MA in Urban Design
As Joint Programme Leaders of the MA in Urban Design (MAUD) course, we are really looking forward to starting the new term.
Each year the MAUD programme involves an exciting mix of students from all across the world, each bringing a different experience providing a great learning opportunity for everyone. This idea of learning together from each other is crucial to our way of doing things in MAUD.
The MA in Urban Design (MAUD) is innovative, participatory, critical, diverse and situated. You can expect to contribute to new methods and tools of looking at and engaging with urban design in ways that may seem quite different to what you had thought urban design was.
We see urban design as an interplay of various disciplinary knowledges – understanding the city from a bottom-up perspective through a situated lens from within the community for whom we work, understanding the ecological and socio-political context within which we must operate, and most importantly re-thinking the city not just as different parts (buildings, infrastructure, landscape) but rather as made of relations between all these parts that is constantly shifting (so, in other words the city as a verb rather than a noun).
When we learn to see the city differently, we can design the city differently as well.
Don’t worry if all these descriptions are too abstract now, we have an introductory video and some preliminary reading material listed below to help you provide a conceptual orientation as you start the programme.
The readings are not to make you understand everything, they are just there to raise some questions, which we hope will make you ask more questions. Asking a lot of questions and voicing your opinion will be another key aspect for your journey here at Sheffield.
We hope you enjoy the journey as much as we do!
Preliminary reading material
The reading materials provided below are available online which can be accessed through StarPlus under MyServices once you login to your University accounts.
These are a selection of readings, two book chapters and an article, that would invite you into the conceptual framework of the programme.
- Akbil, Emre, Luis Hernan, Doina Petrescu, Tanzil Shafique, and Iulia Statica, ‘Urban Design Pedagogies for Staying with a Broken Planet’, in Emerging Perspectives on Teaching Architecture and Urbanism, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ed. by David Leite Viana, Emílio da Cruz Brandão, Franklim Morais, Isabel Cristina Carvalho, José P Duarte, and Nicolau Brandão (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), pp. 301–16.
- Davis, Juliet, ‘Chapter 2: Care in and through Urban Design’, The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2022).
- Tyszczuk, Renata, Provisional Cities: Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2018).
Welcome Week
Welcome Week is a very important part of your introduction to the school, your studies and the University. It starts on 23 September, 2024. The first full week of the Autumn Semester starts on 30 September, 2024. During Welcome Week you will be introduced to members of staff who will support you during your time studying here.
Buying computer equipment
We have attached some general IT information for architecture students. The software commonly used on the MA in Urban Design course includes:
- CAD software such as AutoCAD, ArchiCAD and Sketchup
- MIRO board: set up your email and sign up for a student account
- Image editors like Adobe Photoshop
- Vector drawing editor such as Adobe Illustrator and layout/poster editor such as Adobe InDesign
- Video editors like Adobe Premiere
- Geographic Information System software such as QGIS
- Mapping softwares like Google earth pro, Promap, Digimap and Arcview
Most of this software runs under both Windows and Apple computers. You may need to use rendering softwares to represent your design development. All of the software we use is available free on University computers and some is available free for you to install on your own computer.
This is an important journey for you, and we hope to help you in your learning, well-being and future aspirations. However, postgraduate school is quite different from undergraduate programmes.
We see yourselves not just as students but as independent learners who bring their opinion and critical thinking in group settings and contribute to the teaching process actively.
Postgraduate school also opens up a wider horizon of knowledges and situations, a lot of new theories and case studies, and often the instructions are purposefully vague so that you are in a position to make your own judgement about how to interpret them and make a plan for your learning, deciding which parts to focus on, what to learn, and how to bring it all together in your final output.
It is a continuous process of critically thinking and forming your own voice, and we are there to help with it, but you need to take charge of your own learning process.
We are extremely excited for the start of term and can’t wait to meet you and get started.
Emre Akbil and Dr Youcao Ren
Programme Leaders for MA in Urban Design