Building and Urban Design in Development MSc overseas practice engagements

Each year, our Building and Urban Design in Development MSc students gain hands-on experience of using the skills, concepts, theories and techniques of urban design in a developing context.

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About our overseas practice engagements

The overseas practice engagement forms part of our 'Spatial Design Practice' module, which is a core aspect of our students' learnings and journeys to become better development practitioners. Each year, our Building and Urban Design in Development MSc students focus on social development challenges and opportunities in an urban area of the Global South and engage in an action-learning project that brings out the core concepts and concerns of our master's course, and provides our students with practical research skills, such as engaging with issues raised by partners and communities in a local context. To date, we have engaged with partners and communities in Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, India, Turkey, North-Cyprus, Jordan, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Malta, Cuba, Cyprus, India, Pakistan.

Our previous overseas practice engagements

Discover where we've worked and the organisations we've partnered with in previous years:

2024–2025: São Paulo, Brazil
2023: Moravia, Medellín
2022: Sheffield, United Kingdom
2020–2021: Medellín, Colombia
2017–2019: Myanmar
2014–2016: Cambodia
2013: Thailand
2011–2012: Bangkok
2010: Istanbul
2009: Dharavi, Mumbai
2008: Istanbul
2007: Istanbul

2024–2025: São Paulo, Brazil

The Overseas Practice Engagement (OPE) has taken place over two years in São Paulo, Brazil. It investigates Occupations (ocupações) in the city, understanding them as radical spaces of possibility—arenas for different forms of futuring. In these spaces, the right to the city materialises beyond conventional notions of citizenship and property, reshaping the way people live together and engage in practices of communing, care and solidarity. Despite legal limitations and normative restrictions, people engage in a diversity of practices and strategies to establish a sense of belonging and stability. They engage in a struggle for better life and better future; a collective aspiration that is both spatialized and socialised.

Overall, the aim of the OPE is to develop an understanding of and support the work on the ground of urban social movements such as MSTC (Movimento dos Sem-Teto do Centro) and MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto) that fight for the right to the city in São Paulo, also building on an existing partnership between The Bartlett DPU and the FESPSP. The project’s main objective is to understand how practices of occupation have the potential to generate spaces of hope and care, that can deepen interconnectedness across marginalised groups, leveraging on diverse vulnerabilities, instead of creating competing needs, and promoting solidarity in contexts of shared precariousness. BUDD students have developed research reports that 1) document occupation practices through combining life stories with timelines, maps and diagrams that spatially historicise struggle, resistance and solidarity, 2) understand how solidarity networks mobilise resources through informal conversations, interviews and participatory activities and 3) curate a set of resources that support advocacy, awareness, capacity building, teaching and future research.

Our Building and Urban Design in Development MSc students developed research reports that 1) document occupation practices through combining life stories with timelines, maps and diagrams that spatially historicise struggle, resistance and solidarity, 2) understand how solidarity networks mobilise resources through informal conversations, interviews and participatory activities and 3) curate a set of resources that support advocacy, awareness, capacity building, teaching and future research.

2023: Moravia, Medellín

Our 2023 overseas practice engagement proposed living archives as a decolonial methodology to re-centre life to imagine forms of living heritage based on relational forms of thinking and being, accounting for the everyday interactions, the polyphony of (hi)stories and the multiplicity of spatial practices often silenced.

Building and Urban Design in Development MSc students during fieldwork in Moravia

We proposed two intertwined strategies of co-creation: 1) gendering the archive and weaving (hi)stories of reclamation to reframe a repository of urban memory, and 2) living heritage into a process of collective imagination to counteract the existing enduring eviction threats.

Our aim was to co-create a living archive for Moravia, Medellín, using collective mapping for imagining gendered urban futures, textile practices, audio-visual material, and historic photos. Our living heritage approach reveals processes and practices of memory transmission in Moravia, which builds upon years of partnership and collaboration with the Centro de Desarrollo Cultural Moravia (CDCM).

2022: Sheffield, United Kingdom

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, we situated our practice engagement in the United Kingdom and partnered with Resolve Collective on our project titled 'Sheffield Otherwise: Counter-mapping Living Heritage of Diaspora and Queer Communities'. Through Resolve Collective we formed an alliance with several local organisations in Sheffield including Sadacca and Gut Level.

2020–2021: Medellín, Colombia

Moravia in Medellín was our site of inquiry where we situated our overseas practice engagement 'Living Heritage Atlas' and engaged with living heritage through the dimensions of urban memories, care, recycling landscapes, and community connections, emphasizing the migratory movements that have taken place towards, into, and from the neighbourhood territory. Discover the project website, 'Partimonio Vivo' ('Living Heritage').