MA City Design

City Design MA provides a forum for an emerging generation of architects and those in allied design based disciplines, interested in the convergence of new social, technical and spatial innovations and in harnessing their potential to generate alternate forms of urban life.The global urban population stands at 4 billion, with dozens of megacities and expansive metropolitan aggregations emerging and consolidating. Urban life is undergoing momentous change as patterns of settlement, growth and decline diversify. Many cities are centralising as knowledge and service economy workforces are concentrating toward the core. This is adding enormous pressure to housing affordability. New social groups are emerging, populations are ageing, family units are extending and dispersing as work is casualised, and whole communities are moving online.At the same time, dangerous new social divides are appearing, on the periphery of cities, between different cultures, and now also between different generations. Yet many of the models used to explain, design, develop, and manage cities have resisted change.More recently however, new possibilities are emerging and their consequences promise to be profound: modern social movements, automated building supply chains, technology platforms, driverless transport and logistics, distributed water and energy infrastructure - all will radically reshape the city's fundamental building blocks and allow us to ask a different set of questions: where within these changing conditions is the logic of the new collectivities of intimacy and care that allow us to live and work together.City Design MA believes in the unique capacities of design and the value of propositional forms of spatial thinking.City Design MA is a field-focused, design-led, and project-based course. It proposes a unique, multi-scalar approach to city design education that unites architectural, technological and scientific research.