Letters from the Street: Bringing Fine Art Methods into Urban Design Teaching

Letters from the Street: Bringing Fine Art Methods into Urban Design Teaching

By Dr Laura Novo de Azevedo, Associate Professor, Oxford Brookes University

As many of you know, I am someone who learns by doing, thinking, making, questioning, and being in dialogue. Learning is not something I ask only of my students, it is something I ask of myself. This year, I decided to take up a new challenge and began the MA in Fine Art at Brookes, and I am absolutely loving it.

As an educator with a long-standing interest in creativity, collaboration, and public life, it feels entirely natural to bridge the worlds of urban design and contemporary art. I hold academic responsibilities in the Faculty of Health, Life and Technology, yet I now also walk, sketch and think alongside artists in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

This crossing of boundaries is purposeful. I am part of a group leading a transdisciplinary teaching and learning project, alongside colleagues Emma Skippings, Esra Kurul and Lucy Turner, exploring how learning transforms when we bring two or more modes of knowing into contact, the technical and the intuitive, the analytical and the poetic, the city and the studio.

From Lecture to Making: Two Ways of Knowing

The workshop I recently led with our MA Urban Design students was structured in two parts:

Part One - Technical Learning

I delivered a lecture on the configuration of the public realm, exploring street typologies, human scale, ecological responsiveness, movement patterns and spatial organisation. This grounded students in specialist knowledge: vocabulary, frameworks, and design method.

Part Two - Intuitive & Embodied Learning

We then shifted the mode of thinking. The aim here was to translate technical learning into lived, felt understanding. Because the most compelling designers are those who combine both: clarity + sensitivity; analysis + empathy; structure + imagination.

Students were asked to bring a photograph of a street they considered fantastic - a street that works well for people and for the environment. Using watercolours, pastels, ink, collage and stitching, each student created an A4 page consisting of:

• their street image, annotated or altered
• and a handwritten letter addressed to someone they care about, written as if they were physically on that street. Inviting this person to join them there to experience all the good things that place had to offer.

To open the emotional register, we looked at a painting by Portuguese artist Carlota Flieg, as a prompt to think of the street not only as a spatial configuration, but as a “delightful place to be”.

At first, students were hesitant, uncertain about stepping into a more poetic mode. Then slowly, something shifted. Chattering started, shoulders loosened. Pages filled. The room became warm and conversational. We moved from drawing streets as plans to relating to streets as places to be.

Why This Matters

Urban design education often privileges clarity, precision, and measurable outcomes. These are essential. But streets are not just geometries - they are places of relation: places where encounters unfold, where life circulates, where ecologies, communities, and species meet.

To design truly humane, and more-than-human, public realms, we must learn to:

• sense atmosphere
• recognise belonging
• notice gesture, rhythm, and tempo
• listen to how spaces feel, not only how they function

Teaching through both technical knowledge and intuitive, embodied practice helps students understand that designing a street is not only a question of alignment and width, it is a question of care.

This workshop was a reminder that the future of urban design is not only in the drawing, but in the listening.

Every student’s page will now be assembled into a single accordion-fold artist book titled:

Letters from the Street: Poetics of the Future Public Realm.

From this, I am distilling a collective manifesto about what makes streets inclusive, generous, and alive.

The book will be exhibited at the Oxford Brookes Urban Design End-of-Year Show later in May 2026 for all to see.

To find out more about the MA Urban Design click here.