Who is the city for?

The next generation of city makers will need to find new ways of working if we are to build a more equal society and mitigate climate change.

Urban regeneration needs to take account of all voices, not just some. The FLUX Atelier sets how those voices might be discovered, heard and included when we transform cities. The starting point is to embrace the ‘not knowing’, and then to stay with it. Collaborations between people and between people place and planet need time to unfold.

Students in the FLUX atelier investigate the questions that the developers do not yet have answers for, with a brief to imagine: THE FUTURE OF THE FUTURE for Manchester City Centre.

Taking the Mayfield Regeneration area as their site of study, students were challenged to connect the wider city around it to the planned development. The project was a live collaboration between FLUX, property developers, academics, and the city and its residents.

Students challenged the precepts of what it is to be an architect, developed personalised and innovative praxis, and ultimately produced new paradigms of master planning.