In Episode 21, Season 2 of A is for Architecture I spoke with Maurice Mitchell and Bo Tang, respectively Professor and Reader of/ in Architecture, within the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, and together directors of Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources [A R C S R], an ‘an emergent, studio based, teaching and research area within the practice and academic discipline of architecture’. I got to hear about their 2017 book, Loose Fit City: The Contribution of Bottom-Up Architecture to Urban Design and Planning, published by Routledge, which is ‘about the ways in which city residents can learn through making to engage with the dynamic process of creating their own city. It looks at the nature and processes involved in loosely fitting together’.

The idea of loose in the sense of [a] loose fit city, Bo suggests in our conversation, may be defined as ‘bringing together different intentions, or allowing them to come together in a way that more than one party is able to contribute to the conversation, to the decision making process, to have a voice across scale, across time to try and come to an understanding of shared matters of concern that may then lead to a civic assembly’.

As before, lovely guests, a wonderful, inspiring book and proper, easy conversation. Listen, share, want, get.

You can get Loose Fit City off the Routledge website here but also elsewhere online. Bo can be found on the London Met website here, and Maurice here. Bo is here on Twitter, and here on LinkedIn. There's a boss video of Maurice giving an online lecture for the Architecture Foundation on Laurie Baker and Balkrishna Doshi here.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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