The Incomplete City

Rethinking urban design and urban development, and its teaching, with the Bartlett School of Architecture

Joseph Grima and I are the Sir Banister Fletcher visiting professors at UCL Bartlett School of Architecture this year, focusing on the urban design aspects of the school in particular. It’s a great honour for both of us, given the Bartlett’s standing amongst architecture schools, and Joseph, who is actually an architect (as opposed to my benevolent imposter status) talks lovingly of the ‘the Banister Fletcher’ architectural history textbook, and its status in architectural education.

We’ll be doing a number of things across the year, but the focal points are two week-long studios, the first of which we ran last month, and which are focused on the MArch Urban Design programme, working with Mark Smout.

Joseph and I came up with the brief of ‘The Incomplete City’, building on our perennial interests concerning networked urbanism, participative design, local urban cultures, and alternative models of urban development. We discussed it with Mark beforehand, and got some incredibly useful feedback about making it as tangible as possible for students.

We wanted to get students to explore some of the ideas that I’d written about in the network urbanism and the ‘social…