Post-conflict reconstruction in Yemen has largely focused on rapid housing provision and infrastructural repair, often relying on standardized concrete construction methods that overlook cultural identity, climatic performance, and long-term social sustainability. This project investigates how vernacular architectural principles can be reinterpreted and integrated into contemporary reconstruction processes to create resilient, culturally sensitive, and socially meaningful environments. Through the combined use of theoretical frameworks (such as critical regionalism, resilience, and place attachment theory) and case study analysis of reconstruction efforts in Beirut and Aleppo, the research establishes a foundation for a hybrid design approach that balances tradition with innovation.

The design component of the project translates these findings into a proposal for a girls’ primary school in Sana’a, Yemen. The school is positioned as a form of social infrastructure that extends beyond its educational function, acting as a catalyst for community recovery, economic participation, and collective identity rebuilding. The project responds to Yemen’s educational crisis by creating a safe, accessible, and adaptable learning environment that supports both formal education and informal social interaction.

Architecturally, the project explores the spatial and material dialogue between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Vernacular elements such as courtyards, layered thresholds, climate-responsive openings, and rammed earth construction are combined with modern structural systems, modular timber construction, and flexible programmatic layouts. This hybrid strategy allows the building to maintain cultural continuity while accommodating future growth, climatic resilience, and evolving educational needs.

Special emphasis is placed on “in-between” spaces (shaded circulation paths, courtyards, and outdoor learning areas) which are treated as primary learning environments rather than residual spaces. These transitional zones foster social interaction, collective ownership, and experiential learning, reinforcing the school’s role as a community anchor.

Ultimately, this project demonstrates how post-conflict reconstruction can move beyond purely technical or economic recovery toward a more holistic approach that integrates social, cultural, and environmental values. By positioning architecture as both a spatial and societal mediator, the project proposes a replicable model for educational infrastructure that supports long-term resilience and identity-driven urban regeneration in Sana’a and similar post-conflict contexts.

This work is a call for attunement and sensibilization. There cannot be attunement and an enhanced sensibility without an investment of time, energy, and attention. As a response against scientifization, binary distinctions and taxonomies of othering that dominate and reinforce colonial impositions, this research insists on an engagement with complexity, disorder and contamination, understanding space and time as active relational fields that are non-homogenous but dependant on a point of view and a problematic field, and thereby challenging binary dialectics that rely on simple yes or no answers, taxonomies and an essential objectiveness.
Design is a field of operations that concern themselves with the manipulation of limits and constraints. To understand the limit as the manner of relating is to understand it as a methodology. How to relate organism and environment is the gist of technology and design; then the question of the limit becomes, by definition, the question of the method. Rather than a typological approach, this research adopts a topological one, challenging stable typologies such as the prison, the dwelling, the hospital and the laboratory through their iterative modulations across time.
A methodology is not preexisting to the research nor this research output; instead, I allowed myself to switch methodologies, and I encouraged contamination, engaging in a process of complexity that I now understand as not only responding to my motivating concerns but also as an approach to design. I sought to embed myself in complexity as much as possible, taking the experiment as the technique and unpacking these device-machines of measurement to question them as the method for the understanding of our world.
The design project develops as a genealogical design exercise, asking myself what could have happened instead of what did, recognising virtual memory as affectual and multivergencies as compossible and worlding. Set within the Argentinian context, conditions of extreme scarcity are understood not as lack but as productive, collectivising and creative forces, welcoming contingent ideas and problem-creative solutions.
A contaminated methodology, in research and design, is thus not a metaphor but an actual letting go of the obsession with procedure and control to allow the difference to creep in, and, with it, allow new and fascinating encounters.

he world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.” ~ Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

We live in a globalized world shaken by local conflicts. The digital space that has emerged through technological advancements enables the free flow of information across the globe. As a result, war has become more difficult than ever to conceive as a spatially finite phenomenon (Abujidi, 2014, p. 12). Regional conflicts stem from global political and economic dynamics, meaning that we all, citizens of democracies, bear responsibility and are, in some way, involved. However, rather than being incentivized to act, Western citizens have been transformed into mere spectators of these events. The media inundates us with photos, videos, reports, and stories from war-affected regions, providing ample information. Yet, it remains unclear how - or even if- we are truly affected. Meanwhile, due to hyper-exposure to information, the observer loses interest in the issue (Fuller and Weizman, 2021, p.120). We have the potential, but not the motivation to intervene. Through my graduation project, I want to challenge our preconceptions regarding political crises and our roles as citizens in them. I aim to create a space that allows people to empathize with victims of warfare and serves as a backdrop for discussions and debates among individuals with different beliefs and backgrounds. I believe that through education, empathy, and willingness, people have the potential to civicize their everyday lives and, together, discover how to bring about change.

This graduation project investigates how architecture can function as a medium for social activation, capable of communicating complex societal issues in a way that resonates emotionally and encourages individual action. While contemporary architectural practice often uses a story to explain the design, this research shifts the approach to a design to explain the story, as it argues that architecture possesses a largely underused communicative potential. Societal challenges, such as climate change, are frequently communicated through abstract data and statistics, which tend to overwhelm people rather than motivate them. As a result, there is a growing need for alternative forms of communication that translate factual knowledge into meaningful, memorable experiences.

The research phase explores how architectural space can be designed to convey narratives that move beyond symbolism and instead engage visitors through experience. Drawing from three theoretical fields, narrative psychology, experience design, and narrative architecture, the study identifies 5 key qualities that support emotional engagement, memory formation, and behavioural reflection. An analysis of 24 architectural and non-architectural case studies results in the identification of a practical toolbox with insights into design tools intended to guide message-driven architectural design.

In the second half of the graduation project, this theoretical framework is tested through a research-by-design approach. The design ‘Dripping Data’ outcome is a travelling pavilion that communicates the societal issue of Dark Data: the invisible environmental impact of digital data storage. The pavilion addresses the paradox of increasing efficiency leading to increased consumption and highlights the hidden energy and water demands of data centres. Structured according to the three-act structure, introduction, confrontation, and resolution, the pavilion guides visitors through a carefully choreographed spatial journey. Each space applies specific design tools from the research framework, such as controlled sequencing, interaction, and moments of reflection, to translate abstract information into embodied experience.

The pavilion is designed as a floating, demountable structure situated on a push barge, allowing it to spread the message by travelling between cities while remaining physically connected to water, a key narrative element in the project. Sustainability, adaptability, and material responsibility are integral to the design, aligning with the project’s message. Water functions both as a sensory medium and as a narrative actor, gradually shifting from background presence to the central character.

By integrating theory, analysis, and design, this graduation project demonstrates how architecture can move beyond passive representation and become an active medium for communication and reflection. The project proposes a transferable design framework that can be applied to other societal topics, positioning architecture as a powerful tool for raising awareness, encouraging dialogue, and inspiring individual responsibility.

This project explores how our architectural practice can be reimagined through an ecofeminist lens. In doing so, it addresses the global climate crisis by confronting it at its core: humanity’s broken relationship with ‘nature’.

The project is rooted in an understanding of spatial design as a world-making practice, one that not only shapes material reality but also produces meaning through its storytelling capacities. It questions and critiques contemporary architectural practice, which is deeply rooted in colonial and capitalist systems, and counters this with a practice centred on connection rather than divide.

Through a method of Radical Spatial Imagination, complex theoretical and philosophical notions are translated into spatial manifestations. This process resulted in 18 insights which embody the ecofeminist lens that was developed throughout the research. It is through this lens, represented by these insights, that the design project unfolds.

The projects continues in a speculative reimagination of Amsterdam Central station. Here the station is reimagined not just as a multispecies landscape or a project on ecological continuity but as a place that fundamentally questions and reshapes our relationship with our environment.

Amsterdam Central station is transformed from a sterile, smooth and efficient transportation hub into a messy place of interconnected entanglements. Harsh, dry, dead and TL-lighted spaces are replaced with leaky wet and sun-kissed area’s full of life. By breaking boundaries and facilitating more than human agency it disrupts tempo and forces human actors to let go of control.

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the role and relevance that architecture has (and can have) in facilitating the spatial production of festival spaces. It aims to demonstrate that festival spaces serve as ideal locations for experimenting with spatial relationships and architecture itself – through its expression and collective appropriation -which can have transformative effects on spaces of the everyday, guided by the disruptive nature of the festival.

The intention is to construct a designbrief for a permanent festival terrain in which the dialogue between people, place, society, and time can be constantly re-imagined through its fluid architecture—offering fertile ground for discussion on architecture’s role in the facilitation of festival spaces, how they inform the design, use, andorganisation of everyday spaces, and how they stimulate collective design processes.Ultimately, this project seeks
to enact architecture as a facilitator of dialogue, a medium for questioning and reshaping spatial relationships through the lens of festival spaces.

The thesis investigates the role of architectural practice in engaging with the systemic fragility and uncertain futures of the Cadore region in the Italian Alps. Initially guided by the question of architecture’s agency in the Alpine context, the research gradually evolved into a deeper interrogation: does the territory require architectural intervention at all? Through a multi-scalar and interdisciplinary methodology, The Cadore region is framed as a complex palimpsest - where ecological, infrastructural, and symbolic forces intersect and co-produce the landscape. Architecture is not positioned as a solution, but as a medium of observation, representation, and care. Central to this approach is the reactivation of the Ex-Cementificio Marchino, a former cement factory in Castellavazzo that once played a pivotal role in transforming the Alpine landscape into a resource-extraction machine during the era of the Great Acceleration. The factory’s current state as an industrial ruin offers a critical lens through which to examine the legacies of extraction and territorial violence, while also opening spatial and conceptual opportunities to reframe architecture’s role in a post-industrial Alpine context.

The design engages with the complexities of brownfield reuse in the mountainous landscape, reinterpreting the former cement factory not as a static object, but as a dynamic form in transformation. The factory, once instrumental in supplying materials for hydroelectric infrastructures, has been reimagined as a "landscape" from which to extract meaning and material rather than mere resources. The project is realised through a phased strategy of dismantling, re-scaling and recomposition. This process serves to reduce the alien monumentality of the industrial artefact, thereby initiating a process of contextual digestion. This process involves the demolition of parts of the structure and the reappropriation of their debris. Consequently, the factory becomes the quarry. The final phase of the transformation process involves the introduction of new architectural elements, constructed using the processed remnants of the original building. These interventions are designed to support a new programme, which involves the establishment of a basecamp for landscape observation, environmental monitoring, and community engagement. The site functions as both civic infrastructure and territorial lens, and is embedded within a broader network of observation points across the Caodre region.
The reconfigured ruin, articulated along a path that connects it to a newly designed inhabited wall, now acts as a spatial and symbolic filter between the former machine and its surrounding landscape. Through this mediation process, the site's context is progressively restored, healing the scars left by past extraction regimes and reorienting it towards novel perspectives and connections with the site itself.

For over 5 years I have shared my home with 30 others, continuing an ongoing story since the early 1970s, when the then vacant hospital of Delft (Bethel, Bagijnhof) was squatted by a group of students. Since then, more than 270 people have passed through this community, leaving their traces in over 5500 photographs, notes, postcards, birthday banners and house meeting minutes (etc.) found in a basement archive that preserved over 50 years of stories of human presence. These fragments reveal not just a history of habitation, but the gradual making of a community. A community not formed through design, but through countless human interactions.

Our home became the inspiration for a new type of architectural research. Not about finding specific solutions or creating perfect plans, but about following fragments, being guided by stories, and learning all the hidden ways through which space accumulates meaning.
But what allows a place so (technically) unsuitable, a vacant, decrepit hospital with all its shortcomings, to function so successfully for this community?

In a building never intended for living, leaking roofs, awkward staircases, and narrow hallways turned out to be “effectively inefficient”: imperfections that unintendedly triggered social interactions. What at first glance loos like architectural obstacles instead brought people closer together, turning friction into connection. These so-called shortcomings became subtle design forces, guiding movements, encounters, and everyday rituals. It suggests that what architects are trained to “correct” or “resolve” can be the very thing that gives space its social intelligence.

Therefore this project doesn’t aim to re-design but to re-read. Here, seemingly inefficient architectural details are not interpreted as “flawed” technical junctions but as successful social ones. Through a non-linear, foldable storybook/map the building’s human and architectural “voices” unfold through scale and interconnect in all directions without a set beginning or end. This way, each fragment stands on its own, but (through folding out) always in relation to the bigger whole. Not as a fixed format or static object but, like the building itself, as a layered and living network of human stories.

Understanding space through social life expands the boundaries of what architectural education considers valuable and opens new ways of seeing, practicing, and representing architecture.

‘Queer’ can be both an adjective and a verb: beyond identity, it is a force in motion dismantling systems of exclusion and challenging normativity. This thesis investigates how the queering of the architectural process can transform it from a site of oppression into one of empowerment. This is applied in the context of Istanbul, where urban renewal often serves as a tool of erasure, pushing marginalized communities to the edges of the city.

Accordingly, the project proposes an architecture that listens, brings together and resists fixity. Collaboration is engrained all throughout the project; during research, knowledge is not extracted from ‘subjects’ but constructed collectively: a process that’s messy, embodied and always in flux. By breaking down traditional research and design hierarchies, it shifts authority away from the architect and toward shared authorship, embracing transdisciplinarity and intersectionality as vital conditions, centralizing care and hospitality.

This approach unfolds through shared drawings, communal dinner nights, collective dreams and finally, a 1:1 scale spatial exploration in a queer nightclub in Istanbul. A space scavenged, assembled and transformed through improvisation and shared labor. The storyline reveals key anchor points for queering the architectural process: to value process over product, to embrace temporality, to reintroduce craft - through working hands-on, playfulness and solutions beyond cognition are invited. Very much an unfinished product, this is an inquiry of gathering and holding space, an act of resistance and care - architecture seen as part of a larger celebration.

This thesis explores the creation of an architectural "space of inspiration" aimed at revitalizing Dutch architecture and fostering novel perspectives. The research posits that a collaborative environment, facilitating knowledge sharing, experimental design, and public exhibition, can significantly influence architectural practice. The core design objective was to develop an inspiring architectural intervention that inherently integrates principles of circularity and adaptability.

The M4H district, selected for its future developments and material availability, serves as the project's site. The proposed design envisions a dynamic park landscape, featuring a central pavilion and a series of smaller, adaptable pavilions. This evolving park occupies vacant redevelopment plots, utilizing phytoremediation for soil decontamination, and gradually creating new construction ground. During this interim, architectural practices are invited to use the park as an experimentation ground, constructing small, publicly accessible pavilions from reclaimed materials. The existing Ferro factory is repurposed as a "material pavilion" for storage, manufacturing, and assembly, while the adjacent Ferro dome is transformed into flexible office and exhibition spaces for architectural firms. Concluding the design's vision, a biennial event will regularly showcase innovative projects to a global audience, fostering ongoing inspiration within the architectural community.

Mallorca, a major tourist destination in the Mediterranean, faces a growing crisis of water overconsumption, exacerbated by seasonal tourism, urban development, and unsustainable resource management. This graduation project investigates the island’s water scarcity through environmental, cultural, and infrastructural lenses, identifying the disconnect between consumption and natural limits. In response, the project proposes a bathhouse,a space that reconnects users with water as a precious, experiential resource, while also capturing and reusing rainwater.
During the heavy winter rains, water is collected and stored for use in the bathhouse. In the dry summer months, when water cuts are increasingly common in the village, only the communal showers remain in use, reviving a shared water system rooted in collective responsibility. The rest of the bathhouse transitions into a dry space for events and the drying of herbs. This project reintegrates a caretaker into the site and embraces the storytelling potential of water and enchanting infrastructures, allowing new narratives of care, resilience, and community to unfold.

Europe needs to redefine the way architecture is being built, and also, more importantly, renovated. That is the case also for Poland, with a large stock of degraded housing.
This research explores the potential of bio-based materials and strategies in retrofitting Polish inter-war masonry tenement housing, focusing on circularity while addressing technical requirements, user needs and maintaining historical integrity. Through literature review, market research, cataloguing, and interviews with professionals, the study identifies key challenges in energy efficiency, moisture management, and user satisfaction, proposing bio-based materials such as wood, hemp, flax, wood fibre, straw and many others as effective solutions.
The design focuses on one of the buildings along Grochowska street in Warsaw, with an intention that it could be easily applied to other bildings of the same typology, numerous in the capital. A timber-based structure system is proposed in key interventions to the building, adding new usable space for the residents along with energy retrofitting. Custom timber joinery was developed for that purpose, dawing inspiration from japanese and polsh craftmenship.
The findings of the research emphasize the importance of navigating technical requirements with user preferences, which include affordability, comfort, and adaptability. By addressing these factors, bio-based solutions offer significant advantages in reducing environmental impact of the refurbishment action while enhancing living conditions. To bridge the gap between innovative practices and real-world application, the study also develops a guidebook and materials catalogue, providing accessible knowledge base about biobased renovation strategies to homeowners, designers, and policymakers.
This work contributes to renewable building practices by demonstrating how bio-based strategies can meet both ecological and practical demands, offering a path toward decarbonizing and futureproofing Poland’s aging housing stock.

The Dutch population is growing, and cities are becoming more dense every year. Therefore, we have to share the minimal space we have. Collaborative housing, defined as private dwellings supported by shared facilities and responsibilities, could be a favourable housing type for inhabitants to have a comfortable home within the minimal amount of space of the dense city, since sharing enables a sustainable use of this space. Currently, there is a focus on privacy in housing design. For a shift to collaborative housing design there is a need for a collective perspective on the sense of home. Therefore, the research question of this study is: how does sharing space influence the sense of home for residents in collaborative housing in the Netherlands? The hypothesis is that sharing space has a positive effect on the sense of home for residents in collaborative housing projects.
This case study analysis consists of in-depth interviews in two collaborative housing projects and spatial analysis of four collaborative housing projects in the Netherlands. Through this, the perception of home amongst residents that live in collaborative housing is studied. The case study analysis shows that specific shared spatial features positively influence the sense of home in shared housing projects. Most of these features are situated in the transitional zones between the public and private space. The sense of home in collaborative housing can only be obtained in the presence of a private space. The conclusion of this study is that residents in collaborative housing include shared features within their sense of home. This study adds to the body of knowledge of collaborative housing design. This helps to further implement collaborative housing in the Dutch housing stock. Further research should elaborate on the specific effect of shared spatial features in transitional zones in collaborative housing projects.

This thesis investigates the management and transformation of Christian architectural heritage, with a particular focus on Catholic churches. It explores the dynamics of friction and propulsion that shape this process, analyzing their implications in contemporary society and potential future trajectories. Anchored in the case study of the former Church of Santa Rita da Cascia in Campitelli, located in Rome’s Rione Sant’Angelo, the research offers context-specific reflections intended to stimulate broader discourse on the fate of disused churches across Europe.

Structured around guiding research questions, the thesis is divided into three main sections. The first examines the historical and cultural roles of Catholic churches, emphasizing their function as urban landmarks and spaces of collective identity. The second part addresses the regulatory landscape in Italy, shaped by its cultural and institutional proximity to the Vatican, and contrasts it with the more pragmatic Dutch approach to church reuse. This comparative analysis highlights the tensions between safeguarding symbolic religious value and adapting buildings to contemporary needs.

The final section synthesizes the findings to propose strategies for reimagining Catholic churches in ways that preserve their historical and architectural identity while enabling new, socially relevant functions. Through the lens of the Santa Rita da Cascia case study, the thesis proposes a critical yet constructive perspective on transforming sacred heritage into meaningful assets for modern communities.

In a world full of consumerism, climate change, and capitalism, we face a crisis in how we relate to the world around us. Indigenous values offer a new way forward. This graduation project responds to the task laid out for practitioners to include Indigenous values in the practice. It does so by turning to the values of the Sámi people, the Indigenous people of the North and explores how this can inform architecture.
Because of my unfamiliarity with Sámi practices and beliefs at the start of this project, I looked for an alternative to the Eurocentric design frameworks, which often overlook alternative narratives or oversimplify representations. To include these different stories, there was a need to embrace the unfamiliar and employ this knowledge to design a world in which many worlds fit. This led me to the overarching question: How to make space for the Other? By engaging in interdisciplinary literature analysis and design-for-values frameworks, I gathered tools to make values tangible and translate them into architecture. Through this methodology, I intended to be very attuned to Sámi values and make inexplicit steps of the design process very explicit.
These ideas are grounded in the urban context of Tromsø, Norway—a city with limited visible Sámi representation outside of its touristic identity. Through four site-specific interventions, the Fish-Leather House, the Kitchen, the Weaving House, and the Summer Workshop and its Sheds, this project is a creative collection of practical places and relations, a set of activity spaces. They are not fixed but shaped by the times and contexts in which people engage with them, allowing for a space to find community, speak the language, transfer practical knowledge and reclaim Sámi spaces. Each space embodies core Sámi values: craftsmanship, community, care, and indigenuity.
This project is a continuous exploration of how to engage with the people you are designing for and a reflexive positioning on the role of the architect. The insights gained throughout this process not only informed my design outcomes but also encouraged a deeper understanding of how values shape practices. It emphasises that how we work is just as important as the outcome.

This research explores how architectural interventions can foster urban resilience in post-disaster contexts, focusing on the Uzun Çarşı in Antakya after the 2023 Türkiye earthquake. Through fieldwork, discourse analysis, and ethnographic methods, the study examines how materiality, collective memory, and community agency drive recovery processes. Uzun Çarşı, despite severe destruction, demonstrated resilience through community-led spatial adaptation and the reactivation of everyday practices. The study proposes a community-driven reconstruction of a spice market, utilizing rubble as memory anchors and emphasizing participatory building processes. Rather than restoring a pre-disaster state, the design embraces transformation and continuity, highlighting resilience as an ongoing, dynamic process rooted in social, material, and spatial relations.

Urban environments offer excellent qualities for queer life: simultaneously allowing to acknowledge diversity and to find common ground. It is where a desire for difference can actively challenge the fear of the unknown. This city-based potential is decreasing due to urban optimisation practices, which can be understood as the (re)production of orientations that narrow the 'corridors of spatial possibilities'. In some case studies, the process of continuously creating an orientation could even be considered a form of 'smooth violence'. As a counter, this project offers an explorative inquiry of developing a design philosophy rooted in disorientation.

Through understanding disorientation not only as an emotional mode, but as a concept that spans phenomenology, philosophy and spatial theory, several situated interventions imagine alternative ways of use, design and projection within the context of the Parisian Historical Axis. They show how spatial disorientation (as a design approach) could serve to expose imposed systems, to question inequitable dynamics and to create openings for other ways of living together. Ultimately, it calls for a reconsideration of the position of architecture and the role of the practitioner in scripting and guiding openings in dialogues between orientation, disorientation and re-orientation. In doing so, we could find other urban directions that should be supported by our architectural practices through open-mindedness, care and allowance: to embrace the unexpected turn, to value other interpretations and to make space for difficulties beyond, and against, normativity.

Situated in Nicosia, Cyprus, a city long marked by division, the project focuses on the obsolete sites scattered throughout its historic center and the reclamation of their decayed structures. Abandoned after the city's division and often hidden behind walls, these remnants continue to fragment both the city and its communities. The project asks: how can reclaiming and reusing the city's deteriorating fabric become a catalyst for cooperation across Nicosia's communities?

At its core, the project proposes the creation of a reclaimed material warehouse, a material testing workshop, a city archive and library, all situated on one of Nicosia's obsolete sites. Together, these spaces form a hub for reintroducing decayed materials into the city's material cycle, fostering vernacular practices of labour, care and collective engagement that reconnect people to their surroundings and to one another.

The building grows in phases, mirroring the process of material reclamation. Gardens and courtyards serve as connective elements, weaving the building's phases together and linking the formerly obsolete site to its surroundings. Composed of reused urban fragments, these courtyards mediate between antiquity and the present and ground people in the city's material history.

Storytelling guides both design and research to breath life into the forgotten fragments of the city. Models, drawings and writings are used to reconstruct the stories embedded in them and imagine the stories they could tell. In doing so, the project reimagines Nicosia's future through its ruins, and it invites its communities to acknowledge their shared past and imagine a shared future.

The City of London, situated in the very heart of the capital, serves as the financial centre of the United Kingdom. Informally referred to as the City or the Square Mile, it maintains a distinct identity that sets it apart from its immediate surroundings. As outsiders, our understanding of the City of London remains shrouded in mystery and myth, entwined with an image that has been, whether deliberately or inadvertently, constructed by the place itself, its character, its people and its pursuits.

The project is situated within the context of the Square Mile, building upon the City of London Corporation’s plan to enhance its public realm and become more inclusive. The work established a perspective on what an accessible layer of architecture could entail in the City. It emphasised the importance of unconventional spaces within the Square Mile, alleyways, rooftops or other, and recognising their potential value. Within this project the alleys and roofs proved essential for integrating the new proposed interventions at a chosen site, addressing issues of both inaccessibility and privateness on the horizontal and vertical plane. Passageways were transformed into entrances, while rooftops provided the largest areas of open space suitable for development. The new structures form a gradient of public spaces that mark the beginning of a new public realm.

Although the work does not extend beyond the boundaries of the City of London, it is worth asking a fundamental question; what truly defines the essence of an urban environment? There is only one City of London, yet its distinctly neoliberal character is increasingly found in other urban places around the world. In these places, what was once public space is becoming private and inaccessible. Within a time when urban living and its spatial qualities have become more of a privilege than a right, it remains up to the architect, positioned between competing social, political and economic forces, to mediate their impact on the city.