PhD Researchers in Architecture and Landscape

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.

Marco Veneri

Curating Urban Futures: Urban Farming and Meanwhile Tactics in the Context of Urban Regeneration Strategies

My doctoral project uses scenario planning and participatory action research methodologies to examine the challenges and opportunities of ‘meanwhile scenarios' in urban redevelopment projects. Drawing on London based case studies and participatory research in Madrid Nuevo Norte (MNN), supported by the CDA partner Distrito Castellana Norte (DCN), I will investigate urban farming as a participatory research methodology and means of exploring four main themes:

Time as a strategic dimension in designing public spaces: ‘Meanwhile scenarios' and temporary uses are recognised in planning theory and practice as key tactics within inclusive planning strategies (Bishop, Williams 2012). Scenario planning has emerged as a crucial tool for managing risks associated with large investments and will inform my research into incremental planning strategies.

Combining temporary interventions and tactical urbanism with long-term strategic approaches: Building on ongoing activities for social innovation and participation by DCN, I will engage with urban farming practices operating locally and across Madrid. Requiring modest initial investment, such collaborative projects hold potential for creating sustainable future scenarios beyond the finite timescale of the project.

The interplay of societal actors over extended intervals of "meanwhile" scenarios: DCN is phasing MNN for over 15 years, replacing redundant transport infrastructure, and thereby opening up opportunity sites for meanwhile initiative to researchers, artists, architects and creative practitioners. Using participatory urban farming practices my research will test the potential of methods, strategies and impact of ‘meanwhile' scenarios in urban development for long-term ecological and social benefits to local communities.

Stimulating social engagement and sustainable culture of participation: The research will question institutionalized practices and "invited spaces" of participation (UK Localism Act 2011) alongside "popular spaces" initiated by activists and communities, in order to identify innovative ways of channeling spontaneous and often marginal participatory movements to transversal networks of stakeholders and experts across scales.

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.

Justine Sambrook

The Supremacy of the Eye: The Architectural Review’s Manplan series as a product of the post-war cultural atmosphere 

Throughout the 20th century, the Architectural Review journal developed a reputation as an innovative and campaigning journal with photography as important in conveying its messages as written content.

This project focuses on the late 1960s when the journal expressed disillusionment with the perceived post-war corruption of Modernist ideals through its series Manplan (1969-1970) which employed photojournalists and street photographers rather than conventional architectural photographers to create image-heavy critiques of the architecture, planning and urban infrastructure of the day. It is often described as ground-breaking, shocking, experimental but there were in fact many influences that fed into the creation of the series.

My research will situate the phenomenon of Manplan within the broader cultural, intellectual, architectural and photographic context of the period, demonstrating that a number of precedents exist that together form the origins for Manplan.  Manplan was not, as it is often thought, a unique or eccentric expression of the challenging views of the Architectural Review, but a manifestation of a collection of tendencies and issues that were building throughout the post-war period and most particularly in the 1960s.

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.