MA Cities

University of the Arts London

MA Cities creates city-making practices that foreground social and climate justice.

Course overview

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.

On this course, students will engage with theoretical and practice-orientated approaches, political and ethical positions and a range of scales and methods of city-making. Students will critically reflect upon your own forms of urban practice, and develop new modes of research into critical practices, urban policy, governance and the urban economy –through creative collaboration and experimentation. The course will encourage students to develop an individual position, agenda and methodology, to inform their future urban practice.

Each unit includes a live project with an external partner from across industry, academia or government sectors. In the second year, students lead a live city-making project and self-directed thesis by practice. MA Cities alumni go on to work in many fields—architecture, urban strategy and development in the private and public sector, community collaboration and engagement, teaching and independent practice.