Urban design project one – Neighbourhood of care – Saving Brick Lane

Tutor: Dr Tanzil Shafique

Teaching Assistant: Jing Jing Wang

Excerpt from the studio brief: Who is London for? The asked in Anna Minton's incisive book, in which she lays bare the capitalist processes of city-making in London (Big Capital, 2017). The ground reality of such processes is a particular condition which seems without an alternative – the inevitable displacement of communities from their neighbourhoods in the name of regeneration.

However, this displacement is not equally distributed in the city, and particularly, it appears migrant neighbourhoods and ethnically diverse areas are most often the victims. There is a long history of the subjugation of working-class and migrant neighbourhoods by the instruments of capitalistic and patriarchal hegemony over urban processes.

The cold neoliberal logic of real estate keeps producing nothing less than a subaltern London. However, there are pockets of resistance in the city as well, where local citizens have collectivised, formed alliances, resisted the planning moves from an uncaring urban planning regime.

This urban studio takes this larger system of uncaring by the City as a premise and re-frames it within a feminist ethic of care to posit that the neighbourhoods of resistance are equally neighbourhoods of care. To articulate this landscape of resistance and care, the studio will be situated within one of such neighbourhoods and their ongoing struggle.

Heritage

Group one: Meghna Dhadda, Haimu Nie, Jianyu He, Yihan Li.

Research findings: 'Everyday mundane' heritage assets that contribute to the urban grain of Brick Lane.

Retail urbanism

Group two: Shuming Bao, Duanyi Zhu, Junyang Shi, Kavya Srinivasan, Yi Duan.

Studying the quality of stores along Brick Lane and Whitechapel.

Everyday urbanism

Group three: Xiangyu Xia, Chuke Fu, Fangxin Chen, Yuxi Ge, Jun Xiong.

Activities analysis – building function and quality of the physical environment.