Design Studio 20 Master of Architecture (MArch RIBA Part 2)
TUTORS: Maria Kramer & Shahed Saleem
Stitching Enhancing Evolving
DS20 investigates complex urban conditions through strategic analysis and lived experience, reinforced by direct community engagement and hands-on making through Live Projects.
This year, we explored a complex and layered area in north-east London around the Banbury Reservoir, adjacent to the River Lea, the Lea Marshes and the North Circular.
The area can be described as a fragmented and patchworked urban zone, where residential neighbourhoods, transport infrastructure, industrial estates, historic sites and nature find themselves juxtaposed, overlapping and intersecting. This edge condition creates transgressive, unexpected and liminal spaces where marginal and marginalised social, economic and cultural activity is located. It is an interstitial urbanism that generates its own dynamic and interplay of loosely planned and unplanned spaces, generating new urban uses and relationships.
We analysed this area and interrogated it through a range of research methods including site visits, community engagement, mapping, drawing, historic and planning documents. We also engaged critically with policy documents which detail local authority-led proposals for the area, asking how they have been developed and what their aspirations are. We engaged directly with the Regeneration department of the London Borough of Waltham Forest as our Live Client to test how our critical and speculative thinking converses with local policy.
The aim and intention of our brief was for students to gain an insight into a mega-city as a set of interrelating factors between complex, and sometimes competing, interests, land uses, economies, ecologies and cultures, working at macro-, meso- and micro-scales. Students saw how local authorities approach planning and regeneration, and how city-making and the production of the built environment happen within a political and procedural planning framework.
Archive of DS20’s work from previous years:
