Title:
Roads become Rivers
Unit 13 will explore the new home of ASD in Aldgate and its connection with three High Streets; Commercial Road, Commercial Street, and Whitechapel Road, as they make their way to the Lower Lea Valley. This patch of city plays host to a range and complexity of people and uses including offices, libraries, shopping centres, tube stations, markets, cinemas, mosques, pubs, supermarkets and petrol stations.
 
Around these high streets is a hinterland of urban service spaces that exist on an intricate series of sites and spaces, built on a landscape of gradual adjustment. Multi-storey car parks, loading bays, bus garages, passages, and backlands all make an abrupt transition with a more traditional urban grain. The condition of ‘High Street London’ is typical and all the more interesting for this reason. The high street gains the status of a local institution, catering for civic and semi-social infrastructure, whilst capturing multiple uses with proximity to allow for new forms of workspace, living space and recreation to be explored and supported.

We will begin the year in Aldgate working with Publica and artist Lucinda Rogers, and as participants in the Aldgate project which a number of students from ASD and Sir John Cass Art, Media and Design Faculty. This will be the first of a number of episodes throughout the year, which expose us to a range of challenges that the reality of urban change can throw at the engaged architect.

Students will be expected to work very quickly and with agility, to understand and conceive of situations that are complex and ever changing. Working within the three conceptual modes of proposition, response, and observation, we will consider the deeply pragmatic and hard-nosed financial parameters that underpin development within the city that will require ingenuity and plausible solutions that work with and around the logic of planning, land ownership and developer margins.

Simultaneously we will consider the high street as civic institution; the place where the social lives of the community are played out. The market house, trade house, work house, meeting house will therefore be considered as strategic programmatic opportunities within the high street to encourage collective activity and support collective identity.

We will consider strategies for responding to the often fragmented fabric of the high street and it's adjacent lands to make socially responsible and physically coherent places. The impact of volume and space, scale and grain will be carefully considered in terms of the physical contribution to the high street. Opportunities for carving out and protecting open public space within the locality will also be investigated and examined.

A range of discrete and overlapping episodes will allow us to unlock possibilities in the city.
These episodes will demand;

- Observation of the intricacy of service spaces and the everyday juxtapositions of built uses,
- Design of road space and transport capacity for places and people,
- Design of public open spaces and private inside spaces
- Design of the space between and behind buildings,

- Negotiation of the management, maintenance, and surveillance demands of the high street,
- Articulation of the benefits and problems associated with different design options,
- Responses to propositions of new development from others,
- Design that is a process as well as an outcome

- A balance of the generic with the specific and locally distinctive,
- Documentation of the changing social lives of the high street
- Proposals that sustain the particularities of London high streets.

The MA in Spatial Planning and Urban Design (SPUD) will be closely linked with Unit 13 and students enrolled in SPUD will be expected to join this unit. The unit will act as a critical contribution to professional debate and real processes.