The Housing and Urbanism Programme applies architecture to the challenges of contemporary urban strategies. Today’s metropolitan regions show tremendous diversity and complexity, with significant global shifts in the patterns of urban growth and decline. Architecture has a central role to play in this dynamic context, in developing far-reaching strategies and generating novel urban clusters. This programme focuses on important changes in the contemporary urban condition and investigates how architectural intelligence helps us to understand and respond to these trends. Offering a 12-month MA and a 16-month MArch, the course is balanced between cross-disciplinary research and design application. Students’ work is divided among three equally important areas: design workshops; lectures and seminars; and a written thesis for the MA or a design project for the MArch, which allow students to develop an extended and focused study within the broader themes of the course.

Design Workshop

Terms 1, 2 and 3
The Design Workshop is the core course of the programme, providing a framework for linking design investigation to a politically and historically informed approach to issues of contemporary urbanism. It has two components: the Group Workshop, in which small teams of students and teachers explore and develop design responses to well-defined urban challenges, and the Urban Seminar, which opens up a debate on different approaches to key themes in the programme’s areas of research and is delivered by both students and visiting scholars and practitioners through a series of presentations. While each of the Group Workshop teams will pursue distinctive lines of investigation, the Urban Seminar and individual work gives the opportunity to evaluate and reflect upon different approaches to key issues within urbanism today.

The H&U programme places particular emphasis upon the urban inner periphery, where the complexity of the urban process is plainly visible, and our project work in the Design Workshop reflects this emphasis. Each team will define the balance and integration of architectural, social and political concepts that drive its work, giving each project a distinctive style and character. Our main site for design investigation will be an inner-peripheral area of northeast London. We will engage with the urban process of this site within the larger frame of London and of its metropolitan region. We will also hold an intensive design workshop in Taiwan taking the opportunity to collaborate with other urbanism programmes and to test our design and conceptual approaches in a different context.

Cities in a Transnational World

Term 1
This course explores the social and economic context of housing and urbanism as it interacts with the formulation and implementation of strategies of urban development and with the reshaping of the role of architects and planners in the making of cities. It offers a comparative analysis of the restructuring of cities in the context of the current global internationalisation of the world economy, placing strong emphasis on issues of policy and planning and on current reforms in systems of urban governance.

The Reason of Urbanism

Term 1
This lecture and discussion series provides the foundations for an engagement with the urban as a problem-field in western governmental reasoning. The course will trace the twentieth-century development of urbanism to highlight the inherent political issues, and will develop a theoretical perspective through an engagement with the work of Arendt, Foucault, Sennett and others. Through this, students will investigate the relationship of key political concepts to the generation of new urban spatiality.

Critical Urbanism

Terms 1 and 2
This course will explore urbanism’s role as an instrument of diagnosis and critique. Beginning with lectures and readings in the first term and building toward a seminar format in the second term, the course explores the ways architecture has generated a range of critical and reflexive responses to the city over the last four decades. Emphasis will be placed ondeveloping students’ facility with the critical analysis of contemporary urban projects, while background readings will include Koolhaas, Rowe, Rossi, Eisenman, Tschumi and others.

Shaping the Modern City

Terms 1 and 2
This course explores the various national and local strategies evolved by the state to meet the challenge of urban expansion during the twentieth century. Rather than presenting a continuous narrative history, the lectures and seminars will look at key events, projects and texts that illustrate contemporary responses to the opportunities and problems created by growth. The course will focus on post-1945 housing and planning in a number of European and US cities, offering a vantage point from which to consider critical issues such as density, regeneration, mixed use and new working and living patterns. It will also review the development of ideas about housing form and production.

Housing and the Informal City

Term 2
This course uses housing as a strategic vehicle for investigating the evolution of ideas and approaches to the informal and irregular processes of city making. In particular, it reviews critically the growing despatialisation of strategies to deal with urban informality and its associated social conditions and explores the role of urbanism and spatial design in addressing those conditions. It draws from the extreme circumstances of irregularity and sociospatial segregation of the cities of the developing world. With reference to relevant projects, it attempts to identify appropriate tools and instruments of spatial intervention and design and examine their articulation through the redesigning of urban institutions and rules.

Domesticity

Term 2
This seminar series explores trends in contemporary multi-residential housing against the background of a discursive formation linking domesticity and urbanism. Taking Mies van der Rohe’s patio houses of the 1930s and Karel Teige’s 1932 critique of the minimum dwelling as opening counterpoints, this course develops students’ understandings of type and diagram in the pursuit of fresh approaches to urban living. Core readings for the essay include theoretical and historical writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Donzelot and Nikolas Rose.

Thesis Seminar

Term 3
This seminar is organised around the students’ work towards their written or design thesis. It provides a forum for students to discuss work in progress with members of staff and invited critics, and to comment on each other’s work.

Other Events

We will make a study trip a European city in the Autumn Term. The programme also invites a number of academics and practitioners from all over the world to contribute to its activities during the year. Students are encouraged to attend complementary courses offered by other Graduate School programmes and by History & Theory Studies. hu.aaschool.ac.uk

All Masters courses at the AA Graduate School are validated by the Open University (OU).

Programme Directors

Jorge Fiori is a sociologist and urban planner. He studied in Chile and has worked in academic institutions there and in Brazil and England. He is a visiting lecturer at several Latin American and European universities, and consultant to a number of international and national urban development agencies. He researches and publishes on housing and urban development, with particular focus on the interplay of spatial strategies and urban social policy.

Hugo Hinsley is an architect with expertise in housing design, community buildings and urban development projects. He has a wide range of practice experience in the UK, and has been a consultant to many projects in Europe, Australia and the US. He is a member of the research committee of Europan, and has taught, lectured and published internationally. Recent research includes London's design and planning, particularly in Docklands; urban policy and structure in European cities; and rethinking density for housing and urban development.

Programme Staff

Lawrence Barth lectures on urbanism and political theory, and has written on the themes of politics and critical theory in relation to the urban. He practises as a consultant urbanist to architects, cities and governments on large-scale strategic projects, and is engaged in research on urban intensification, innovation environments and the transformation of workspace in the knowledge economy.

Nicholas Bullock studied architecture at Cambridge University, and completed a PhD under Leslie Martin. His research includes issues of housing reform with a special interest in Germany; post-war housing design and policy; and the architecture and planning of reconstruction after World War II.

Elad Eisenstein is an architect and an urban designer, and is an Associate Design Leader at the Integrated Urbanism Unit of Arup. Elad has experience in designing and delivering a wide range of projects with sustainable placemaking at their core, ranging from new eco-cities to large scale metropolitan centres to constrained and complex city centre sites. He has lectured internationally on urban design and sustainable urbanism.

Kathryn Firth is Chief of Design at the Olympic Park Legacy Company in London, where she leading the masterplanning and urban design of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. She has been involved in both design work and research projects that inform urban design policy and practice, and she lectures internationally on issues of urbanism and urban design. She has taught in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics, the GSD at Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Toronto.

Dominic Papa is an architect and urban designer involved in practice, teaching and research. He is a founding partner of the practice s333 Studio for Architecture and Urbanism, which has won awards for projects across Europe. He is a design review panel member for CABE and the West Midlands, and has been a jury member for a number of international competitions.

Elena Pascolo is an architect and urbanist who has trained and worked in London and South Africa on large housing and urban regeneration projects. She recently co-founded Urban Projects Bureau with Alex Warnock-Smith. Her research focuses on the development of spatial tools that structure complex urban strategies, and the role of institutions in promoting urban transformation. She is a member of the AA research cluster - the architecture of the informal city - and has participated as a design tutor in numerous international workshops on design and urbanism.

Alex Warnock-Smith is an architect and urban designer. Alex trained at the University of Cambridge and the Architectural Association, and has a range of experience in practice, teaching and research. His work is concerned with the relationship between social experience and urban space. Alex has taught at the Architectural Association, London Metropolitan University, and University of Brighton.