Course summary

MA Cities explores creative approaches to city-making. 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 will challenge the conventions of urban development, regeneration, and place-making and provide a platform for generating and implementing new forms of civic practice. MA Cities will confront the pressing social, ethical and environmental concerns of the city and explore the value and agency of alternative practices from around the world. In doing so, it will ask you to navigate complex and dynamic scenarios using creativity and originality to address 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, using London as a test bed. You 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 your studies are informed by leading international perspectives and expertise in creative city-making. On this course, you will engage with theoretical and practice-orientated approaches, political and ethical positions and a range of scales and methods of city-making. You 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 you to develop an individual position, agenda and methodology, to inform your own future urban practice.