Urban Design Otherwise 2025 Series published

This year’s edition of the Urban Design Otherwise series brought Building and Urban Design in Development MSc (BUDD) students from The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, into close engagement with Pelican House, a countercultural cooperative and social centre in Bethnal Green. Known for its commitment to collective knowledge production, activism and spatial experimentation, Pelican House served as a site through which students could interrogate established notions of space politics, urban agency and design practice.

The workshop unfolded in two sessions. In the first, students engaged directly with the building—its internal networks, spatial practices, and politics—working with key actors from Pelican House to map its role as a living infrastructure for collaboration, care, and resistance. Together, they examined how the building redefines its own spatial boundaries by turning its enclosed architecture into an active and flexible forum for collective action. Here, design was approached not as a fixed outcome, but as a tool to reveal how urban space can be shaped from within through horizontal processes and everyday acts of reconfiguration. 

The second session, Mapping the Threshold, expanded the lens beyond Pelican House, beginning with a walk from the House of Annetta, through Brick Lane, and ending at Pelican House. Guided by BUDD alumnus David McEwen (Unit 38) and Florence Wright (House of Annetta), students reflected on local struggles around urban space and displacement. The session culminated in a collective role-playing exercise, where each group embodied different actors involved in a Brick Lane redevelopment proposal. This methodology enabled a critical exploration of the competing forces shaping urban space, the potential for collaboration between diverse actors and the role of spaces like Pelican House in driving new forms of urban engagement and political action.

Bringing together reflective pieces on the otherwise, the methodology, the workshop and the role of Pelican House, the pamphlet is a collective contribution by both staff and students—a recognition of otherwise practices that challenge dominant spatial logics and affirm urban design as a space of resistance, care and transformation.

Download the pamphlet here: