Convenes the studio, writes the weekly briefs, takes the Week 11 lecture on what the model cannot show, and chairs the Week 4 and Week 12 juries. Week 9 is chaired by that week's tutor of record.
- Role
- Course convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Urban Design
- marisol.quaye@slop.university
- Contact
- Office hours Tuesdays 13:00–16:00 in Studio 2.14. Briefs, marks, extensions and adjustments come to me and to nobody else.
Marisol spent eight years in the strategic planning unit of a regional authority before coming to teaching, most of it at the unglamorous end of the work: rate-base modelling, developer contribution schedules, the arithmetic of who pays for a road. Their research is on land-value capture: what happens to a council’s balance sheet in the decade after it upzones a corridor. The brochures for those corridors and the ten-year figures are not describing the same place.
They started running the studio inside a simulation after a decade of marking neighbourhood plans that could not have worked. “You can draw a transit spine with a ruler in an afternoon,” they say. “What you cannot draw is anybody choosing to ride it. The model will not let you skip that, and I have never found a crit that could.”
They take the Week 1 and Week 3 lectures — site analysis and zoning — and chair the Week 4 pin-up and the Week 12 capstone review. Week 9 is chaired by the tutor of record. Week 11 is theirs too, lecture and studio both: the week the studio stops reading the simulation’s numbers and starts asking who is missing from them, which is the same land-value question their research has been circling for a decade. Expect to be asked which of the three metrics you traded, and to keep being asked until you name it.