Three years of Urban Pamphleteer
A collaboration with Central Saint Martins explores the long tradition of using pamphlets to instigate change in cities.
“If you think about where architectural knowledge resides,” says Dr Ben Campkin, Director of UCL Urban Laboratory, “it is in the built fabric, but also in the published form.”
Campkin and Dr Rebecca Ross, Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and an Honorary Senior Research Associate at Urban Lab, are co-editors of the Urban Pamphleteer series, which was founded in 2013 as a joint undertaking between the Lab and the art school. The latest, issue 6, entitled ‘Open-source Housing Crisis’, explores communal, tech-savvy and creative ways to approach London’s escalating housing crisis – currently witnessing a shortfall of 100,000 units a year.
“With Urban Pamphleteer we wanted to create a publication that brought together different kinds of discourse around the city,” Campkin explains. “So between citizens, practitioners and scholars we could provide a forum where debates could happen between those separate silos.”
Each issue is aligned to support activities and events at UCL. Issue 6 was compiled on the back of a one-day workshop at Central Saint Martins in 2015. The event brought together 35 built environment professionals, designers, academics, and technologists to develop and scope creative responses to the housing crisis.
All issues of Urban Pamphleteer – with themes ranging from smart cities and regeneration in London to heritage in Doha, security design and urban education – are free to read online and are also distributed in print.
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