As an international student who studied interior design at the undergraduate level and is now pursuing a cross-disciplinary master’s in urban design, the blog creation task in the TCP8090 module this semester has been a challenging yet exciting learning adventure for me. At first, I felt lost with urban design ideas, but later managed to Read the full article…

Before I ever heard the term co-housing, I had already lived it. Growing up in India, sharing space was simply how life worked. Homes extended beyond walls—grandparents, cousins, neighbours, all part of a loose but dependable network. Childcare, meals, and even emotional support flowed through these shared spaces. Housing wasn’t something you owned in isolation; Read the full article…

Blue–Green Infrastructure (BGI) is increasingly framed as a practical and sustainable response to urban climate challenges. Interventions such as rain gardens, bioswales, and Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) are intended to manage flooding while enhancing public space and biodiversity. However, their performance in everyday urban life suggests that resilience is not guaranteed—and nor is justice. Maintenance, Read the full article…

Personal Reflections on Learning and Positionality Contributing to the course blog throughout the semester has been an engaging and genuinely formative learning experience, one that reshaped how I understand environmental justice and my position within urban design. As a full-time international student, settling into a new academic environment involved more than adapting to unfamiliar teaching Read the full article…

Co-Producing Urban Vitality Through Everyday Participation Urban spaces work best when they are shaped not only by planners and designers, but also by the people who use them every day. Through studying urban design, I’ve come to understand that economic vitality and social life often emerge from shared processes of urban co-production, where communities actively Read the full article…

By taking the cases of Shanghai and Beijing as examples, this blog explores the relationship between urban space and economic vitality As a student from Shanghai, I can personally feel the impact of urban design on economic vitality and realize that economic vitality actually lies in these everyday scenes. Whenever I walk in the downtown Read the full article…

Linking shared living, urban design and inclusion through three co–housing cases This carousel explores co-housing in the UK and asks what it could mean for Newcastle. Co-housing brings together self-contained homes, shared facilities and resident-led decision-making. When designed with clear thresholds between private, semi-shared and shared space, it can turn everyday “weak ties” into practical Read the full article…

Personal Reflections: Contributing to this blog over the past few months has been an insightful and enjoyable experience which has led me to explore topics I wouldn’t have necessarily considered previously. I have found working with other members of the cohort to explore the overarching theme of spatial injustice has provided different perspectives from all Read the full article…

Personal Reflection and Learning Process Fig 1: Writing blogs for TCP8090 has been a really enjoyable and valuable experience. Every blog I wrote felt like a little journey where I explored different ideas, thought about what was important, and learned how to organize my thoughts clearly. Using images, diagrams, and examples from real cities also Read the full article…

Personal reflection: Writing blogs comes with a series of challenges, and the first step can often be the hardest. Simply choosing a theme to write about and sticking to it, without loosing focus and going on a tangent can be tricky. In my experience this happens most often when something interest is uncovered during the Read the full article…

Reflective Summary Fig 01. A Detailed image showing the learning process Personal Reflection : Overall Experience As a Master of arts student in urban design at Newcastle University, this course has been a meaningful and transformative learning experience for me. Throughout the module, i engaged with different forms of learning, including writing blog posts, reading Read the full article…

Initially, I considered cities as mere physical places, defined by buildings, infrastructure, and zoning regulations, before starting the module TCP8090. However, this fourteen-week course has changed my perception completely, and I see urbanism as people and their identity and needs in the first place. I believe now that spatial justice is the same as everyone Read the full article…