Urban Design MArch Research Clusters
Explore the Research Clusters that our current students have been working on during their Urban Design MArch study, a studio-based course.
Urban Design MArch students work collaboratively within teaching groups called Research Clusters, which allow them to pursue a rigorous approach to architecture within a highly speculative and creative context. Find out more about this year’s Research Clusters below.
Visit our online prospectus for more information about the course.
2020/21 Research Clusters
RC11
Hidden Dimensions
Julian Besems and Philippe Morel
In 2000, when speculating about the architecture and urban planning of the future, it seemed that the future of the city would be ‘post-urban’. The built environment would no longer be made up of entities identifiable as architectures. Instead it would be reduced to three types relevant to a global production system: 1) the vertical box (the skyscraper), 2) the horizontal box (the shed) and 3) the individual cubic box (the house). All human or non-human activities could find their place among these elements.
Today, the replacement of intellectual tasks by extraordinary artificial intelligence (AI) tools forces us to question the very existence of skyscrapers and central business districts whose economic rationality is no longer evident. Through a study of these districts around the world and a case study of Europe’s largest (Paris La Défense) RC11 will speculate about AI’s impacts. By making an (ever more) extensive use of deep learning techniques, and by understanding the computational hidden dimensions of central business districts, students will design their future.
Image: ‘Equal Rights of Space’ by Wanting Ding, Peiwei Jiang, Yan Li, Fan Zhuang and Wu Di, Urban Design MArch, RC11
RC12
Videogame Urbanism: Welcome to the Metaverse
Luke Caspar Pearson and Sandra Youkhana
Over the last year, the ‘Metaverse’ has become one of the most discussed buzzwords in technology and design. This term is not new and has roots in 1990s cyberpunk literature. It can be broadly defined as a persistent virtual world operating as a counterpart to the physical world, using game engines, interoperable software platforms and decentralised computation. Realising the Metaverse is now a primary aim of Facebook and gaming giants like Epic Games. South Korea has established a Metaverse alliance containing diverse industries from car manufacturers to K-pop agencies.
Yet for a ‘spatial internet’, specialists in the built environment appear strikingly absent. Will an entire virtual second world be built without any input from architects and urbanists? This year Research Cluster 12 will use its Videogame Urbanism techniques to explore new forms of urban design that investigate the current logics of the Metaverse, while also prototyping new forms of spatial practice in preparation for its arrival.
Image: ‘Symbiocity’, RC12 Videogame Urbanism 2020-21, project by Siming Chen, Yetong Jin, Yuxin Liu and Xinyue Shou.
RC14
Machine Thinking Urbanism - Cities Beyond Recognition
Roberto Bottazzi and Tasos Varoudis
RC14 explores the role of algorithms to mine, visualise, and design with very large datasets to conceive innovative urban environments. Such research relies on both sensing and data gathering technologies and learning algorithms which categorise data in an unsupervised manner (Machine learning). The structuring of the cities through data provides students with advanced tools for analysis, and radically changes notions of scale, time, and connectivity and their impact on design.
The consequences of these observations can be profound for urban design: received notions of type, programme, site, representation, and inhabitation are re-assessed to give rise to more complex, fluid, open, incomplete and embracing urban proposals.
Design is mainly understood as a problem of distribution concerning the organisation of objects, bodies, data, and perceptions in both physical and digital domains. In RC14, students are encouraged to develop projects about global issues and test them in different contexts.
Image: “Nutri.Net” by Alankrita Amarnath, Margarita Chaskopoulou, Ioannis Bousios, Junqiao Li, Urban Design, RC14, 2020/21
RC16
Deep City: The co-evolution of artificial and biological intelligence in urban design
Filippo Nassetti and Claudia Pasquero
The current global health crisis has almost instantly pushed most human relationships into the virtual world. This year’s studio will be no exception. Students will be connected by dense flows of data, a vast amount of them. These flows will almost entirely replace all other perceptual stimuli, including visual, spatial and pheromone ones.
This year RC16 will design a collection of radical urban design visions that will be entirely virtual and yet profoundly material. Students will index specific material transactions in real world cities, as relayed by remote sensing technologies. They will evolve their own artificial intelligence through accelerated co-evolution with real living organisms.
Students will work in small groups or individually. Each team will choose a site and a set of systems to analyse and map algorithmically. RC16 will develop a high-resolution digital model of each set to draw analytical terrains of the present condition; and will run cycleGAN algorithmic simulations, the virtual breeding grounds, for future Synthetic Landscapes proposals.
Each team will produce an inhabitable 3D cyber-garden, a territorial DeepCity Plan, and a bio-digital planning interface.
Image: “Geological Adversarial Network of Shelters Gan.Os101” by Anshika Tajpuriya, Shusheng Huang, Sheng Cao, Meng Zheng and Tao Chen, Urban Design, RC16, 2021
RC18
Relational Urbanism From the Molecular to the Planetary
Zachary Fluker and Enriqueta Llabres-Valls
RC18 investigates how urbanisation alters the Earth Biochemical Cycles in the context of “planetary urbanisation,” in which global ecology has become a capital-driven process. A capital-driven Earth System is one in which many agents interact in a non-linear way, returning different levels of organisation and hierarchies, each ruled by its law.
The cluster starts by understanding the Earth’s primary biochemical cycles, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous, as a complex dynamic system, identifying the relevant scales and rules of law that would lead them to identify a relevant site and the relevant research question from the global to the molecule. The cluster design methodology embraces the non-linearity of the Earth System, leading to a much larger spectrum of disciplinary niches,. It employs a wide range of design methodologies from flow modeling and data mining to interactive platforms aiming to engage a wider audience with questions about environmental change and evolution.
The aim is to understand how current urban trends alter the Earth Biochemical Cycles resulting in extreme weather patterns and biodiversity loss. The new urban models proposed by the students aim to encourage positive behavior and correct negative environmental externalities caused by urbanisation.
Image: Between Void. by Qianyun Zhou, Siyi Liu, Qichen Cui and Chuandi Wei
2024/25 Research Clusters
RC11
CASTS
Julian Besems and Andrew Porter
RC11 shifts its focus towards the art of casting as a conceptual framework for digital exploration. Embracing the fluidity and transformation inherent in the creation of casts, we depart from binary thinking and embrace the nuanced interaction between different domains. Our cluster will delve into the cityscape through the lens of casting, viewing urban environments as fluid entities shaped by cultural interactions. Cities, like casts, are collectively imagined, created, and inhabited spaces. Our exploration begins with an examination of cultural information derived from various sources such as articles, film, literature, music, paintings, performance, poetry, photography, and theatre. The city is treated as a mould of culture, with its complexity celebrated through the digital plenty - a seemingly infinite stream of elements. This digital abundance offers an opportunity to understand and relate to the city from diverse perspectives, much like the casting of a mould onto different domains.
Image: RC11 2023, B-Pro show
RC14
Sensoria Urbanism – Machine Intuition
Roberto Bottazzi and Tasos Varoudis
The introduction of machine learning [ml] models in creative disciplines such as urban design represents more than a mere technological or functional improvement of the current status quo. A closer inspection of the mechanics of ml models reveals that some of the most original operations they perform consist in projecting and correlating different datasets onto one another.
This new condition cannot be grasped by the technical literature alone, as it gives rise to profound questions regarding the methods and aims of design. Firstly, this new affordance transforms the role of the urban designer closer to that of a curator, a data curator. Also, it expands the range of qualitative aspects of urban environments possible to engage and manipulate through design.
Think of this condition as a new sensorium (the totality of your sensory apparatus) or, better, in its plural form, as new Sensoria consisting of multiple ways in which to sense urban life through form, sound, colour, perception, health, etc. Mediated by algorithms, this new sensorial approach will allow you to imagine new spatial, cultural, social forms of organisation for urban design.
RC14 will explore how urban designers can use ml models to engage the ephemeral, abstract aspects of urban life to conjure up new forms of organisation and experience of the city. London will be the testing ground for our exeperiments.
Image: ‘Accent Diffusion’ by Yiwen Qian, Xuming Cai, Yiheng Xu, Muskaan Mardia, Urban Design MArch, RC14.
RC15
PERVASIVE URBANISM: SCENARIOS OF SPATIAL RESISTANCE
Annarita Papeschi, Vincent Nowak, and Ilaria Di Carlo
Historical institutional wrongdoing has contributed to the construction of what is yet today a tiered access to resources, budgets, and political power within the British society. These inequalities remain easily readable within the fabric of the UK built environment, and in particular in London, where severe gentrification and displacement continue to affect the most fragile and depleted communities, generating pockets of contested space, where the materiality of injustice emerges in its physical terms.
With the latest advances in AI technologies offering easy access to machine learning methods of analysis, and the opportunities offered by low-tech solutions for in-situ data gathering, we have today the possibility to design research methods with an unmet potential to unravel the details of spatial injustice. With the aim to examine the qualitative and intangible components that make up the identity of urban fabric, RC15 explores an immersive and affective reading of the city, as defined by the intersection of post-humanist aesthetics and the theory and methods of automated cognition, formulating a design-research practice that uses situated sensing, data-science and participatory practice to explore the emerging new relationship of digital networks, cities, and citizens.
Image: Post-digital Proxemics: Ecologies of Olfactory and Visual Augmented Experience, by Naixiang Gao, Siyi Huang, and Xinjie Zhu
RC16
DEEP CITY III
Claudia Pasquero and Filippo Nassetti
Deep Green III investigates the potential of the application of artificial intelligence and nature-based technologies in shaping the evolution of contemporary cities. It takes on the now pervasive topic of design intelligence, extending its definition to encompass both biological and digital realms.
In the age of catastrophic climate change, such perceptual expansion helps to clarify that change cannot simply be stopped or rolled back. We must instead establish more positive dynamics of change within the living world. To this end, this studio will engage with design and architecture as an extended cognitive interface, a sentient being that is co-evolutionary and symbiotic with the living planet, contributing to its beauty and to our continued enjoyment of it.
Investigating post-industrial sites across planet Earth, the studio will focus on the design of resilient city network that use their size and collective energy to create refuge for humans and displaced wildlife, promote the emergence of positive microclimates, replenish depleted water sources, and restore degraded terrains. This entails innovative strategies of urban regreening and rewilding, as well as urban agriculture.
Methodologically the studio has been testing the potential of AI to develop a new green-planning interface, combining the scalability of a planning application with the sensibility and intuitive accessibility of its design interface. Using sophisticated algorithmic drawing techniques that involve networks, particles and volumes, the application produces simulated scenarios of sustainable urban development and a new way of urban planning: one that is dynamic, iterative, and comprehensive.
The field trip will take place in Innsbruck, Austria, and will allow our team to explore the Alpine Landscape, one of the most affected by the consequences of climate change; during the visit the Bartlett students from RC16 will engage in an academic exchange with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at Innsbruck University.
Reference: Bio-Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: DeepGreen; C. Pasquero, M. Poletto, 2023, Routledge publishing.
Image: Peat Revitalisation, by Rock Zheng, Napapa Soonjan, Jecci Chen, Yuanhao Wei
RC18
Relational Urbanism: From the molecular to the planetary
Enriqueta Llabres-Valls and Zachary Fluker
RC18 delves into the theoretical framework surrounding the concept of Planetary Urbanization in order to reveal current geographical phenomena and devise innovative strategies to combat climate change, biodiversity depletion, and the pervasive global ‘waste’ predicament. Our cluster delineates the urban paradigm by establishing interconnections across diverse scales, ranging from the Molecular to the Planetary level, and scrutinizing the intricate material and energy exchanges between urban centers and the distant landscapes of the Anthropocene. These landscapes presently serve as primary sources of material and energy for our cities, while also serving as repositories for the waste generated by urban activities.
This investigation has facilitated the development of fresh perspectives on urban design and has consistently guided the cluster’s objectives over the past four academic years. Over the course of the previous three years, the cluster has focused its attention on Earth’s Biochemical Cycles, the Global Trade of Raw Materials, and the geographical dynamics of Multi-National Corporations. In the current year, the cluster’s focus has shifted towards evaluating the role of international institutions in addressing cross-border challenges through the sharing of data, knowledge dissemination, and the establishment of collaborative networks.
The cluster’s initial approach involves a comprehensive analysis of how these geographical phenomena can be translated into tangible data, and how this data can be leveraged to inform urban planning and design processes. Subsequently, the design projects delve into the incorporation of data digitalization and the creation of virtual environments, enabling students to conceptualize and implement contemporary design solutions in response to unprecedented urban predicaments.
Image: Planet Earth without water, Project: Cry automata. Reviving the glacial hinterland, by Yu Zhong, Jesu Koya and Raksiri Kaewtawee.
Carousel images: 1. “Data Island” by Yuqi Leng, Jinhui Shen and Xinfeng Lu, Urban Design, RC18
2. “Upon Iso-individuals” by Qiyuan Hong, Yuhan Shen, Shiqi Wang and Jiang Chang, RC14
3. “Civic Sensorium” by Dhruval Shah, Songlun He and Qirui Wang, Urban Design, RC15
4. “Physarum Poly-xylem City” by Marco Alfaro Ruz, Heyuan Chen, Shiyu Qin and Siyi Li, Urban Design MArch, RC16