The standing rules of the studio — pin-up deadlines, extensions, authorship at crit, the standard map, and where to take a problem.
Every brief in this studio is a design problem. This page is not. It is the set of rules the studio runs on, gathered in one place so that a brief can point at a rule instead of restating it, and so that no rule arrives for the first time in the week it costs you something.
Read it in Week 1, and again the night before your first pin-up.
Where a brief on the assessment pages sets a different rule for one piece of work, that brief wins for that piece of work, and says so where it does. Everything else here holds from Week 1 to the final jury.
See resources and access for pre-Week 1 invitations, the supported lab build, worksheets and upload destinations.
Enrolment dates#
For this fictional 2027 semester, 12 March is census: finalize enrolment and fee liability by that date. 30 April is the last day to drop without academic penalty; dropping after census does not reverse fee liability. Contact the convenor for referral to student administration before either date.
Marking bands#
| Band | Score | What the evidence supports |
|---|---|---|
| High distinction | 80–100 | A specific spatial argument tests a credible alternative, quantifies its costs, and identifies who loses and where the model cannot decide. Sources and denominators are traceable. |
| Distinction | 70–79 | A coherent, costed plan with convincing comparisons and explicit limits; a few gaps remain in the alternative or distributional account. |
| Credit | 60–69 | A workable plan with relevant evidence, but an important trade or alternative is asserted more than tested. |
| Pass | 50–59 | The basic claim is legible and supported, but comparisons, funding or limitations need substantial repair. |
| Fail | 0–49 | Missing or incompatible evidence prevents the claimed outcome being defended. A polished image cannot substitute for a funded, spatially evidenced plan. |
A1 and A2 apply these descriptors to each weighted criterion, then combine the scores using the brief’s percentages. A1’s “middle band” means Credit: its stated cap is 69/100 overall. A2’s “fiscal fail” means the fiscal criterion receives 0–49, according to how much funding is unsupported; it does not automatically fail the whole assessment. A3 uses one holistic score under these descriptors, including hazard resilience and the omissions appendix, with no hidden criterion weights. A missing live defence is assessed from the lodged memo and boards.
The pin-up deadline#
A pin-up is not a submission portal that happens to close at noon. It is a room, with a jury in it, booked for one afternoon. That is the entire reason the deadline is a deadline, and it is why this studio does not treat “a day late” as a small version of “on time”.
Two things are due each time, and they run on different clocks.
The artefact — your in-simulation screenshots and your defence memo — is due at 12:00 on the date named in the brief. Work uploaded after that loses five percentage points per calendar day, weekends included, and is not marked at all past five days. If you can see that coming, what you want is an extension, not a penalty.
The defence happens at 14:00 the same day unless the brief names a different start. It is heard by the week’s studio tutor of record, your cohort, and in assessed weeks a Visiting Critic who is in the building for that afternoon and no other. The Course Convenor chairs Weeks 4 and 12; Week 9 is chaired by the tutor of record. Week 12 runs two rooms at once, so the Convenor chairs one and the tutor of record chairs the other; the Visiting Critic sits on every jury but chairs none of them. This one cannot be submitted late, because there is nothing to submit it to. Miss the jury and your plan is marked from the memo alone — which means the memo has to answer, unprompted, every question the room would have asked you. Most memos do not. Turn up.
Turning up matters in the weeks you are not being marked, too. A crit with no audience is two people in a room looking at a screenshot, and the studio’s critique is the thing you are actually paying for. Attendance at the crit — desk crit, pin-up or jury, whichever the week calls it — is expected in all twelve studio sessions.
Extensions#
Extensions are granted, and granted readily, when something outside your control has eaten the time. Ask the Course Convenor in writing before the deadline. An extension arranged in advance costs you nothing; a case made afterwards has to argue about what you could have foreseen, which is a worse conversation for everyone.
What an extension moves is the artefact clock. What it cannot move is a jury: the room is booked, the Visiting Critic has a train to catch, and rescheduling one student’s fifteen minutes reschedules everyone’s. In practice that means one of two things, and you and the Convenor will pick between them when you ask:
- you present at the pin-up on the original date with whatever you have, and the extension applies to the artefact you upload afterwards; or
- you present at a desk crit with the Course Convenor alone, within a week, and forgo the wider room. Rescheduling one student’s slot reschedules the room; that is why an extension cannot move the jury.
Neither is a penalty. They are what “extension” can actually mean in a format where the deadline is other people’s time.
A lost or corrupted save file is not, on its own, grounds for an extension — if you were keeping the backups the studio asks for (see save discipline below), the save is not actually lost, and what you need is a working machine, not marks. A machine dying close to a deadline is grounds for an extension when it costs you the hours it takes to get back onto a working machine with that backup — it is the time you have lost, not the save.
Authorship and what the crit is allowed to change#
This studio has an unusual academic integrity problem, and it is worth naming it directly rather than gesturing at the University’s rules and hoping.
The whole method here is that other people tell you what is wrong with your district and you go and change it. That is not a grey area at the edge of the course; it is the course. So the line cannot be “your work must be uninfluenced by others” — nothing in a studio ever is. The line is authorship, and it sits in three places.
The district is yours. One student, one save file, Week 1 to Week 12. You may sit at another student’s machine during a desk crit — do, it is the fastest way to learn a tool — but you may not open, edit, or submit their save, and they may not touch yours. A district built by two people is a different assessment to the one everyone else sat.
Advice taken is advice named. Anything the room gave you that changed the build gets a line in the defence memo: what was suggested, by whom, in which week, and why you took it. This is not a confession. It is the ordinary courtesy of design practice, and it is also the difference between a decision you made and a decision that happened to you. A change you cannot account for is one you did not really author, and the jury will find that out by asking.
Everything imported is declared. Asset packs, a road layout lifted from a published plan, a district someone posted online, a real city’s street grid traced off a map — all of it is fine, all of it is normal, none of it is allowed to arrive silently. Name it in the memo and say what you did with it.
Passing off another person’s design work as your own is plagiarism, and the University’s academic integrity rules apply here in full and unmodified. What this section adds is the studio-specific reading of them.
The standard map and simulation settings#
Everyone in this studio builds on the same site: the standard map issued in Week 1, on the settings listed in that session’s brief. This is not bureaucratic tidiness. The three metrics your work is marked against — fiscal performance, mobility performance and livability — only mean something comparatively, and they only compare if the ground underneath them is the same ground.
So, for assessed work:
- No simulation-altering mods. Anything that changes traffic behaviour, demand, service radii, the economy or the cost of anything is out. A district that scores well on livability because a mod raised the ceiling has not scored well on livability.
- Cosmetic mods and asset packs are fine, and declared in the memo. How your district looks is your business; how it behaves is the studio’s.
- Unlimited money and unlock-all are off. Fiscal performance is one of the three metrics; switching it off is not a design move.
- Play the map you were issued. Terrain is a constraint, and Week 1 is about reading it. Regenerating the site because you did not like the river is the one edit that invalidates every week that follows.
Sandbox saves, where you can do whatever you like to find out how a system behaves, are encouraged and never marked. Keep them separate from the assessed district.
Save files and version discipline#
Your district is a twelve-week argument, and the save file is the only record of it. Treat it the way a studio treats drawings.
After every studio session, take a dated save named for your student ID and the
week — u1234567-w04 — and put a copy somewhere that is not the machine you
built it on. Unassessed weeks also upload that save and the week’s sheet to the
course share issued in Week 1, by 21:00 the same day. Week 11 is an explicit exception: its save and appendix are due Tuesday 18 May at noon, giving time to reconcile the historical sheets before the Friday capstone memo. A registered
accessibility adjustment (see below)
uses the next booked lab slot and emails the tutor before 21:00. Assessed artefacts follow the pin-up clock above, not this 21:00 line.
Week 1’s session covers the routine.
Two things depend on this. The first is obvious: hardware fails, and the studio cannot mark a district that no longer exists. The second is Week 11, where the brief asks you to read your own district’s land-value history from Week 1 forward. Students who kept the weekly saves have a semester of evidence for that week. Students who kept one rolling save have a screenshot and a memory.
Submit the relevant save alongside the screenshots and memo each time the brief asks for it.
Generative tools#
Use them. Research, reading, working out why the traffic AI is doing something baffling, drafting and tightening the memo — all reasonable, none of it interesting to declare in detail.
What is not delegable is the design. The zoning call, the transit alignment, the budget tradeoff and the reason you chose it over the obvious alternative are the assessed work, and if a tool made those choices you have submitted its studio project rather than yours.
One line in the defence memo naming the tools you used and what they did for you is the whole disclosure requirement. Beyond that, the jury is a good detector: a memo that argues for a decision its author cannot defend out loud reads exactly the same whoever or whatever wrote it.
Conduct at crit#
Critique is the studio’s core teaching method and the part most likely to go wrong, so the room runs to a protocol:
- The presenter presents, uninterrupted, for five minutes — unless the brief for that pin-up names a different clock. Assessment 1 is six minutes (two presenting, four questions). Assessment 2 is a four-minute wall walk, changeover included. Assessment 3 is fifteen minutes from 13:00 in two rooms.
- Clarifying questions only — things you need to know to look at the work properly, not opinions with question marks on them.
- Critique. Describe what you see before you judge it. Address the plan, not the planner.
- The presenter responds last, and is not obliged to agree.
Nobody is required to defend their own competence, only their design decisions. Comments about a student rather than a student’s work end the crit, and the University’s code of conduct takes it from there.
If something in a crit lands badly — yours or someone else’s — tell the Course Convenor. It is a small studio and this is fixable when it is early.
Equipment, access and adjustments#
The studio runs on Cities: Skylines II, which needs a reasonably capable machine. You do not need to own one; if you want to, the resources guide states the floor the technicians support. The design lab has fifteen machines with the software installed and the standard map preloaded, available during studio hours and bookable outside them; the cohort is sixteen. Bring-your-own is first. Remaining students book lab machines; the sixteenth live save loads on the tutor station in Studio 2.14 — the same room desk crits and juries run in, not the design lab — or as a booked pair on machine 15. Ordinary weeks never require sixteen simultaneous lab saves. Jury weeks use the presenting machines named in the brief, not sixteen live copies. The Week 1 session covers how.
If you have registered accessibility adjustments, they apply here without argument or explanation. Some of the studio’s own conventions have obvious adjustments available — presenting to the Course Convenor instead of a full jury, additional time at the pin-up, a written defence in place of a spoken one, a captioned recording rather than a live room. Raise it in Week 1 or 2 if you can, so the adjustment is in place before the first assessed pin-up rather than arranged around it.
Nothing in the pin-up format is more important than your being able to take part in it.
Where to ask what#
| If it is about… | Ask |
|---|---|
| A brief, a mark, an extension, an adjustment | The Course Convenor, by email |
| The software, the map, a build that will not behave | Your tutor, during studio |
| Feedback on a specific design decision | Bring it to the desk crit — that is what the hour is for |
| A lab machine, an account, a licence | The design lab technicians |
| Something that went wrong in a crit | The Course Convenor, as soon as you can |
Contact details for everyone named here are on the people page. The Visiting Critic does not take student email; their feedback arrives at the jury, which is the point of having one.