Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Study Details: Two years (60 weeks)Extended Full Time
MA Cities creates city-making practices that foreground social and climate justice. As an art and design college, Central Saint Martins is a place of intense cultural production, generating critical creative practices in complex and conflicting urban settings. Through an enquiry-led approach, MA Cities challenges the conventions of urban development, regeneration, and place-making and provides a platform for generating and implementing innovative forms of civic practice.
MA Cities confronts the pressing social, ethical and environmental concerns of the city and explore the value and agency of alternative practices from around the world. Students will navigate complex and dynamic scenarios using creativity and originality to address current and future city-making challenges. MA Cites understands cities, towns and other dense urban settlements as collaborative and contested spaces – created through interactions between various participants and stakeholders. The course engages in collaboration and knowledge exchange with a wide range of art, design, and architectural practices, external partners and organisations. Students will be immersed in professional contexts of public sector and urban practice through direct engagement with local governments, regeneration agencies, creative and spatial practitioners. The course also works in collaboration with world-wide partners, to ensure that the course is informed by leading international perspectives and becomes a platform for transnational exchange and expertise in creative city-making.
What to Expect
Offers will be made based on the following selection criteria:
Students come from these backgrounds:
This unit introduces students to a series of short live projects and collaborations across courses, for example with MA Narrative Environments’ Unit 1: Foundations
Voices in the City introduces each incoming cohort to a series of analytical, speculative, and creative studio-based explorations of the city. The intention is to learn a range of new skills and unlearn fixed perspectives on the city, then establish an ethical, situated and propositional position in relation to the city and to others.
The unit addresses the challenges facing cities through transcultural and cross-cultural dialogues and lectures, situated projects and site-specific interventions and documentation. It challenges students to confront their own specific cultural identities in relation to others and to reflect upon the polyphonic nature of civic practices.
Contextual studies sessions run in parallel to studio and engage with different theories and approaches to collaborative forms of city-making and taught research skills. Students will establish a thematic grounding and critical position to working in, with and for communities, examining: theories and practices around the production of social space; concepts of public space, the public realm, place-making, participatory practice and the commons.
Productive Ecologies explores ways of working that bring together research and practice to address pressing urban issues and contested sites, developing civic practices through the observation of, and participation in, a live project. This is undertaken in collaboration with external agencies, for example local government, regeneration authorities, arts groups and/or third-sector organisations. In this unit, students will develop methods of critical analysis and interpretation through mapping and proposition, and will interrogate the role of culture and value in city making—the production and distribution of both, and how they might be created, countered, measured, counter-mapped, communicated, protected, collectivised—in relation to urban change.
Students will contribute to the development of a productive ecology on a specific site, working with a live client to define to develop curatorial strategies for the generation and/or maintenance of ‘life-affirming infrastructure’.
The unit will test a broad spectrum of models of research-based creative practices. These research-based practices serve as propositional models for valuing, advocating for and creating spaces with and for specific communities in the changing city.
This unit supports students to develop and launch a live project.
Start your creative future at University of the Arts London About University of the Arts London (UAL) University of the Arts London (UAL) is hos...
