Cities as the engines of the global economy consume a disproportionate 70% of global resources and result in more than 75% of global emissions. However, cities where more than 55% of the global population reside occupy less than 3% of the landmass. Therefore, cities need to be sustainable, liveable, and attractive for global sustainability. The patterns of consumption, pollution, social, environmental, and economic injustices make many cities unliveable and unsustainable.

Post-industrial models of urban development consider cities to be static. However, cities are one of the most complex systems that we have ever created; consisting of social, environmental, economic, intuitional, and spatial sub-systems. These subsystems manifest themselves in the spatial system of a city constantly transforming each other.

Liveable Urbanism studio unit explores these complex relationships in the cities, especially in the global south where the cities are growing rapidly and their sustainable development is detrimental to global sustainability. In 2021-22 Liveable Urbanism was based in Kochi, a coastal city of 0.67m population in the southern Indian state of Kerala, to develop a comprehensive vision for a sustainable, re-silient, and liveable future for Kochi.
Studio encouraged students to develop a GROUNDING in theory and approach to the liveable cities and tools for modelling cities. This then followed onto an intense RESEARCH that included a field trip to Kochi to develop personal agenda. Students developed their first set of ACTIONS in the form of urban strategies to achieve their individual agenda which in turn informed their RE-ACTION with an urban catalyst project.