The Urban Design Masters programme is a space of experimental design and teaching located in central London. Believing that urban design must move beyond its current role as mere facilitator of capital expansion, the program sets out to transform existing paradigms of urban design education. . Currently, urban design conceives of relevance and experimentation in separate ways, either it repeats conventions of form and spatial organisation or it is swept along in a cycle of formal and aesthetic experimentation with little consequence. In an increasingly homogenized educational landscape, the challenge is to reconnect these two scenarios, to commit to an ethos of radical experimentation directed toward material consequences. 

The program brings together a new generation of designers and thinkers from across the world in order to provide a rich and challenging space for long-term research on urbanisation and design. Every three years a single geo-political region will act as a common object of inquiry for the entire program. Individual studios work collaboratively on projects located within this region. Studio inquiry ranges across an expansive set of scales and bodies of knowledge culminating with a design project and thesis.  Environmental and ecological questions are prioritized within a critical structure that embraces the dispersed, often paradoxical nature of contemporary urbanism. The curriculum introduces students to various fields such as archaeology, ecological history, governance, law, media, philosophy, planning and political theory.

Dynamic Catalysts

We are interested in how the city can be understood as a field of stakes and protagonists, rather than the conventional conception as a grouping of disinterested objects. This stance posits that meaning in the urban environment arises from use and is not latent in objects. We are therefore interested in the mechanisms through which interventions are made in the city via processes of contestation and collaboration.

We established an archive of knowledge providing a substantial understanding of the Tangier-Tetouan region at a range of scales. Exploiting this body of data and quality of relationships to focus specifically on ideas of the city as a dynamic phenomenon. We prioritise not the architectural object, but the role of interventions in the city as catalysts for aggregated change within networks of relationships.

∙ We establish diagnostics of the conditions of the city, recording social and economic phenomena in particular.

∙ We develop methods of representation that capture the kinetic qualities of the city at speeds ranging from the ephemeral to the millennial.

∙ We create instrumental forms of communication out of which propositional interventions can be formed at appropriate scales from the tactile to the global.

Our approach is founded in a response to specific conditions, and we concentrate closely on the geographic, social and economic mechanisms through which growth of the city is being shaped. We established spatial platforms for interventions that locate the territories in which we will focus, within the historic centre of the city and in its urbanising periphery.

Tangiers

The Tangier-Tetouan area can be seen as a microcosm of phenomena that operate at multiple scales across the Mediterranean. At the same time, it represents a distinctive condition shaped by its geographical position and historic processes of colonisation and migratory flows. The city sits in a strategic location between Africa and Europe, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Tangier is also shaped by multiple boundary conditions, nested within one another, overlapping and adjacent. These have historically defined its strategic value and continue to shape its contemporary condition.

Tangier has been a colonial outpost, an International Zone, and is today the northernmost region of the monarchical Moroccan state. The region is currently undergoing rapid development, with investments including construction of a European-funded Free Zone, a new container port, new towns and related high speed rail and road networks. As a consequence of these moves, and the rapid pace of internal migration, the population has trebled in the last 30 years.

In this context, the region can be seen as a territory exemplifying contestation and collaboration in its distribution of spatial, economic and social resources. Tangier operates within and beyond multiple boundaries. Disputed territories define its relationship to sovereign neighbours. Economic internal boundaries create taxation advantages in relation to global trading markets. Rapid urbanisation has resulted in the formation of peripheral suburban settlements that blur the boundaries between city and landscape.

Graduates developed rigorous research proposals through experimental design work. Students synthesize information across multiple bodies of knowledge and work collaboratively in complex environments. Students also develop skills in advanced forms of analysis and representation and a high-level of literacy in political theory, history and architecture.