In collaboration with community groups, LB of Southwark, with Bartlett School of Planning and geographers at LSE, AAD Cities has been working to reveal local economies in Southwark.
Since 2015, AAD Cities has been involved in influencing urban policy-making in the London Borough of Southwark through research and proposition. We have worked with community and activist groups including the Peckham Weeklies, the Southwark Planning Network, the Southwark Law Centre and the Livesey Exchange (What if Projects). AAD Cities have been involved in many Southwark-based events including two exhibitions of our audit findings alongside speculative student projects; a hustings focussed on Planning and Development issues; and two participatory workshops as part of the London Festival of Architecture, in collaboration with community groups called the Action OKR workshops in 2018 and 2019. We have undertaken three large scale social and economic audits of non-residential building types, uses, land and occupation in the Southwark, focusing at first on the Old Kent Road Opportunity Area and latterly on the whole borough. These audits have also underpinned student-led research by design projects undertaken by MA Architecture, Cities and Urbanism and MArch Architecture (RIBA 2) Cities Unit students. Collaborating on occasion with staff and students at The Bartlett School of Planning at UCL and LSE Department of Geography and Environment, audits of non-residential uses in the Old Kent Road Opportunity Area were carried out in 2015 and 2017.
