Two new publications, ‘Public City’ and ‘The Politics of Design’, were launched on Tuesday 26 June by the ‘Cities Programme’, LSE Cities’ graduate education branch.
The 2012 MSc Studio publication Public City, centred on the Barbican arts centre and housing development. The Barbican is a massive multi-level, multi-entry, modernist labyrinth in the City of London comprising the largest arts centre in Europe and a dense housing development, as a site for thinking about the problems and the potential of the ‘public city’. The Studio explored the public character of the city not simply in terms of designated spaces, but in terms of different kinds of use, of users and of urban interaction.
The second volume of the Cities PhD researchers’ publication citiesLab: The Politics of Design, is a compilation of working papers that focuses on different forms of ‘design’ in the city – from the design of policies to that of buildings and public spaces – and considers the ways that these practices and processes of design are implicated in various kinds of politics, both official and informal.