Research_

Seeding the Urban

Small-scale interventions for large-scale positive change.

At the turn of this century the Catalan architect and urbanist Manuel de Solà- Morales suggested that urban environments benefit from “small interventions, which create a ripple, not comprehensive development”. Two decades on, cities now house over half the world’s population and their health has never been more precarious.

‘Seeding the Urban’ – a collaboration between the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at University of Edinburgh, UK, and Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University in the US – focuses on socially and ecologically strained urban environments. In particular, the focus falls on the capacity for small-scale tactical urban interventions to generate large scale ripples of positive change.

Through an approach to complex situations that requires tightly framed and considered, small-scale interventions, the work will explore and document case studies to develop new knowledge about the impact of this kind of approach. Despite the scale of national and international investment in the multiple ecological and political crises that play out in urban environments, there is relatively little research so far on how novel synergies might foster reparative knowledge. The collaboration here supports a nascent network of international researchers operating in the shared territories of architecture and urbanism, environmental humanities, and ecologically informed, activist practices.

Project team

University of Sydney

Chris L. Smith – Professor of Architectural Theory
Sophia Maalsen – ARC DECRA Fellow, Senior Lecturer
Hannes Frykholm – Rothwell Chair Postdoctoral Associate
Leigh-Anne Hepburn – Head of Design, Senior Lecturer in Design Innovation
Matthew Gill – Doctoral Candidate, practicing spatial logistician

University of Edinburgh

Suzanne Ewing – Professor of Architectural Criticism
Matt-Mouley Bouamrane – Chancellor’s Fellow in Population Health Sciences and Informatics
Moa Carlsson – Lecturer in Architectural Design
Miguel Paredes Maldonado – Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design
Aidan Mosselson – Global Challenges Chancellor’s Fellow

Cornell University

Lily Chi – Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Jesse LeCavalier – Associate Professor in Architecture
Anne Weber – Assistant Professor in Landscape
Farzin Lofti Jam – Assistant Professor in Architecture, Director of Realtime Urbanism Lab, Center for Cities
Asya Uzmay – Doctoral Candidate

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