PhD Researchers in Architecture and Landscape

Juliet Haysom

From the Ground Up: An Exploration of a Purbeck Quarry’s Leftover Materials

This research investigates the creative potential of certain geological materials that are currently discarded during limestone quarrying and masonry processing in Purbeck, Dorset. These materials include the clay found between the prized limestone beds; the high proportion of offcuts due to the limestone naturally occurring in relatively small sizes; and the waste stone dust produced by sawing. The Purbeck quarries are finite resources for the construction industry, and complex ecological and cultural sites.

In the context of the climate crisis, there is an increasing imperative to reconsider undervalued, low carbon and locally abundant materials. By focusing on both sourcing and using materials close at hand, this research uses creative and community-based research methods to  generate new uses for one quarry’s leftover materials. Undertaken in practice, between architecture and sculpture, allows for material and social inquiries that range from the functional to the poetic. Navigating between collaboration, complicity, and resistance to the industry’s commercial practices will foster critical and constructive reciprocity. The research will support the local industry by proposing applications for its undervalued materials, while also designing and making independent and public-facing creative work.

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Joshua Bulman

Parataxis and being within Cities - an investigation into minority experience and production of space within Thamesmead 

This practice-based PhD proposes a methods-based approach to exploring how spaces and places can be read paratactically, over the architectural tradition of reading them syntactically. As such challenging dominant cultural and historical narratives of urban spaces whilst highlighting minority experiences and responding to multidisciplinary calls to move beyond grand theories and prevailing histories of space, identifying the multifarious other experiences of place, including the experiences of minorities, and of life seen from the everyday, through practices, performances and embodiment. 

While expanding the architectural discipline’s repertoire of analytical and creative tools for tracing place-based narratives, this research addresses a theoretical problem at the intersection of philosophy, urbanism, and architectural criticism: how to develop an object-oriented approach to architecture that is meaningfully grounded in material, spatial, and design practices. Contributing to this line of inquiry, the research will focus on Thamesmead, a post-war modernist housing estate in South-East London, conceived in the 1960s as a utopian solution to urban overcrowding. 

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Yoav Caspi

Masking and Unmasking: Preserving Jewish Heritage through Architectural Heritage

This practice-based PhD explores the intersections of Jewish and Persian identities through the creation of architectural bas-reliefs shaped as masks. Combining historical research with contemporary fabrication techniques such as CNC milling and 3D printing, the project examines how ornamentation can function as a repository of cultural memory. Drawing on narratives of masking and unmasking within Jewish-Persian history—from the story of Purim to diasporic migration following the Iranian Revolution—the research investigates how architectural ornamentation can preserve minority identities within the built environment. By reintroducing reliefs as expressive façades and interior elements, the project challenges modernist dismissals of ornament and proposes a renewed design language rooted in resilience, hybridity, and cross-cultural dialogue. Ultimately, it demonstrates how architecture can transmit endangered heritages and serve as a medium for storytelling, identity preservation, and intercultural exchange in contemporary contexts.

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Oscar Mather

Memory’s Narratives:  Considering Fernand Pouillon’s Architectural Approach to Historical Time

Through primary research of the French architect Fernand Pouillon’s work, including extensive unpublished archival material, interpreted through primary philosophical writings from hermeneutics phenomenology, this project investigates the historical dimension of architecture as living memory. This perspective suggests that architecture is not merely a static record of the past but a medium through which we continuously re-draw, re-build, and re-write our understanding of history. The aim is twofold: to bring to light hereto unknown material on this important architect and highlight his contribution to our approach to the historic built environment; and to contribute to contemporary debates on architectural practice understood as poetic dialogue, allowing us to experience the past as an ongoing dimension of the present.

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Maria Minic

Who are Cities For? Informal tactics and co-operative strategies challenging the housing crisis

Drawing on participatory action research in Belgrade, supported by CDA partner Ministarstvo Prostora, and in London, my doctoral project explores how alternative housing solutions organized informally by citizens and more formally by civil society can challenge the current housing crisis.

The primary body of my research focuses on the city of Belgrade and emerging housing solutions that confront investors' urbanism: informal tactics and citizens' self-initiative in city building, and cooperative strategies carried out by civil society. Case study analysis through an innovative mixed methods approach will produce a morpho- typological atlas describing housing construction processes, citizens' participation, and their impact on the physical city environment. 

By cross-referencing the case of Belgrade to London's established participatory framework, my research will critically assess the transferability and scalability of Belgrade's informal and cooperative models.

My project addresses wider questions about: who is going to live in cities? Who are cities for?

Ziva Cheng

Original Copies: Simulacra Cities in Contemporary Chinese Urbanism

Simulacra cities in China are urban spaces that faithfully recreate European cities, raising questions about authenticity, originality, and copying. This research aims to explore the evolution of simulacra cities since 2000 by investigating three principal research questions. It seeks to understand how authenticity is defined in contemporary urban spaces in China and the varied roles of simulacra cities. It aims to examine the relationship between simulacra cities and the history of Chinese art, architecture, and urbanism in terms of notions of copying, truth, and originality. Finally, the research investigates the perceived impact of simulacra cities on the communities and inhabitants' everyday life. The research methodology combines an analysis of primary and secondary sources documenting the inception and reception histories of simulacra cities, as well as research into the complex notions of authenticity in the history of art, architecture, and urbanism in China. The research will focus on three simulacra European cities on the outskirts of Shanghai, using archival and ethnographic research to explore lived experiences, perceptions, and memories of adaptations to urban transformations.

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Alessandra Fasoli

Sustainability in the Making: Radical Craft and the Roots of Eco-Social Change

Building on prior work into the cultural role of artisanship and makerspaces, this research focuses on the potential role of craft and maker programmes to promote and enable cultures of sustainability. The project aims to understand British craft ecologies in relation to sustainable behaviours, to establish how a maker literacy for sustainability change is developed and integrated into specific social and cultural contexts. The research focuses on the existing craft ecosystem in the Devon area, aiming to also to provide clarity on how maker initiatives are coping with the environmental crisis, how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their approach, how they organise themselves to pursue their eco-social missions. It is expected that an understanding of the Devon maker social context will provide deeper insights on how knowledge is generated through making and will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the role culture plays in sustainability and environmental discourse

Xin Yao

Participatory Design for Informal Settlements: An Alternative Transformation of China's Urban Villages

Urban villages are one of China's most striking inequality phenomena. Sharing some characteristics with informal settlements, they constitute a distinct urban typology spawned by the old mixing with the new during urbanization processes. The structure of society, social classes and build fabric contrast against the urban morphologies and systems that surround urban villages. Despite many problems, contestations and an enduring history of stigmatisation, urban villages continue to provide rural-urban migrants with low-cost housing and affordable facilities, thereby playing an essential role in the dynamics of rapid urbanisation. The large-scale demolition and construction policies of the past are unable to solve current problem, as they negate the interests of residents and aggravate social inequality, to the detriment of communities, but also the larger urban environment. By enabling residents to engage in planning process and the future development of urban villages, and by documenting and considering their urban narratives and spatial practices, disparities between the contributions migrants and urban villages make to cities and their societal recognition can be identified and addressed.

Samantha Kitchener

How can interaction with digital technology enhance perception of space? The case of the disused steelworks Dorman Long; by offering an alternative experience of landscape, people and time.

This project investigates remote sensing technologies such as satellite imagery and 3D scanning that capture information relating to the disused steelworks ‘Dorman Long’; predominantly photogrammetry and light detection and ranging techniques.

These tools can allow poetic readings of the landscape to come forward and are reclaimed in accordance the origin of the word ‘Techné’; it is a word that applies to the activities and skills of the craftsman, as well as the arts of the mind and the fine arts.

Their value as ‘semi-scientific’ tools is considered and we question how they can augment forgotten landscapes in their computational processing of reality; which often produces glitches that are comparable to the breakdown of the steel working community. They can be offered as tools that challenge the notion of the real and the alleged volumetric totality of digital reconstruction.

Remote sensing technologies are explored as methods for reconstruction the past and offer alternate realities when combined with novel techniques for participatory research. The project explores the translation of still image into three-dimensional space as a method to reclaim heritage and reach poetics.

Pietro Pezzani

Targeting the City: Genealogies, Spatialities and Politics of Computational Classification in Urban Planning and Governance

My research puts forward an original notion of targeting as an analytical and interpretative diagram, and it uses it to investigate historical and contemporary data-driven technologies of classification presiding over decision making in urban governance and planning.

 The key questions this research project aims to address are the following: how does the current shift of targeting environments to the mathematical spatialities of digital information, and the increasing recourse to sophisticated algorithmic methods of classification impact the way cities are made visible, analysed and transformed by public and private actors? How do these technologies mobilise and transform space? What type of politics do they perform? In order to answer to these questions, I focus on algorithmic clustering methods for the classification of populations, geographic information and remote sensing imagery.

 Firstly, I outline a genealogy of such methods in the context of the United Kingdom, tracing their emergence from a range of diverse human operations and realms of knowledge production, historical circumstances, and social and economic priorities: form Charles Booth's early statistical method of classification of urban poverty in Victorian London, to multivariate analyses of social deprivation in urban inner areas in the 1960s and 70s  ̶  such as the Third Survey of London Life and Labour and the Liverpool Social Area Study; from the first attempts at automated cartography at the NERC's Experimental Cartography Unit in the mid 1970s, to geospatial analyses carried out by the ECU's successor, the University of Reading's Unit for Thematic Information System. In addition to that, I examine current applications of clustering algorithms as means of visibility in urban governance and planning: from geodemographic techniques of neighbourhoods profiling for the allocation of public resources and services adopted by the Greater London Authority's Intelligence and Analysis Unit, to geospatial land use classification studies informing transnational environmental policies in the EU, carried out by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

My research is the first to focus on a specific type of algorithmic operator, by analysing its genealogy and current applications in the context of urban governance and planning. It does so by following the trajectories of classificatory clustering algorithms across geographic and mathematical spaces, abstract datasets and digital imagery. In analysing algorithmic classification through the visual/pragmatic diagram of targeting, my research aims to contribute to pressing debates around the politics of so called "smart" urbanism, by bringing to the fore the relation between visibility and space. Filling a gap in current critical studies on forms of "algorithmic governmentality" (Rouvroy & Berns, 2013)  ̶ which have so far focused on notions of digital surveillance (Wolf, 2015), algorithmic bias (West, Whittaker & Crawford, 2019) and securitization (Aradau & Blanke, 2017)  ̶  my research interrogates the political agency of clustering algorithms by focusing on their minute spatial operations, the asymmetrical conditions of visibility they engender, and their transformative impact on urban environments.

Kristina Anilane

Curating the City

Writing about toolboxes in 2019 means navigating between layers of published and exhibited self-criticism within curatorial discourse and purpose-driven solutions proposed by constantly updating its research practice relationship social design practice. The first one seems to refer to being enclosed in current global political agenda and sees no further possibility of the world outside the one we inhabit, nor any development of it. The available notions for the future entail more versions of the present, financial speculation and disruption being common characteristics of our political imagination. “In order for us to explain the foreclosure on any notion of the future besides more of now, a series of shifts should be taken into account: from value to price, from labour to debt, from alienation to metabolic synchronization, from avant-garde to speculation, and from revolution to disruption. These are expressed in the reality of non-linear warfare and disinformation (shorting on truth in the form of fake news), derivatives, disruptive innovation, and other operations that involve capitalizing on contingency” (Simon, 2019: 159). The second one, in its turn, proposes real-time DIY solutions to local urban enquiries: the UK pavilion’s participation at the Milano Triennale of Design represented by Forensic Architecture in collaboration with Yazda highlighted this through an installation created by “an interdisciplinary team of investigators, artists, architects, archaeologists, filmmakers, software developers, lawyers, and journalists—in collaboration with the NGO Yazda, set out to document crimes committed by IS, and to train a ground team to collect evidence to support legal cases against IS members. Local investigators were equipped with a toolkit of advanced digital techniques and accessible DIY methods, such as rigs made from kites, plastic bottles, and helium balloons to be used for aerial photography in dangerous locations” (Broken Nature, XXII Triennale Milano 2019).

What I am trying to claim within this essay is that the two discourses and approaches can no longer stay alienated and disclosed within their own settings – as they form part of the contemporaneous shifts, where people’s social securities may no longer be guaranteed by their elected governments. Lies and implicit virtuality are rigorously intertwined with what before seemed real, guaranteed, elected, set. In order to attempt a closer understanding and further assistance with a critical filter for reality for a wider spectrum of audiences, knowing how to “play their games” is considered to be of utmost importance for divided societies. There, live action role-playing (LARP) and tabletop gaming present themselves as potential powerful triggers of an immersive political agenda, armed with curatorial tools. Identitarianism has previously been raised as a condition of living within a global utopia, whose inventors we can no longer even identify.

Rut Blees Luxemburg, Meet Me in Arcadia, from: A Modern Project, 1996.

Julien Alfred Bernard Clin

Belonging in the City: Poetics of Place as Resistance to Gentrification

There is a poetics of place that emerges from contemporary London writing which does more than bear witness to the changing urban environment. In the context of a gentrification process that has been accelerated and fundamentally changed by the hyper-commodification of space, city narratives are also a creative act producing place (in Henri Lefebvre’s terminology). Celebrating the everyday and the mundane, anchoring community in small locales, novels like Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, Zadie Smith’s NW or Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, imbue their places with identity. They become acts of resistance against a materialist gentrification that seeks to erase or homogenise places.

This resistance is explicit in Gunaratne’s novel, set against the backdrop of a riot. Resistance is also apparent in Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, whose focus are the place, people and histories erased by new developments – culminating in the impact of the London 2012 Olympic Games. Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd’s work, to name but two novelists, similarly see the city as a palimpsest of traces and reveal a place-attachment that is rooted in the past. This recalls the German concept of Heimat (“Homeland”), which has been undergoing a fundamental rethinking since the late twentieth century.

Through its poetics of place, contemporary London writing also seems to call for a rethinking of the idea of Home in a dynamic, urban environment — one that is actively built, participatory, inclusive and future-oriented. In this regard, it is to be read in the context of the “right to the city” (Lefebvre) and “spatial justice” (Edward Soja/David Harvey). It is around this central question that my research is built: how does a poetics of place act in resistance to gentrification, and what is the sense of home that emerges from it. In doing so, the project will provide an essential literary perspective on questions of urban planning.