Designing Inclusion The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies

Designing Inclusion is a research area led by Dr Beatrice De Carli and emerging from two EU-funded projects titled DESINC – Designing Inclusion (2016-2019, De Carli PI) and DESINC Live – Designing and learning in the context of migration (2019-2022, De Carli Co-I).

The most recent of these projects, DESINC LIVE, explores the role that urban space and spatial practice play in creating conditions of exclusion or inclusion in cities. The project is set within the European context and centres on migration as a key component of urbanisation and an important lens for understanding how dynamics of power, oppression and emancipation relate to city-making.

The project is particularly concerned with knowledge and learning. What knowledge about cities and migration informs the definition of urban policies and plans? What knowledge underpins the design and material construction of buildings and places? Whose perspectives are taken in consideration in the making of the city, and why? And what can social work and activism gain from a greater understanding of how the built environment works?

The project attempts to address these questions by developing an experimental learning programme, Practices of Urban Inclusion, that links together professional and experiential knowledge, art practice and urban policy, theory and action. The educational programme aims to provide current and future practitioners with the conceptual and practical tools that will enable them to develop new ways of fostering inclusion in urban space.

The basis of the work is a framework of principles, methods and pedagogical tools, developed by the previous DESINC project, that DESINC LIVE is now testing ‘live’ with specific learners, partner organisations and sites of engagement.

Research outputs from DESINC are available here.

For details and updates about DESINC LIVE, please visit the project website