This programme has strong thematic, creative and theoretical directions, but offers scope for participants to develop their own architectural interests and passions. Each year of the programme focuses on one European city. The wider theoretical concerns of the programme are tested and elaborated through intensive periods of field study in the selected city. Each year's study is also guided by an over-arching theme - such as 'island territories'', 'borderlands', 'field+work', 'post socialist city and its material prehistories' and 'spatial dialectics of a global place'. These themes offer a general framework for the theoretical study, the urban fieldwork and design work. The programme has a strong collaborative and inter-disciplinary ethos.

Applicants for Architectural and Urban Design are eligible to apply for the 2010 History of Art/Architecture AHRC Professional Preparation Masters studentship. Please click here for further details.

Please direct all academic queries to the Programme Director, Prof. Stephen Cairns (stephen.cairns@ed.ac.uk)

Please direct all administrative queries to the Programme Secretary, Dr Kirsten Phimister (k.phimister@ed.ac.uk)

Theme and Fieldwork Sites, 2010-11

Each MSc Architectural & Urban Design cycle is oriented around a theme and fieldwork sites relevant to contemporary urbanism as a way of framing the collective aspects of the programme. A new cycle begins this year with a focus on the sites, issues and challenges of urban MARGINALITY. Where the theme provides the imaginative and moral infrastructure to the programme, fieldwork provides the empirical and material ballast. Studies of marginality will be grounded in specified situations in EDINBURGH and CASABLANCA, Morocco. This twin-city focus will enable participants to engage with marginal situations (real sink estates and slum conditions) in each of those cities. This framing will also activate the macro-structural marginality that each of those cities experiences in the context of the global urban network and hierarchy. We invite participants in the programme to undertake a set of theoretical, methodological and fieldbased studies around the theme of urban marginality as animated by Edinburgh and Casablanca.

‘Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine’ (Rick Blaine).

When Humphrey Bogart uttered this famous line in Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca, he anticipated what scholars of globalization were later to formulate as the global urban hierarchy. This project sought to categorize ‘all the towns, in all the world’ according to how integrated and connected they were into what Manuel Castells called the ‘space of flows’. Rick’s Casablanca of 1942 was on the margins of the War and so served as a loosely regulated site that hosted a cosmopolitan cast of characters.

Rick’s Café Américain encapsulated the cosmopolitanism of war-time Casablanca, where American, French, German, Czech, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Russian and other nationals coexisted. Casablanca was portrayed in the film as a shadowy expatriate zone where vagabonds, crooks and assorted thieves, mingled with refugees from Nazi tyranny desperately await exit visas. Casablanca’s geographical position in the North of Africa, bordering Europe, on the Atlantic coast gave it this cosmopolitan and unregulated atmosphere. For scholars of globalization Casablanca remains on the margins of the global urban network. The more integrated into the global flows of capital, information, elites, technology, the higher a city would be ranked. Cities such as New York and London are ranked Alpha++, Tokyo as Alpha+, Bangkok as Alpha-, Los Angeles as Beta+ and so on. Alpha and Beta cities are followed by Gamma, High Sufficiency, and Sufficiency as categories. According to this influential global urban hierarchy, Casablanca and Edinburgh are rated as ‘Gamma’ cities. That is, they are connected into the global urban system but loosely so. Cities such as these are also linked in important ways to their regional and national hinterlands. This positioning on the cusp of the space of flows makes for a powerful framework for research on the contemporary city.

Stephen Cairns

Programme Director, MSc AUD