What now ...?: The Fourth Annual MA A+U Colloquium

The Fourth Annual MA A+U Colloquium will be held in our new base Chatham 809 on Thursday 26 September between 4.00-6.00pm presenting examples of the urban research conducted by the 2012-13 cohort. ALL WELCOME

Thomas Sydney MA PARIS Hajir Alttahir MA NEW YORK Curtis Martyn MA HAVANA Simon James MA MADRID The Colloquium will be followed by the opening of the MA Show in the new Manchester School of Art building

CONGRATULATIONS!

Congratulations to all our successful MA A+U graduates in the 2012-13 cohort

Elham Amini MA Hajir Alttahir MA with Distinction Xiaoxue Bu MA Simon Carder MA Matteo Casaburi MA with Distinction Chen Xi MA Juan Manuel del Castillo Caceres MA with Distinction Gu Fang MA Simon James MA Justina Job MA Rebecca King MA Christos Kyrillou MA Che-Yu Liu MA with Distinction Curtis Martyn MA with Distinction Shiyuan Qin MA Thomas Sydney MA with Distinction Zhouzhi Yu MA

Architecture + Urbanism recommends "Confronting Urban Planning and Design with Complexity: Methods for Inevitable Transformation"

On January 16 - 17 2014 Manchester School of Architecture will be hosting the AESOP Confronting Urban Planning and Design with Complexity: Methods for Inevitable Transformation 12th Thematic Group Meeting on Complexity and Planning

call for papers Urban transformation has increasingly become recognised as both inevitable and complex. Processes of urban change can take various forms, from evolutionary to emergent, and are driven by trans-scalar and dynamic relationships ranging from policy and infrastructure to local and bottom up agency. Working with these complexities requires innovative new approaches and tools which can incorporate and utilise the inherent potentials of urban change. These could support spatial planners and designers in managing transformation and retaining dynamics and adaptability within systems. Processes of urban transformation incorporate multiple and parallel assemblages of dynamic change. It is often within the comparative timelines of the processes of change and the differences between the types of transformation, that opportunities for intervention and management in such processes can be identified and negotiated. With this in mind, spatial planners and designers of the urban realm are asked to demonstrate, identify and propose innovative approaches and methodologies which utilise complexity as the filter through which morphological urban processes can be addressed in a variety of ways, from spatial acupuncture and pattern formulation, to stakeholder negotiation and policy design. This call is aimed at exploring more closely the potentials and parallels between processes of Spatial Planning and Urbanism/Design. In particular, how the complexity sciences can create and enhance this discourse through an examination of processes of inevitable transformation. Papers may address: The relation between processes of planning, urban spatial design, urban transformation and complexity; Approaches and tools to work with ongoing and inevitable urban transformation; The potential of utilising multiple timelines and dynamic relationships between spatial development processes to enhance planning and design methodologies; Complexity as the basis for communication and collaboration between planners, designers and policy makers. We will work towards a themed issue for the journal Environment and Planning B: Planning & Design. ABSTRACTS to be submitted by 30 September 2013 to Ulysses Sengupta u.sengupta@mmu.ac.uk

MA A+U 2012-13 Thesis Projects 2.0

The second group of recent student submissions are illustrated below

Hajir Alttahir New York

Thomas Sydney Paris

Curtis Martyn Havana

Elham Amini Runcorn - Further examples of thesis projects are available here

Where are they now, already?

Matteo Casaburi, who joined MA A+U from the Politecnico di Milano is continuing his postgraduate studies in Architecture at TU Delft

MA A+U 2012-13 Thesis Projects

Images from the first group of thesis project submissions are displayed below

Zhouzhi Yu Qianhai

Juan Manuel Del Castillo Ñaña

Matteo Casaburi Manchester

Shiyuan Qin Nanjing - More projects will follow in future posts. - The MA Show will open on 26 September in the Manchester School of Art

Architecture + Urbanism recommends "Visible and invisible: perceiving the city between descriptions and omissions"

Visible and invisible: perceiving the city between descriptions and omissions AISU Congress Benedictine Monastery CATANIA 12/13/14 September

The conference will focus on the many ways in which the city has been described, narrated, portrayed and quantified in words, numbers and images over the centuries. Description and representation techniques from ancient and medieval times onwards provide an opportunity to initiate a comparison between different cities and contexts, seeking different ways of perceiving the urban whole in its full complexity. This is just the start, with respect to the objective and subjective limits inherent in the analytic process. On the one hand, there is what has actually been omitted, hidden and ignored, especially within the deliberately concealed areas of a city (in the private and social life behind the walls of ghettos, prisons, hospitals, brothels, convents, homes). On the other, there is a city that lies beneath the surface of all physical evidence: the city of excavations, underground infrastructures, sub-services, underground or underwater buildings. Beyond physical substance, there is also a city of intangible networks, a city of networks and other relationships that go beyond the “papers” and official documents. Beyond descriptions and representations, therefore, there is a city that is silenced and marginalized, which is not mentioned or pointed out in the documents. It is a somewhat submerged reality that eludes renderings and corresponds, in part, to what has been concealed over time. What comes into play here are other techniques and strategies related to the omission of information, to deception and to propaganda. Different realities have to be brought to light: the many residual presences in the city, conditions of decay and suffering, as well as industrious situations, which have not been recorded but are no less real. The conference will provide an opportunity to reflect on the complexity and ambiguity of the tools required to describe the city and its history. Confronting opposites, it is possible to compare a visible to an invisible city, an official to an unofficial city, a public to a private city, a subjective to an objective view, a systematic view to one based on impressions, a false to a plausible view, and, finally, even an interpretation structured as an "album" to one built on individual fragments. AISU Congress site here