Designing an equitable city: confronting gentrification in studio pedagogy

The article offers a methodological contribution to the pedagogies of urbanism by examining how design can address the urgent issue of urban inequality from an in-depth, long-term, and ultimately, transformational, perspective. We conducted a 3-year experiment in studio pedagogy at Cardiff University to address this question by confronting one of the most prominent spatial expressions of urban inequality, i.e. gentrification. The site of the studio was the Grangetown area in the city of Cardiff, which is the capital of Wales in the United Kingdom. Grangetown contains concentrations of low- to moderate-income groups that are threatened with large-scale involuntary displacement due to incipient gentrification. The goal of this experiment in design pedagogy was to gain an in-depth understanding of processes of gentrification while simultaneously developing design strategies that not only address gentrification’s root causes but also propose equitable alternatives to the future of the city. The studio was guided by an overall framework–based on extensive research on gentrification–consisted of its most critical aspects (e.g. patterns of land ownership and uses, housing finance and commodification, public policies and regulations). The article describes this design studio process, its multiple innovations and different outcomes, and then critically reflects on its implications for studio pedagogy as well as for design practice. The goal of confronting gentrification in this experiment was to help graduate students--and future practitioners--design a far more equitable city by combining theoretical knowledge and scholarly research with critical thinking and design skills, and by engaging with values that are closer to social justice than what market-oriented thinking and mainstream practices currently allow.