Who is the city for?

The next generation of city makers will need to find new ways of working if we are to build a more equal society and mitigate climate change.

Urban regeneration needs to take account of all voices, not just some. The FLUX Atelier sets how those voices might be discovered, heard and included when we transform cities. The starting point is to embrace the ‘not knowing’, and then to stay with it. Collaborations between people and between people place and planet need time to unfold.

Students in the FLUX atelier investigate the questions that the developers do not yet have answers for, with a brief to imagine: THE FUTURE OF THE FUTURE for Manchester City Centre.

Taking the Mayfield Regeneration area as their site of study, students were challenged to connect the wider city around it to the planned development. The project was a live collaboration between FLUX, property developers, academics, and the city and its residents.

Students challenged the precepts of what it is to be an architect, developed personalised and innovative praxis, and ultimately produced new paradigms of master planning.

Professional Studies

Professional Studies 1

PS1

MArch1 students were invited to explore what opportunities the Mayfield Regeneration Project, a £2bn urban regeneration project on the south-east edge of Manchester city centre holds for Ardwick, an area which is home to some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK. How can the notion of fields of play be used to put citizens not development organisations at the centre of urban transformation? How can they be used to develop an architecture which empowers citizens and creates conditions for civic cohesion.

Students were asked to use situated practices to investigate their site of study. Guided by vertical discussion groups they developed an individual matter of care and design proposals which stitch connections through the damaged urban fabric of Manchester City Centre South. Informed by relevant theory and precedent students first tested a hypothesis through a proposal for an instrument of play: a landscape or architectural intervention with explores how fields of play might be used by architects to establish a state of change, promote cohesion and empower local citizens in the making of their city. They were asked to use learning from the instrument of play to inform the development of a concept design for the adaptive reuse of a building in Ardwick.

Professional Studies 2

PS2

In this module students are asked to explore how detailed design for adaptative reuse can contribute to just and equitable urban transformation, how might the design decisions we make as architects reaffirm the rights of citizens to their city and how we design buildings which can respond to the needs not only of the present social context but also that of the future and the future of the future.

Through the detailed design of their proposals for adaptive reuse students examined how factors such as cost, design life, buildability and design for ease of maintenance or disassembly might empower a community to take ownership of its built fabric and communal spaces, provide a rich and varied urbanscape which promotes human wellbeing and provide opportunities for revenue generation and financial and energy security.

Students were asked to consider what it means to design architecture which is innately human while at the same time engaging deeply with aspects of place and temporality. They continued to explore fields of play, speculating on the role they could play in humanising detailed design and the building interior.

Students

MArch2