England: Commons, Climate, Collective Housing

The field trip aims to provide students with a situated understanding of critical spatial practices across England (London, Manchester and Sheffield). We want to examine how such spatial practices—which foreground the production of space as a product of social, political, ecological and economic relations—emerge through questions of land ownership, labour, governance, climate responsibility, and collective action.

From London's public housing schemes and Olympic redevelopment zones in East London to the (post)industrial landscapes of Manchester and Sheffield, we will engage with colonial and trading histories, the early sites of the industrial revolution, deindustrialisation, neoliberal restructuring through the privatisation of public assets and goods—and, crucially, resistance to the dissolution of the commons.

On the trip, we will meet initiators of community gardens and climate action groups, community-led housing initiatives as well as land-trusts and municipal housing projects. Together, we will discuss architecture as embedded within larger social, political, and economic entanglements across various scales through site visits, workshops, and meetings with practitioners, activists, academics, and other students.

The field trip foregrounds practices that respond to current social and spatial questions through activism, advocacy, municipal policy, as well as architectural research and actively assemble alternative arrangements—composing new relations between institutions and communities, between labour and politics, and between architecture and ecological processes.