Tutors: Socrates Stratis, Charis Nika

​2023-24​

In recent years, the Urban Design Studio has been exploring the role of architecture, as an urban practice, in supporting a reunified Cyprus. More specifically, the Studio has been formulating alternative approaches to support the urban commons of Cypriot cities, by exploring and proposing modes for coexistence and exchange in contested cities, such as Nicosia, Famagusta and the «Meridian City» (stretching between Larnaca and Kyrenia). This year, the Urban Design Studio explores the «Invisible Nicosia» through the constitution of the Commons of the Kotsirkas River, a small and relatively unknown river that crosses the city of Nicosia from west to east, cutting through the backyards of houses and passing through the Buffer Zone. The Studio explores the potentials of transformation and re-naturalisation of a river that was turned into a rainwater infrastructure, canalised, and buried over the years in the 1980s. It investigates design strategies that allow the river to participate actively in urban ecologies that respond to the climate crisis and the lack of social infrastructures at the neighbourhood scale. How could spatial practices of care in architecture support the constitution of the Commons of the Kotsirkas river? And how could such practices highlight and claim the participation of Kotsirkas as an active agent in the shaping of the city, instead of a well hidden underground canal? The question posed by the Urban Design Studio is, therefore, whether the Kotsirkas river can play an active role in the co production of the commons in a reunited Nicosia, particularly in the current context of climate crisis. The students are invited to explore the multiple aspects of the «invisible» and to study how Urban Design, through critical mapping, and design can support the Commons of Kotsirkas river.