The Bartlett Development Planning Unit - MSc Building and Urban Design in Development - APPLY NOW!
Friday, Apr 25, 20146:22 AMEDT
| London, UK
The production, reproduction, and transformation of urban space via socially, economically, and environmentally just methods presents a complex challenge for architects, designers, engineers, planners and other professionals. There is an urgent need to use our professional capacities to reconsider and recalibrate our engagement with design to effectively respond to rapid urbanisation. The objectives of the MSc BUDD are to equip those interested in the development of urban areas with a political economy perspective of space, to further nuanced comprehension of the unique needs, abilities, aspirations, and forms of resistance of urban dwellers in various contexts - specifically in geographies of the global south; to be able to critically challenge different morphologies and tensions that shape the current complex neoliberal landscape at different scales; to be able to respond with strategically coordinated process design to leverage local abilities to meet local needs; and to be able to critically engage with the practice of urban design, architecture and urbanism. It is combining cultural, social, economic, political and spatial analysis in the effort to present a holistic response to the growing complexities within the design and production of the urban form. The course provides an opportunity for students to acquire relevant concepts and skills relating to development, urban design and building processes, and to test the theory of building and urban design through practice. Poverty, social and political exclusion, extreme density, environmental degradation, marginalisation, land conflicts, informality and top-down governmental re-development plans threaten the life of millions of inhabitant at risk of eviction and forced to develop resistance mechanisms. The MSc BUDD explores what it takes to design an effective response to urban habitat – inclusive, secure, adaptive, and sustainable – in a conflicting urban setting. The engagement of the MSc BUDD participants with the urban is explicit. During the course, participants develop a socio-spatial cognition; a knowledge and understanding of the socio-spatial intertwinement, through study, exploration, experience and critical thinking. This understanding is then translated into suggestions for strategies and actions that allow people to take ownership of their right to the city. Central to this reasoning is the idea of critical design. The classical notions of urban design and the understanding of the role of the practitioner are recalibrated. Participants in the studio critically immerse themselves within the broader community in which they work. In trying to meet the challenges that are being posed, straightforward and conventional answers are refuted. This way of working calls for an innovative attitude in which design is reconfigured at the urban and the architectural scale. Urban design practice becomes something more - it becomes an activator for change. http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/dpu/programmes/postgraduate/msc-building-urban-design-in-development
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