A Proposal for Elephant Square, London

Abstract

The Elephant Square project was carried out in the context of the 2019 University of Buckingham Summer School, chaired by dean John Simpson and director Clive Aslet. The design brief for the project was created by Stephanie Jazmines and Lucien Steil, both tutors at the 2019 University of Buckingham Summer School. Rather than following up on the endless series of post-Covid-19 urban, or “return to nature”, or “health technology” utopias, the Elephant Square project in London simply offers to re-establish the primacy of public space and public life as a main condition to reassess the city of the future. This project supports a vision of the city as a plural and common world, the purpose of which is to enhance public life in its most sophisticated forms.