Living Localities
Designing in the Desert of Post-ideology

Master's Thesis, 2021
Written Component

The way we build our cities reflects what we think of those we build them for. It shows the rights and dignity we accord them. The same belief systems, the same notions of right and wrong, style and vulgarity, progress and decline, determine not just what goes on in a neighbourhood, but also what it looks like. Crucially, these ideas are living things. To be alive is to be mutable, constantly shifting and evolving in step with the wider socio-political discourse. If this is true of the process, then why not of the form?

Living Localities explores conceptual configurations of participatory urban development. By re-contextualising the arid ambiguity we find in the desert of post-ideology, we find instead a foundation of recursivity in line with the dynamic nature of the city as social assemblage - a call to designers to think in terms of processes rather than forms, to seek alternative models of development that extend agency to citizens through heterarchical practices of co-authorship, co-production and interpretation of space.

The seeds of living growth take root on the threshold between contradiction and congruity; on a bedrock of mutability, the ambiguous city unfolds.

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Print layout & cover design by Desiree Kabis