Last Friday 15 December, students of the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development concluded the first phase of the Urban Intervention Studio, presenting their individual design responses.
The Studio has unfolded in a comparative investigation between the contexts of Medellin and Beirut, addressing the complexity of design in several scenarios – all compounded by scarce resources, by skew power relations at the individual and institutional levels, by unresponsive provision and limited access to housing and infrastructure, by legal and spatial informality, and by the contested interweaving of top-down vs. bottom-up agendas.
Students have spent the whole term deconstructing the emergence of border-making practices in both cities, and have sought – through their individual projects – to enact positive change, re-orienting existing design practices toward more just, sustainable and equitable spatial outcomes.
The MSC BUDD programme have attended a compelling series of presentations projects: these have focused on creating new spaces for participation and resistance to materialise, on creating new infrastructures for encounter, on strategies for the reconciliation of conflictive memories, on the creation of opportunities for empowerment through income-generating activities. All projects articulated through a relational comparative framework and tackled border-making practices in their multi-dimensional nature, grounding into both cities' urban dynamics and into the complex aspirations of their manifold urban stakeholders.
