The Socio-spatial Design of Community and Governance

Sam Jacoby is Professor of Architectural and Urban Design Research and Research Leader of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art. His diverse practice-led research focuses on transdisciplinary design research with public and social impact. He is co-founder and former Director of the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design: Projective Cities at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (2009–2019), and has taught at universities in the UK and Germany. His recent publications include the book Drawing Architecture and the Urban (2016) and the guest co-edited special journal issue ‘Collective Forms in China: A Contemporary Review’ for New Architecture (2018).   Jingru (Cyan) Cheng is a researcher of the Laboratory for Design & Machine Learning and design tutor in the MA Architecture programme at the Royal College of Art. Cheng’s works on Chinese rurality and domesticity (2018) and China’s People’s Commune (2020) are respectively recognised by the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) President’s Awards for Research. Cheng’s design research practice does not dwell on a defined subject matter, but rather meandering through architecture, anthropology and art. The wide-ranging themes include, non-canonical histories and socio-spatial models, diverse ways of cultural knowing and being, aesthetic agency, and modes of co-existence and affinity between human and non-human.