City Design

The MA City Design makes use of digital design, analysis and visualisation tools, including moving image, animation, augmented and immersive design, as drivers of speculative innovation. Together with collaborative forms of knowledge production and exchange, the programme argues these are necessary for enabling the designers of cities to creatively imagine the future in just and equitable ways. Through invited guests, collaborators and site visits, students will have access to different stakeholders involved in contemporary urban transformation. These will range from industry and design practitioners to central and local government, or community and grassroots organisations.

Students of the MA City Design will have the opportunity to pursue a degree within a world leading art and design institution, and to access the rich culture of radical and experimental interdisciplinary work at the Royal College of Art. Moreover, the programme will help students to establish a network of colleagues and mentors by offering them the opportunity of connecting to leading figures in City Design both in London and internationally through an innovative practice mentorship scheme.

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

Design Studio 1: Conditions: This unit consists of an introduction to the programme’s design-led, and site-based pedagogical model. It familiarises you with design-based research methodologies, and collaborative forms of knowledge production. The unit will require you to work in partnership with non-academic urban actors and organisations to speculate on the realisation of change in the city.

Seminar 1: Positions: The Seminar unit will aim to help you to situate city design in relation to the collective knowledges, perspectives and experiences of those in the frontlines of urban change.

Media Studies: The unit is subdivided into multiple sections led by tutors with a diverse range of media experience. Lectures are delivered by staff and invited guests and introduce a range of media and spatial practice methodologies. In the tutorials, you will learn specific skills related to your section, and deploy your research through the execution of new media-based projects. The unit’s mission is twofold: first to encourage the incoming MA students from disparate programmes to increase their cross-disciplinary communication and secondly to challenge you to expand your media practice beyond architecture’s reliance on media as purely representational.

College-wide unit AcrossRCA: Running across terms 1 and 2, this unit aims to support students to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing them together to work collaboratively on a series of themed projects informed by expertise within and beyond the College. See below for more details.

Term 2

Design Studio 2: Propositions In Studio unit 2 ‘Propositions’, you will develop a series of spatial interventions with the objective of developing innovative forms of social organisation for their studied sites. Working in groups, you are required to develop a set of spatial propositions for design intervention in your site of study. This will require a clear hierarchy of ideas and approaches, in response to potentially changing conditions. A core element in this unit is the exploration of digital tool to speculate on forms of social innovation. The unit requires as well as the understanding of potential externalities such as conflicts between stakeholders or changes in the material, political and economic conditions that structure the project.

You will be asked to consult local specialists, NGO’s, planning authorities or private developers or others currently operating in the context of their project. You will be asked to critically explore modes of digital representation and communication in relation to the different forums where their project might be presented. The submission will take the form of a design brief including proposed design stakeholders and methods.

Seminar 2: Transformations Seminar unit 2 deepens your understanding of contemporary urban transformation theories and principles.

Media Studies In term 2 all School of Architecture students will participate in the Media Studies, School-wide unit. The unit aims to increase students’ critical engagement with media and space. Through this unit you will be supported to increase your cross-disciplinary communication and you will be challenged to expand your media practice beyond architecture’s reliance on media as purely representation.

Term 3

Independent Research Project (IRP) The Independent Research Project aims to enable you to apply the intellectual, technical and professional skills that you have developed throughout the programme, to a challenging self-set brief focusing the role of digital tools to fostering social innovation.

The part-time programme is spread across two years, with a distribution of 90 credits per year. This allows for a lower intensity of teaching which is balanced by a longer maturation time for the development of the Independent Research Project.

Year 1

Year 1 is focused on theoretical and historical skills, developed together with the full-time programme. Students will familiarize themselves with the field of City Design through the seminar units ‘Positions (term 1) and ‘Transformations’ (term 2). Year 1 includes the AcrossRCA unit, which will allow students a critical complement to seminar-based teaching, reflecting on collaborative research practices. In term 3 students will develop the first stage of their Independent Research Project and participate in the public presentation of work.

Year 2

Year 2 is focused on studio-based skills, developed together with the full-time programme. Students will be able to further explore the design implications of the work developed in the previous year by engaging with the site-based research developed in the studio units ‘Conditions’ and ‘Propositions’, including the field trip. Year 2 includes the School Wide and Elective units across term 4 and term 5.

The year concludes with the second part of the Independent Research Project in term 6 when students will work towards fine-tuning their proposals towards the final submission at the end of term.

You will participate in AcrossRCA. This unit aims to support students to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing them together to work collaboratively on a series of themed projects informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

The programme focuses on case studies and organises student research and projects around site-specific questions and spatial problems within cities. Each year the design studio units focus on a unique case study. Case studies are chosen according to their capacity to challenge and inspire students, and to allow for critical and skills-based teaching within the studio.

Design Studio 2023/24

In 2023/24, students take either Underground Palestine III or Border Environments

Underground Palestine III posits heritage sites as sites of urban struggle and those that are weaponised for settler colonialism and occupation. Archaeological sites, and sites of cultural heritage, are generally understood as frozen in a moment of ruination. By highlighting those spaces as living and breathing landscapes today, and questioning the value systems and assumed linear time embedded in the classics and archaeological discourse, the studio embraces a delinear and decolonised methodology in order to contest the prevalent instrumentalisation of archaeological sites. This year, the studio case study is the city of Jericho the West Bank, Palestine.

Find out more about the Underground Palestine III studio.

Border Environments investigates the phenomenon of "illegalised" circulations within the European Union by mapping the interplay between migrant people and the physical, political, and cultural environment they move into. While bordering practices are often analysed as geographically localised, linear, and physical manifestations of power – a wall separating two territories, a series of checkpoints funnelling and filtering circulations – the Studio proposes to investigate borders within the European Union as relational and dispersed assemblages that bring together distant geographies at multiple scales, international and nation-state politics, widespread racism, and colonial refluxes.

Find our more about the Border Environments studio.

Past Studios Archive

• Design Studio 2022/23: Underground Palestine II and Border Environments I.
• Design Studio 2021/22: Underground Palestine I.
• Design Studio 2020/21: Post Pandemic Urbanism.
• Design Studio 2018/19: New Logics of Intimacy and Care: City/House.

Our mentorship scheme is an innovative partnership between the MA City Design programme, and city and urban design professionals.

The scheme brings together a group of spatial professionals who work in architectural practices, municipal authorities, planning practices or other allied fields in the UK and abroad. Practice mentors meet with students over the course of their time in the programme to advise on their future careers and give feedback on their projects from the perspective of industry.

Access to and reflection on real-world practice will offer you unique career insights, while our partners benefit from innovative thinking emerging from the RCA. Working with you also enriches our partners’ network of high-performing professionals working in cities across the world.

Recent practice mentors include:

• ACME
• Akil Skaife Smith / RESOLVE collective
• Alice Meyer + Saijel Taank / EDIT collective
• Anurag Verma / Rural Urban Synthesis Society
• Allied London
• ARUP
• Claudia Theisen/Mehr Als Wohnen Zurich
• dRMM Architects
• Greater London Authority
• Haworth Tompkins
• Karakusevic Carson Architects
• Nick Stanhope / SHIFT design
• Publica London
• Tiago mota Saraiva / Ateliermob
• Tonet Font / La Dinamo

The independent research project (IRP) is a continuation of the work previously developed in the Studio Units ‘Conditions’ and ‘Propositions’. This is an opportunity for students to reflect on the theme of the studio while pursuing their own research interests, either in continuity with studio units or in a new direction. Priority will be given to the use and exploration of digital research, design and visualisation tools.

Teaching consists of studio based tutorials and seminar sessions. The IRP project can be submitted through project or by thesis, and includes a Public presentation of work, that might take the form of an event or exhibition. The portfolio will be submitted in the form of a blog/online platform.

Each year, City Design MA students undertake two field trips

The first is a short study tour of a European city such as Barcelona, Zurich or Berlin.

The second is a longer design workshop study trip. For the last three years, the destination for this trip has been Hong Kong. Here we partner with NGO Help for Domestic Workers and the Tai Kwun cultural centre Hong Kong in a 10-day workshop looking at the production, use and domestication of public space in the city.

Follow us on Instagram for more details, and look out for our public programming in Hong Kong while we are there in February 2020.

In addition, in mid-February 2020, City Design MA will be in Melbourne, Australia as guests of MPavilion and the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

Intergenerational Cities

Essential to understanding the opportunities and challenges of the global intensification of urban life and of a general move toward the city and its inner urban core, is understanding the parallel question of ageing and labour. The plasticity of human capital, its ‘employability’ within new and emerging labour markets, depends on its capacity for both mobility, and for lifelong learning and adaptation. This demand extends the productive lifespan of human beings beyond concepts of retirement established in the twentieth century, while pulling people out and away from traditional support structures such as community or family, those sites that have traditionally carried the responsibility of care for the old and the very young. The Intergenerational Cities Research Group asks: where are the new collectivities of intimacy and care for the intergenerational city if the single-family dwelling and the nuclear and extended family are no longer fit for purpose, or are being pulled undone? 

This research group examines the conditions under which such a question of the relationship between housing and the city may begin to occur: through spatial experimentation and through the innovation and transformation of the performance of housing at multiple scales, in the context of new procurement processes that support such transformation, and through the regulatory framing that needs to transform to support innovation and experimentation with housing ownership.

Future Homes for London

Along with St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust, Haringey, The Architecture Foundation and Baylight Foundation, the City Design MA programme organised Future Homes for London, a two-day series of presentations and discussions, questioning alternate models of affordable and community-led housing projects for the UK.

City Design MA programme staff:

• Godofredo Pereira
• Dima Srouji
• Charlotte Grace
• Riccardo Badano
• Areej Ashhab
• Helen Brewer

This unit enables students to explore how architects communicate ideas from both a contemporary and historical perspective. This encompasses a range of media that spans disciplines, ideologies and methods.

Students will use both analogue and digital technologies to understand better how a designer creates, interrogates and manipulates spatial environments.

This investigation will take place in a critical context, which explores how images are used to manufacture socio-political ideologies and negotiate public identities.

The City Design programme and the School of Architecture offer events all year round, including seminar series, practice mentorship sessions, as well lecture series.