Landscape Urbanism MSc/MArch

at Architectural Association School of Architecture

The Landscape Urbanism (LU) programme leads to either an MArch (16 months) or an MSc (12 months) degree. It explores the role that design and designers – from architects and landscape architects to urban designers and planners – can play when confronted with the processes, landscapes and territories of planetary urbanisation (metropolitan areas, rural environments, infrastructural and productive landscapes, etc) and the environ-mental, racial, socio-economic and health-related crises they have triggered. Planetary urbanisation is structured by an economic model based on policies, legal frameworks, political decisions, social and cultural contexts and engineering solutions; design inputs are either left out altogether or consigned to the fringes.
 

LU explores design beyond normative aesthetic and performative proposals, as a mechanism with which to orchestrate, choreograph and negotiate political and economic frameworks to avert the contemporary climate crisis. LU is inherently multidisciplinary, integrating critical thinking at its core with practices including policy-making, political ecology, cartographic representation, scripted simulations and GIS mapping. Alongside this, various forms of media representation are explored, all of which are widely available but relatively untapped within the design field.
 

Design and the Green New Deal (GND)
 

The programme will explore the role design can play as part of a potential implementation of a Global GND. Considering the climate and ecological emergency that the world currently faces, it is of paramount importance that architects, landscape architects and designers support a socially-just restructuring of the world we inhabit. LU is currently developing projects and existing GND proposals in close collaboration with progressive economic think tanks such as Common Wealth and the New Economic Foundation in London.
 

The design expertise of Landscape Urbanism in the visualisation, mapping and spatial under-standing of socio-ecological systems is crucial to this project and the particular challenges that it will face. The programme will therefore develop proposals for a Global GND through the exploration of different policies, such as:
 

•Retrofitting existing buildings – specifically housing – across cities and towns to save energy, reduce material consumption and footprint and promote the repair, maintenance and reuse of material, structures and infrastructures within the building industry.
 

•Exploration of urban life beyond the use of private cars, and subsequent research into mobility alternatives based on people, mass public transport and the creation of healthy and fair environments for citizens.
 

•Transformation of urbanisation processes through the implementation of a four-day working week, and impact this might have on the landscape of cities.
 

•Rewilding of vast areas in UK and Europe, and the benefits that this could have upon the wellbeing of humans and non-humans in urban and rural environments.