Cities are built through intense negotiation, contestation, and collaboration. The culture of architectural production in many parts of the country continues to be collaborative and involves individuals as well as collective groups with specific spatial skills as co-producers of space and key players in city-making. The role of design is difficult to articulate, let alone remunerate or value in such dynamic contexts. As a result, designers often find their place in serving the elite sector of society as this position allows a more comfortable valuing and understanding of service and position. For this reason, the studio was framed around the key question: how and where design engages in this complexity. International discourse of architectural design in the last decade has acknowledged participation as an element of the design process and the role of the designer as the creator of potentialities of co-production of spaces. This studio exposed students to the methods of understanding processes of co-production in an existing built environment, introduced tools to visualize, analyze and communicate these processes for their applicability.
