The Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR) is an emergent, studio based, teaching and research area within the practice and academic discipline of architecture. It examines and extends knowledge of the physical and cultural influences on the built environment, focusing on situations where resources are scarce and where both culture and technology are in a state of rapid change. ARCSR aims to explore how the urban landscape is inhabited, made and remade through personal and collective acts, events, memories and experiences; attempting to cut through the surface to expose the undercurrent of silent issues that constitute the everyday.

Students are encouraged to work outwards from the observed fragment of lived experience. Study is by speculative studio project and has generated a small number of live projects including the construction of 3 small schools and a water and sanitation project.

​

Research, speculative design work and reflective practice are carried out with optimism, in the hope and expectation that the creative interplay between the energy of the students and the residents’ ongoing act of dwelling will generate a valuable and meaningful architectural discourse around engagement with the opportunities and responsibilities available within civic topography. 

​

ARCSR was founded at London Metropolitan University in 2000, where its teaching, research and live-project work developed over more than two decades through the School of Art, Architecture and Design and its collaborators. ARCSR now continues as a collaborative platform bringing together academics, alumni, practitioners and civic partners in the UK and internationally. Its work is supported by The Water Trust (ARCSR), registered charity no. 1160565.

​

https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/research/centres-groups-and-units/the-centre-for-urban-and-built-ecologies/architecture-of-rapid-change-and-scarce-resources/