Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq, Founders of Epidemic Urbanism Initiative, speak to Ashraf M. Salama.

September 11, 2020

Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq, Founders of Epidemic Urbanism Initiative, speak to Ashraf M. Salama.

Architectural Education in the Post-COVID Era: Envisioning New Opportunities and Implications New York, Baltimore, Glasgow, 11 September 2020.

This talk, by Professor Ashraf M. Salama, is part of the Epidemic Urbanism Initiative, which Drs. Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq founded in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

This presentation, by Professor Ashraf M. Salama, is part of the Epidemic Urbanism Initiative, which Drs. Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq founded in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Our goal with this initiative is to explore how the outbreak of, response to, and lasting impact of epidemic illnesses help us understand urban environments and communities in the past as well as in today’s COVID era. One of the outcomes we hope to provoke with this Epidemic Urbanism Initiative is the fundamental rethinking of architectural scholarship, education, and practice in response to epidemic illnesses.

Thinking about architectural education in particular, we recognize the need to bring new questions, topics, and lenses to seminars and studios alike in order to understand the complex relationship between cities and epidemic illness; advocate the necessity of forging new, global, interdisciplinary collaborations in service of these questions; and seek novel, socially just interventions to better prevent and respond to urban epidemics.

In this presentation, Dr. Ashraf Salama (University of Strathclyde) contextualizes the recent and sudden shift of architectural education to online formats in broader, decades-long changes observed by William Mitchell and Manuel Castells; reflects on the unique challenges of this shift to architectural pedagogy, studio culture, and student motivation and community-building; highlights specific practices that resulted in a largely successful (if stressful and imperfect) shift to online education; and advocates the need to embrace and identify opportunities opened up for and by architectural education in a post-COVID era that will almost certainly be characterized by constant change and flux. Ultimately, Dr. Salama demonstrates how the shift to online education and the current global COVID-19 pandemic pose important opportunities for re-examining pedagogy and curricula, embracing transdisciplinary collaboration and action, and emphasizing person-environment relationships in design pedagogy and practice.

Dr. Salama is Professor of Architecture and director of research and of the cluster of architecture and urbanism in the global south, in the Department of Architecture, at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, United Kingdom. He has led three schools of architecture in Egypt, Qatar, and the United Kingdom, two of which he has founded. His work and research have focused on curriculum development and design studio teaching practices, transformative and critical pedagogy, and sustainable architectural and urban design, with a strong emphasis on the impact of socio-cultural factors on shaping the built environment. Having authored and co-edited 14 books and published over 170 articles and chapters in the international refereed press, he is the Chief Editor of ArchNet-International Journal of Architectural Research and co-Chief Editor of Open House International. Professor Salama is the recipient of the 2017 UIA Jean Tschumi Prize for Excellence in Architectural Education and Criticism.

Michael Crosbie interviews Ashraf Salama on possible outcomes in a post-coronavirus world.

How Might the COVID-19 Change Architecture and Urban Design? Ashraf M. Salama, a professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland, and the director of the Cluster for Research in Architecture and Urbanism of Cities in the Global South, has been following how these disciplines might be changing. He’s recently written a publicly peer-reviewed paper on some of his findings: “Coronavirus Questions That Will Not Go Away: Interrogating Urban and Socio-Spatial Implications of COVID-19 Measures.” I sat down with Salama to discuss some of the issues he raises, and what their implications might be for the built environment in the future (7 May 2020) (Feature image taken from CommonEdge by Andy Yueng, as part of his “Urban Density” drone series).