Alicia Pivaro

Alicia Pivaro will work with students to explore and encourage practice that cultivates and celebrates real and long-term engagement with communities, local authorities and civil society, connecting with like-minded partners who align design with new forms of political action and intervention.

Alicia is an urbanist, community activist and artist working across disciplines and using participation and radical thinking to inform methods of urban and social change. After training as an architect, she worked at several leading organisations including the Arts Council, RIBA and Architecture Foundation where she developed projects that supported alternative practices and diverse voices and community involvement in architectural discourse. Then, as an independent curator, teacher and activist she developed a position within the field of architecture that links bottom-up community action to Marxist academia via social architecture and urbanism. She is an advocate for neighbourhood planning and other examples of co-production of the city that work towards creating a more sustainable, equitable and lovely version of the world.