone come together to discuss the re-emergence of the material’s use in architecture.

In association with King’s College London and the Lithuanian Cultural Institute, the Films for Ukraine roundtable and fundraiser took place on 29 March 2023. The discussion focused on women, cinema and the city, reflecting on gender in Ukraine and Eastern Europe during wartime.

The Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium, 26–28 October 2022 was co-organised by The Bartlett’s Professor Edward Denison and Professor Ola Uduku, Head of the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture, along with partners at the University of Cape Town and the Africa World Heritage Fund as part of the Modern Heritage of Africa (MoHoA) global collaborative. The three-day global symposium addressed decolonising, decentring and reframing the recent past to achieve equitable and sustainable futures.

The Architectural History MA student-led symposium, Missing Links, 19 November 2022 examined the missing links in relationships between histories, theories and the practice of architecture.

A series of in-person events took place around this year’s Fifteen show, marking its return to campus for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The Design for Performance & Interaction Project Fair and Situated Practice Live, 9 December 2022 showcased ground-breaking work from their respective cohorts. The Design for Manufacture Conference 2022, 13–14 December 2022 saw students present research projects formed around the starting point of architectural ceramics. The two-day event included a keynote lecture by architect and innovator Paul Michael Pelken.

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Book Launches Resisting Postmodern Architecture, 31 October 2022 Professors Jonathan Hill and Megha Chand Inglis joined Dr Stelios Giamarelos to discuss his new book, published by UCL Press. This event was part of the Situating Architecture lecture series.

Monumental Wastelands, 14 November 2022 Déborah López Lobato and Hadin Charbel launched the first two volumes of Monumental Wastelands, a bilingual publication for the research and investigation of contemporary spatial practices and their contingencies.

Animal Architecture, 23 March 2023 Author and lecturer Dr Paul Dobraszczyk was joined by panellists Tom Dyckhoff and Professor Nathalie Pettorelli for the launch of Animal Architecture. The launch was co-hosted by the ISRF and moderated by Professor Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.

Brutalist Paris, 27 April 2023 Author Dr Robin Wilson and photographer Dr Nigel Green introduced their new book Brutalist Paris, a unique photographic record of over 50 brutalist buildings across the French capital.

Bartlett Shows Website In September 2020, the school launched its bespoke digital exhibition environment, presenting The Summer Show 2020. Since then, thirteen further student shows have been shared digitally, including The Summer Show 2022 and The B-Pro Show 2022. Each digital exhibition has attracted thousands of online visitors from across the globe, with the Summer Show 2022 content viewed over 250,000 times.

With each exhibition, the digital environment is being refined to improve the visitor experience and to encourage greater engagement with the student work displayed.

Projects are now searchable by thematic concern with all previous shows available to browse from a single landing page. In line with our commitment to inclusivity, we are actively working towards making the website more accessible to a wider audience.

The digital exhibition space was designed by creative agency Hello Monday, working together with the school’s exhibitions and communications teams, to create a unique online experience for the visitor. Hello Monday delivered a virtual show space that allows the user to explore the work spatially, within exhibition rooms, and in detail, on student project pages. Students have the opportunity to display their work using video, high-definition imagery and 3D models alongside detailed narratives.

The Bartlett’s digital show environment has won web design awards at both the Awwwards and Favourite Website Awards and has been shortlisted for the prestigious Archiboo and D&AD Awards in the Digital Design category. This year the website picked up two additional awards, a Silver Lovie and the People’s Lovie in the Schools & Education category. The Lovie Awards, named after Ada Lovelace, recognise European Internet excellence in the fields of culture, technology and business. www.bartlettarchucl.com

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Alumni The Bartlett’s diverse and vibrant alumni play a vital role in the life of the school, as staff, visiting lecturers, mentors, sponsors, donors and participants.

This year saw the formation of the alumni group ‘The Friends of The Bartlett School of Architecture’. Their inaugural social event took place at the end of April and was hosted by alumnus Joe Morris at the East London offices of Morris + Company. Over 100 former students came together with current staff to enjoy refreshments provided by the hyper seasonal, low-impact restaurant Edit. The evening was chaired by Paul Monaghan Director of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.

We invite alumni to join us at The Bartlett Summer Show for an exclusive Alumni Late drinks reception.

Alumni interested in running events should email architecture.comms@ucl.ac.uk to discuss how we can help you.

All Bartlett School of Architecture alumni are invited to join UCL’s Alumni Online Community to keep in touch with the school and receive benefits including special discounts, UCL’s Portico magazine and more.

Registered alumni have access to: — Thousands of e-journals available through UCL Library — A global network of old and new friends in the worldwide alumni community — Free mentoring and the opportunity to become a mentor yourself — Jobs boards for the exclusive alumni community aoc.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

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The Bartlett Promise Across higher education and in industry, the built environment sector is not diverse enough. Here at The Bartlett, we promise to do better.

The Bartlett Promise Scholarship was launched in 2019 to enable UK undergraduate students from backgrounds under-represented in The Bartlett Faculty to pursue their studies with us, with the aim of diversifying the student body and ultimately the built environment sector.

In 2020, it was widened to include Masters and PhD scholarships, and in 2021, internationally, to Sub-Saharan Africa master’s students.

We want a Bartlett education to be open to all, regardless of means.

The scholarship covers full tuition fees for the degree programme, plus an annual allowance to cover living and study expenses. All Promise scholars will also receive ongoing academic and career support during their studies. In addition, The Bartlett Promise Sub-Saharan Africa Scholarships provide a comprehensive support package, including travel to and from the UK and study visa costs.

Sara Shafiei, Vice-Dean of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at The Bartlett says: The award is a promise from The Bartlett faculty to future generations of scholars of the built environment – that we are wholeheartedly committed to taking bold and innovative steps in addressing underrepresentation of students from diverse backgrounds within built environment higher education and industry.

We are delighted that The Bartlett Promise continues to grow and play a significant role in attracting the very best students, who continue to enrich our community in extraordinary ways.

To be eligible for a scholarship, candidates must have an offer of a place on a Bartlett degree programme. When selecting scholars, we consider the educational, personal and financial circumstances of the applicant, and how these relate to the eligibility criteria.

Full details of the application process and eligibility criteria can be found on our website. ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/bartlett-promise

Students at 22 Gordon Street, The Bartlett’s Bloomsbury home.

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Staff, Visitors & Consultants A Ana Abram Vasilija Abramovic George Adamopoulos Ava Aghakouchak Visiting Prof Robert Aish Roslyn Aish Yasemin Didem Aktas Alejandra Albuerne Rodriguez Wardah Ali Laura Allen Salam Al-Saegh Carlos Alvarez Doran Arveen Appadoo Dimitris Argyros Azadeh Asgharzadeh Zaferani Abigail Ashton Felicity Atekpe Edwina Attlee Annecy Attlee Joseph Augustin Karen Averby B Julia Backhaus Kirsty Badenoch Francesco Banchini Matthew Barnett Howland Beth Barnett-Sanders Sarah Barry Carolina Bartram Stefan Bassing Paul Bavister Simon Beames Richard Beckett Bedir Bekar Jhono Bennett Julian Besems Harry Betts Vishu Bhooshan Peter Bishop Laurence Blackwell-Thale Isaie Bloch Eleanor Boiling Paolo Bombelli Iain Borden Alex Borrell Roberto Bottazzi Visiting Prof Andy Bow Matt Bowles Eva Branscome Albert Brenchat Aguilar Alastair Browning Jessica Buckmire Tom Budd Rosalind Burkett-Wenham Christopher Burman 222

Mark Burrows Matthew Butcher C Blanche Cameron William Victor Camilleri Alberto Campagnoli Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange Ben Campkin Brent Carnell Mario Carpo Martyn Carter Daniel Carter Luciano Caruggi de Faria Tommaso Casucci Tsz Long Chan Megha Chand Inglis Hadin Charbel Nat Chard Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno Tung Ying Chow Krina Christopoulou Sandra Ciampone Mollie Claypool Marjan Colletti Michael Collins Emeritus Prof Peter Cook Hannah Corlett Samuel Coulton John Cruwys Marcos Cruz Rut Cuenca Candel Nichola Czyz D Christina Dahdaleh Amica Dall Tiffany Dang Satyajit Das Peter Davies Tom Davies Edward Denison Ricardo de Ostos Klaas de Rycke Pradeep Devadass Max Dewdney Ilaria Di Carlo David Di Duca Jan Dierckx Visiting Prof Elizabeth Diller Katerina Dionysopoulou Paul Dobraszczyk Patrick Dobson-Perez Oliver Domeisen Elizabeth Dow Sarah Dowding Philippe Duffour

Shyamala Duraisingam George Dwyer Tom Dyckhoff E Dave Edwards Samuel Esses Ruth Evison F Ava Fatah gen. Schieck Donat Fatet Laura Fawcett-Gaskell Timothy Fielder Lucy Flanders Zach Fluker Emeritus Prof Adrian Forty Alice Foxen Murray Fraser Daisy Froud Maria Fulford G Emeritus Prof Stephen Gage Gunther Galligioni Christophe Gerard Egmontas Geras Christina Geros Octavian Gheorghiu Stelios Giamarelos Pedro Gil Agnieszka Glowacka Ruairi Glynn Daniel Godoy Shimizu Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita Perez Jon Goodbun Polly Gould Niamh Grace Kevin Gray Kevin Green Emmy Green James Green Sienna Griffin-Shaw Sam Griffiths Kostas Grigoriadis Samuel Grinsell Eric Guibert Srijana Gurung Seth Guy H Tamsin Hanke Sean Hanna Penelope Haralambidou Jack Hardy Alice Hardy Ben Hayes

Thea Heintz Colin Herperger Rosie Hervey Thomas Hesslenberg Danielle Hewitt Visiting Prof Neil Heyde Parker Heyl Matthew Heywood Jonathan Hill Ashley Hinchcliffe Bill Hodgson Tom Holberton Seyedeh Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami Tyson Hosmer Delwar Hossain Oliver Houchell Johan Hybschmann I Jessica In Anderson Inge Bruce Ivers J Benjamin James Clara Jaschke William Jennings Nicholas Jewell Manuel Jiménez Garcia Steven Johnson Helen Jones Luke Jones Nina Jotanovic Aurore Julien K Nikoletta Karastathi Kayvan Karimi Jan Kattein Tom Keeley Tom Kendall Jonathan Kendall Filip Kirazov Jakub Klaska Fergus Knox Maria Knutsson-Hall Andreas Korner Vasiliki Kourgiozou Margit Kraft Kimon Krenz Dirk Krolikowski Dragana Krsic Amy Kulper Max Kynman L Chee-Kit Lai Mani Lall

Ekaterina Larina Zoe Lau Wai Law Tony Le Kwang Lee Benjamin Lee Stefan Lengen Christopher Leung Sarah Lever Visiting Prof Amanda Levete Tairan Li Ifigeneia Liangi Chwen Lim Enriqueta Llabres-Valls Visiting Prof Lesley Lokko Alvaro Lopez Déborah López Lobato Luke Lowings Tim Lucas Matt Lucraft Abi Luter M David Maciver Jörg Majer Alexandru Malaescu Shneel Malik Gurdav Mankoo Emily Mann Yeoryia Manolopoulou Vasilis Marcou Ilchuk Olivia Marra Sara Martinez Zamora Patrick Massey Robin Mather Emma-Kate Matthews Billy Mavropoulos Claire McAndrew Donald McCrory David McEwen Joe McGrath Niall McLaughlin Visiting Prof Jeremy Melvin Jingyuan Meng Jose Mias Gifre Luke Michael Frédéric Migayrou Doug John Miller Siraaj Mitha Matei-Alexandru Mitrache Tom Mole Ana Monrabal-Cook Cristina Morbi Philippe Morel Bongani Muchemwa Saud Muhsinovic Shaun Murray Maxwell Mutanda

N Tetsuro Nagata Giles Nartey Filippo Nassetti Tsing Yin Ng O Aisling O’Carroll Toby O’Connor James O’Leary Andrew O’Reilly Visiting Prof Femi Oresanya Luke Olsen Daniel Ovalle Costal P Igor Pantic Annarita Papeschi Thomas Parker Claudia Pasquero Jane Paterson Luke Pearson Visiting Prof P. Michael Pelken Alan Penn Barbara Penner Emma Perry Guillem Perutxet Olesti Drew Pessoa Frosso Pimenides Alicia Pivaro Ruth Plackett Maj Plemenitas Danae Polyviou Lyn Poon Matt Poon Andrew Porter Rebecca Preston Emily Priest Arthur Prior Lakshmi Priya Rajendran Sophia Psarra R Margaret Rawes Sophie Read Aileen Reid Guang Yu Ren Jane Rendell Gilles Retsin Farlie Reynolds Julie Richardson David Roberts Felix Roberts Gavin Robotham Daniel Rodriguez Garcia Javier Ruiz Rodriguez Colin Rose

S Visiting Prof Jenny Sabin Kevin Saey Kerstin Sailer Diana Salazar Morales Anete Krista Salmane Eleanor Sampson Tan Sapsaman Edward Tristram Scott Peter Scully Yair Schwartz Khaled Sedki Tania Sengupta Neba Sere Sara Shafiei David Shanks Alistair Shaw Bob Sheil Visiting Prof Wang Shu Naz Siddique Gareth Simons Isaac Simpson Yip Siu Colin Smith Paul Smoothy Mark Smout Valentina Soana Joana Carla Soares Goncalves Jasminder Sohi Amy Spencer Ben Spong Matthew Springett Michael Stacey Tijana Stevanovic Rachel Stevenson Sabine Storp Greg Storrar David Storring Ignacy Styszko Michiko Sumi T Farhang Tahmasebi Philip Temple Emmy Thittanond Andrew Thom Kathryn Timmins Michael Tite Claudia Toma José Torero Cullen Martha Tsigkari Samuel Tuppen Samuel Turner-Baldwin Jonathan Tyrrell

Kim van Poeteren Nasios Varnavas Tasos Varoudis Laura Vaughan Hamish Veitch Maria Venegas Raba Viktoria Viktorija Amelia Vilaplana De Miguel Jordi Vivaldi Piera Nina Vollenbroker W Michael Wagner Andrew Walker Susan Ware Gabriel Warshafsky Tim Waterman James Watkins Patrick Weber Visiting Prof Lu Wenyu Rosamund West Paul Weston Alice Whewell Isabel Why Andrew Whiting Alexander Whitley Daniel Widrig James Wilkie Daniel Wilkinson Henrietta Williams Gen Williams Graeme Williamson James Williamson Robin Wilson Sarah Wilson Oliver Wilton Jane Wong Katy Wood Michael Woodrow X Zoe Xing Y Sandra Youkhana Michelle Young Z Barbara Andrade Zandavali Emmanouil Zaroukas Yi Zhang Fiona Zisch Dominik Zisch Stamatios Zografos

V Melis Van Den Berg Kelly Van Hecke 223

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