Urban design project one – City of Margins

Tutor: Dr Emre Akbil

Teaching Assistant: Tom Moore

Excerpt from the studio brief: Sheffield is a city of urban resistances where the outcasts – workers + women + migrants + trees + rivers – keep claiming the centre stage hence changing the course of the city. Learning from bell hooks as well as Rosi Braidotti's seminal text Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness and her notion of 'generative thresholds', the studio City of Margins aims to reimagine the margins as productive spaces of the city.

The margins are conceptualised as the resourceful settings for the (re)production of more just and sustainable spatial futures. The studio aims to generate a caring attitude towards the knowledges, narratives, and practices of the powerful communities who refuse to be left in the margins and are actively reimagining spaces they occupy within the city which happens to be in relation with liminal spaces such as the river Don, railway tracks and others.

These communities aspire to retell their stories by centring their margins (bell hooks), while continuously advocating for the recognition of their labour as a creative force which has reshaped the city during times of crisis such as the post-war reconstruction processes.

The Wicker Resistance Social Club

Group one: Diana Carolina Silva, Hang Song, Haoqi Liu, Sicheng Zhang, Ziyue Wei.

Map detailing design intervention.

Potential of vacancy

Group two: Yiqi Shi, Hui Qi, Yujie Cao, Jie Wang.

Interventions map and information on the Arches app.

Ecology of cultures

Group three: Chenyu Li, Junzhi Liu, Xiang Gao, Xiaohua Tan.

Strategy and process – Design interventions map.