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This module constitutes a pedagogical platform for expanding the notions and the scope of a renewed urban design practice, attuned with global challenges. This is a project-based, practical module that aims to provide an opportunity for students to acquire relevant concepts and methodological skills relating to design and development, constructing a strategic and symbiotic relationship between the two. The practice module is truly transdisciplinary in nature: it embraces the conviction that contemporary urban challenges must be investigated and tackled through a new radical mode of design research, putting the emphasis on the collective, active and trans-disciplinary character of producing knowledge and space in contested contexts.
The guiding questions of this module are:
• How to contribute to foster translocal spatial justice through urban design?
• How to use research-based design to shape urban strategies of intervention?
• How to enact partnerships, with equivalence, to jointly devise strategies to achieve spatial justice?
In the first term, the module brings together the inputs and reflection from different modules of the MSc BUDD programme in a studio-based pedagogy. It offers the participants relevant concepts and skills relating to development, urban design and building processes, and allows engaging with the theory and methods of building and urban design through real case scenarios. The module consists of intensive sequential project-based workshops carried out in teams and individually. Students will approach urban interventions in a comparative fashion, while investigating local areas’ and communities’ concerns and their spatial significance. They will be gradually introduced to the design research process and develop the necessary skills to be employed during the Overseas Practice Engagement, developing across part of term 2 and then in term 3. The module also enables participants to develop essential communication skills in verbal, written and visual presentation, while enriching abilities in analysis and synthesis of information and knowledge co-production involved in the practice of critical urban design. Thus, rather than focusing on specific tools, the studio enables the emergence of a new learning mindset to approach urban processes and collaborative work.

This module is organised according to weekly teaching units, composed of weekly face-to-face encounters on campus (please refer to the weekly DPU timetable) supported by readings and up to one-hour of asynchronous activities (including but not limited to short pre-recorded lectures) accessible on the module-specific Moodle page. Students are expected to dedicate approximately 150 learning hours per module per term, amounting to around 10-12 hours per week (for full-time students). The asynchronous activities will be released on a weekly basis via Moodle announcement, 3 to 5 working days prior to the face-to-face encounter. You must keep pace with those. You are expected to participate actively in all module activities and your participation will be routinely monitored. Over the course of the module, each participant is expected to engage in the learning activities by drawing on the literature and on his/her personal and practical experience. The module includes site visits and a overseas travel, where possible.

Introduction: on design research
Mapping territories for living: live design research charrette in London
On comparative design research, part 1: decolonising urban design thinking
On comparative design research, part 2: trans-disciplinarity in urban design
Strategies of intervention for design justice, part 1: tactics and strategies
Strategies of intervention for design justice, part 2: interconnectedness and singularity
Trans-local imaginations, part 1: new scales of solidarity
Trans-local imaginations, part 2: fostering emancipatory practices
Studio conclusion: individual design research projects presentations and collective reflection

This module aims to provide participants with the following:
• To analyse and reflect on the challenges of achieving a socially just urban development practice
through studio praxis, seminars, workshops and an overseas practice engagement project;
• To engage with the theory and ethics of an emancipatory urban design in the context of specific
cases;
• To explore research-based design methodologies and skills for dialogue, diagnosis and action
learning in building and urban design for development;
• To experiment holistic responses to the growing complexities lying within the design and
production of the urban form at multiple scales (i.e. building, neighbourhood, city, trans-local
networks).
On completion students will have:
• Been introduced to the transformative potentials of spatial design strategies at different urban
scales;
• Gained a research-based design approach to reveal the ways in which design activities shape
and influence spatial environments, and how the built environment in turn affects and influences
human activity at different urban scales;
• Familiarised with the complexity of the spatial implications to which building and urban design
has to respond in the context of contested situations;
• Developed a framework for a newfound professional approach to building and urban design for
development that takes design as an effective response to urban habitat – inclusive, secure,
adaptive, and sustainable – in conflicting urban settings;
• Understood how to develop design research strategies and an effective response to urban
habitat for the development and upgrading of urban areas, in ways that are transformative,
socially and culturally acceptable, economically viable and environmentally sustainable.

Findeli, A. (2012). Searching for Design Research Question: Some Conceptual Clarification. In Grand,S. and Jonas, W. (eds.) Mapping Design Research (pp. 123-134). Birkhauser Architecture: Barcelona, Basel.
Sobers, N. (2019) Intervention without imperialism: an equitable approach to design research. In: Design Research for Change, Rodgers, P. (ed.) Lancaster University. 373-394 pp.
Till, J. (2007) Three myths and one model. Collected writings. Available at: https://jeremytill.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/post/attachment/34/2007_Three_Myths_and_One_Model.pdf Boano, C., Garcia,L.M., and Wade, A. (2014). Deconstructing and recalibrating urban design in the Global South. In Carmona, M. (ed) Exploration in Urban Design: An Urban Design Research Primer. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Escobar, A. (2018) Design for transitions. In: Design for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. 137-165 pp.
Pacheco, R. (2020) Designing Justice + Designing Spaces on "unbuilding racism", Available at: https://archinect.com/news/article/150201409/designing-justice-designing-spaces-on-unbuilding-racism?fbclid=IwAR3lptrgdiXxL8EE3Dnz56NIYHxU3plpwGgjWPQWHgIN6WCOQpTh_tI4RAY
Hirsch, N. and Miessen, M. (2012). What is Critical Spatial Practice? Stenberg Press, Berlin.
Doucet, I. and Janssens, N. (2011) ‘Transdisciplinarity, the Hybridisation of Knowledge Production and Space-Related Research’, in Doucet, I. and Janssens, N. (eds) Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism: Toward Hybrid Modes of Enquiry. London: Springer.