BA Urban Planning and Design Year 1 BA Urban Planning and Design
Luz Navarro & Kanaka Thakker
Luz Navarro is Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design. She is the Course Leader for BA Urban Planning and Design and a member of the Emerging Territories Research Group.
Kanaka Thakker is a part-time visiting lecturer. A graduate of MA Housing and Urbanism at the AA, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture at the University of Westminster and is a member of the Architectural Humanities Research Group.
YEAR 1: Reinforcing the Urban Potential of Church Street Ward
Students: Aliye Asenova, Tina Babashahabi, Harry Chalk, Matthew Decker, James Enti, Zeyad Ghandi, Daria Halip, Mahirah Hussain, Kendal Jackson, Dylan Lima Canali, Aaron Longdon-Hughes, Orla Mannion, Harry Marshall Griffiths, Lorcan Quinn, Carolina Santamaria Padros, Nathan Scofield, Elizabeth Sodiacal, Dimitrios Stratomitros
The YEAR 1 STUDIO project for BA Urban Planning and Design is located in the Church Street ward of Westminster, focusing on the Regent’s Canal and the surrounding neighbourhoods of Lisson Grove. Despite its central London location, the area is marked by deep socio-economic inequalities, high levels of deprivation and environmental challenges such as poor air quality, limited access to green spaces, and flood risk. The Regent’s Canal, once a vital artery for industrial transport, now presents a fragmented and underused landscape with immense potential for ecological renewal and community connection.
The area is the subject of the Church Street Masterplan, an ambitious regeneration strategy aiming to deliver new housing, jobs and public spaces while addressing historic marginalisation and exclusion. However, this transformation also raises critical questions about displacement, equity and whose voices shape the future city.
In this context, students developed proposals that envision just, inclusive and climate-conscious futures for the area, including the canal. Their work builds on the area’s social and cultural richness, while confronting the spatial consequences of top-down planning. Through transformative and site-responsive design strategies, students offer spatial visions that prioritise local needs, ecological balance and shared urban futures.
The studio’s pedagogy involves both collaborative and individual projects, encouraging students to continuously question the connections between their collective analyses and strategies, and their individual masterplans. Through these design pedagogies, the studio critically addresses urban development and its socio-spatial and environmental challenges within the area, seeking to question the role of planning and design to contest the current landscape of urban development in London, and investigate the critical role that public space and urban design play in enabling a fair and open urban transformation.
Guest Critics: Mike Devereux
Special thanks: Digital PALs: Farah Mussadiq, Alice Owen; Studio PAL: Isabelle Achou, Sanaa Bijlani