Student City
Jan Frohburg (University of Limerick)
Abstract
The Student City project is a case study in undergraduate architecture education in the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick (SAUL). By trying to open ways of engaging with a locale it reaches beyond a technical or purely formalist design approach. The presentation will outline SAUL’s commitment to the local community and its involvement in the Limerick Regeneration process. It will focus on Student City, a third-year design project, introduce its methodology, follow the students’ progress and relay their finalised proposals. The project promotes a utopian view and, at the same time, a realistic model for civic engagement.
SAUL designs with the city in mind
Firmly committed not only to its location but also to the local community, SAUL actively participates and informs the discussion of the Limerick Regeneration process and influences city development strategies. Limerick may not be readily identified as a student city – a perception we attempt to change. Students along with artists have been termed ‘storm troopers of gentrification’ and they have pioneered the sustained development in other inner-city areas. Limerick’s Milk Market area shares qualities that suggest redevelopment: it is marginalised but central and well served by public transport, neglected but also active and interesting. As yet another testing ground for SAUL involvement with Limerick we ask: What if 500 students would live in that area?
Market-driven development has come to a standstill
Against a darkening backdrop of an economic downturn we come to question the driving forces in urban development. As with any academic institution, for UL to develop a distinctly urban perspective must be understood not as a “moral obligation” to step in where private investment has failed, but as a – quite opportunistic – chance to re-conceptualise third-level teaching. In the same way as the university’s presence, through its students, will impact on the city, engagement with the city will impact upon the university, upon its teaching practices, research ideas and community interactions.
Propose scenarios of change
Third-year design studio empowers students to conceive a thesis-centred project and foster self-directed investigation. In responding to a series of open-ended challenges, each of 28 third-year students identifies and addresses positive qualities and pressing issues within the Milk Market area. In this context small intervention may become a catalyst of change in this transition neighbourhood within Limerick. To identify such ‘transformer sites’ and to deploy them as both ‘detonator and engine’ is at the centre of our concern. This process engages not only UL faculty in architecture and in other disciplines but also other third-level institutions, as well as local people from all walks of life.
Architectural proposals contribute to a local and national discourse
In understanding the political and poetic dimensions of architecture, proposed interventions may act as platform or incubator, as factory or ivory tower. In the process, we come to understand utopian thought as experiment and interpretation, as cognitive method of critique and anticipatory design. In design studio we adopt a contemporary mode of knowledge production that is context-driven, problem-focused, interdisciplinary, and is even characterised as “tinged with political commitment”. Ireland’s ongoing transition to a knowledge-based economy provides the setting for SAUL’s design studio projects. As this process of national transformation has implications beyond architecture education, design studio teaching in general, and Student City in particular, may be understood as models for civic and academic engagement alike.
