Global Urban Research Unit

Transcription

>>[Voiceover] The Development Planning Unit is a school within the Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment, focusing on the evolution of the urban planning and design in developing cities in the "global south", which consists of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Some of the research areas include activism, informal urbanism, informal design and collective urban poverty. >>[Camilo Boano] My name is Camillo Boano, and I'm the Director of the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at DPU. We run at the moment three different design studios with the MSc students, and of course, the collective nature of the research is manifested in the way we communicate our outcome, that is through collective writing, both with PhD and staff, but especially also with students. Research is not emerging from a top down perspective but is really grounded into action, into experiences and into the reality. >>[Music] >>[Voiceover] Giorgio Talocci, PhD researcher and teaching fellow. >>[Giorgio Talocci] I was based in Phnom Penh for about seven months, and the research was looking at informal reappropriation of leftover spaces in the city, so, abandoned spaces, and to the extent these kinds of environments in the city can inform a future practice of urban design. So I was actually constantly dealing with poor communities, interviewing them and having an interaction with them, with the help of facilitation subpartners on the field, basically towards a way of looking at their everyday life, the use that they were making of these spaces. The recent definitely is feeding back on the whole research process of the MSc bud and of the department as a whole, especially because this year we are organising this field trip in Phnom Penh again, so it will be a good, let's say test, to see some research outcomes from a different perspective, to look at the same environment from again, the point of view of the researcher, but also with a group of students and a wider network of actors intervening in the process. >>[Music] >>[Voiceover] Anna Schulenberg, graduate teaching assistant. >>[Anna Schulenburg] Our field trip was in Bangkok, and we were looking at upgrading projects very much in connection with an organisation called Cordee. We were looking at the development of Bangkok as a whole. We were working two components: one was speaking and meeting with local stakeholders, drawing from the process that happened there, and the second part was fieldwork, where we worked with communities that were picked by Cordee on their current struggles and upgrading processes, contributing to it but also understanding what they were going through and feeding that into bigger picture. If you come from a design profession, I think through the MSc you actually learn the relationship between research and project work, and I think it definitely draws you into staying in this field and continuing it. A lot of people, including me, enter the MSc as a professional already, so the connection to reality and the idea that you're both working with the community and feeding back into the bigger picture gives it the meaning actually. It's also what the DPU stands for.