Environmental Architecture and Urban Design MA

Royal College of Art

Environments across the world are transforming at a remarkable speed. Prolonged heat and drought are followed by intense rainfall and flooding changing climates reshape how we live, move, source energy and share habitats. At the same time, technological and social change is transforming how we work, relate, and care for one another. Established distinctions between architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and environmental practice are increasingly inadequate for engaging with these interconnected conditions. The Environmental Architecture & Urban Design MA brings these fields into productive dialogue, exploring how design can engage with the ecological, social, and political processes shaping contemporary life. Through design-action research, studio practice, and fieldwork, you’ll work across disciplines and scales to understand complex environments, develop forms of intervention, and define your own position within an expanding field of spatial practice. The programme understands spatial change as inseparable from questions of organisation and collective life. New spatial arrangements – and new uses of existing ones – can require new forms of stewardship, governance and participation. You’ll explore how design can contribute not only to different environments, but to different relationships between people, institutions and the more-than-human worlds they inhabit. Bring environmental thinking and urban design into productive dialogue. Work with communities and institutions on urgent environmental, spatial and urban challenges. Connect transformative design approaches with policy, fieldwork and speculation to enact change. Develop your design practice within the justice-oriented, experimental, collaborative, and interdisciplinary culture of the RCA.

School of Architecture