What is BUDD?
The MSc Building and Urban Design in Development is located in the reknowned and influential Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London. The course operates on the premise that 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. Therein exists an urgent need to reconsider and recalibrate our professional capacities through a critical engagement with design in order to effectively respond to rapid urbanisation.
image by Andrew Wade
Since 2008, the majority of the world’s human population has lived in urban areas. While such urbanisation is substantially transforming the planet, cities are fundamentally shaped by neoliberal policies and exogenous transformative market-led forces that deepen the vulnerabilities of the urban poor and marginalised communities.
Additionally, the destructive effects of climate change and natural hazards tend to be concentrated disproportionally in poorer urban districts with the least adequate provision of protective infrastructure and services. The result of these global, regional and local processes is that cities, the planning of cities, and the design of urban space has become increasingly fragmented, while inequality and vulnerabilities have risen.
The programme presents a holistic process of design for development in cities within this context. It combines an examination and analysis of economic, social, cultural and spatial elements in the production of urban form and building with the principles of designing for development, which include affordability, acceptability, sustainability, participation and responsiveness in design. In particular the course links together the methods and practice of ‘design’ with the complementary ‘developmental’ processes of development practitioners dealing with the spatial manifestation of injustices, complex urban challenges and spatial transformations at the scale of the building (architecture) and wider fabric (urban design) not as isolated disciplines or fields of practice but rather ones that are embedded and infused in the broader and more complex and contested urbanism.
The objectives of the programme 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 urbanisation at different scales; to be able to respond with strategically coordinated process and product 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 as emanating from specific modes of production with their inherent structures of social relations, cultures, ideologies, histories and struggles that configure the urban realm.
The MSc BUDD course is led by Course Director, Dr. Camillo Boano and coordinated by Anna Schulenburg. The Urban Intervention Studio (BENVGBU3) is led by William Hunter, University Teaching Fellow.
This microblog is written and developed collectively by the twenty-two students in the 2011-12 studio module of the MSc BUDD programme, detailing their investigations in various stages of studio research and design.
What is BUDD?
The MSc Building and Urban Design in Development is located in the reknowned and influential Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London. The course operates on the premise that 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. Therein exists an urgent need to reconsider and recalibrate our professional capacities through a critical engagement with design in order to effectively respond to rapid urbanisation.
image by Andrew Wade
Since 2008, the majority of the world’s human population has lived in urban areas. While such urbanisation is substantially transforming the planet, cities are fundamentally shaped by neoliberal policies and exogenous transformative market-led forces that deepen the vulnerabilities of the urban poor and marginalised communities.
Additionally, the destructive effects of climate change and natural hazards tend to be concentrated disproportionally in poorer urban districts with the least adequate provision of protective infrastructure and services. The result of these global, regional and local processes is that cities, the planning of cities, and the design of urban space has become increasingly fragmented, while inequality and vulnerabilities have risen.
The programme presents a holistic process of design for development in cities within this context. It combines an examination and analysis of economic, social, cultural and spatial elements in the production of urban form and building with the principles of designing for development, which include affordability, acceptability, sustainability, participation and responsiveness in design. In particular the course links together the methods and practice of ‘design’ with the complementary ‘developmental’ processes of development practitioners dealing with the spatial manifestation of injustices, complex urban challenges and spatial transformations at the scale of the building (architecture) and wider fabric (urban design) not as isolated disciplines or fields of practice but rather ones that are embedded and infused in the broader and more complex and contested urbanism.
The objectives of the programme 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 urbanisation at different scales; to be able to respond with strategically coordinated process and product 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 as emanating from specific modes of production with their inherent structures of social relations, cultures, ideologies, histories and struggles that configure the urban realm.
The MSc BUDD course is led by Course Director, Dr. Camillo Boano and coordinated by Anna Schulenburg. The Urban Intervention Studio (BENVGBU3) is led by William Hunter, University Teaching Fellow.
This microblog is written and developed collectively by the twenty-two students in the 2011-12 studio module of the MSc BUDD programme, detailing their investigations in various stages of studio research and design.
