The formation of the European Union in 1993 (with 27 member states and approx 30% of the world’s GDP) has resulted a fundamental rethinking of the sovereignty of individual countries a new understanding of how boundaries and relationships within Europe are formed and organised.

The EU formed a political mega-state, in contrast Vietnam is emerging from the insulated economic relations of communism to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Under a new type of communist rule Vietnam implemented ‘free market’ reforms in 1986 and joined both the World Trade Organisation and UN Security Council in the last 2 years precipitating massive transformation in the country.

The study tour will explore agents of change in the city, in particular how political and economic shifts alter the modes of the city, its structure, connections, context and ‘identity’.

Students will engage with the manifestation of ‘city’ in two different contexts and respond specifically to those conditions through modelling of urban process, tracking historical shifts that exist as traces within new systems and proposing ways of dealing with change in the urban landscape.

The term landscape for this studio will be conceptualised as means for describing the city as an active plane which ‘organises and supports a broad range of fixed and changing activities’. How it might imply a performative ‘connective tissue’ that organizes not only the objects and spaces of the city but also the complex systems, dynamic processes and events that move through them.