To mark this year’s Open House Festival, University of the Arts London (UAL) invited Open City’s Hafsa Adan, curator of the festival, to put together a collection of graduate projects that put social impact in city planning front and centre.
The projects within the London, City of Layers
collection focus on the needs of existing communities in the capital, as well as future residents – from children to artistic professionals – imagining spaces and structures that inspire them.
The collection consists of 17 projects across architecture, illustration, art and design from 3 UAL Colleges, including
Central
Saint Martins, London
College of Communication and
Camberwell
College of Arts.
Some propose sustainable solutions that bring different sections of the community together through communal facilities or co-living. Others reframe the city as a site of exploration, its streets paved with adventures.
The convergence of so many people is a catalyst for innovation and imagination, but the housing crisis means that metropolitan life can be a struggle, especially in London, where rents are high. This UAL Showcase collection demonstrates how the next generation
of architects, app makers and artists explore not what a city should be, but who it should be for.
Hafsa Adan, Open House Festival Curator at Open City, said:
“I’m very grateful as a black Muslim woman to live in a diverse city. There’s obviously a lot of underrepresentation in the field that I currently work in, but from working with young people on the programmes we run, especially from underrepresented communities,
it’s nice to see that there is hunger and excitement to break out into architecture, design or curation.”
“One thing that will always fascinate me is designing for young people. You can’t have ideas about what future cities look like without including young people, because they’re the ones who are going to inherit these future cities. From my experience working
with them, they’re all incredibly capable. We’ve run a young people programme called Accelerate, which works with 16- to 18-year-olds. Some of them want to study architecture at university, but don’t actually have much experience with architecture besides
their own lived experience. You’d be surprised at how many observations they make about the city that they live in and how they fit into it.”
