Becoming Urban: Developing Districts Unit by Unit

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• Joshua Bolscover, DDU Professor, University of Hong Kong
• Tuesday 04 November 2025, 17:00-19:00
• Lecture Room 1, Department of Architecture, 1-5 Scroope Terrace, Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Charles Walton.

The world’s climatic future hinges on how developing regions grow. Developing economies are projected to increase their emissions by 5 billion tons while the rest of the world plateaus or declines. By 2040 developing countries will account for 67% of global energy consumption. How we build in these areas will determine how we consume energy and emit carbon for generations. To change this detrimental urbanisation process, we have to change how people build their homes and their communities.

The lecture will present prototyping as a method to generate new models of housing and community infrastructure that offer scalable alternatives to current forms of building. Strategies developed in our ongoing work in Nepal, Mongolia and the Philippines will demonstrate this approach and the challenges of working in rapidly urbanizing emerging economies, struggling with the processes of becoming urban.

Joshua Bolchover is an architect and Professor at The University of Hong Kong. His work focuses on innovating design strategies in regions undergoing rapid urban transformation. He started a new impact enterprise in 2020 – District Development Unit – to scale initiatives designed to change how developing regions grow. DDU ’s housing prototype for Mongolia, The Ger Plug-In 3.0 was awarded the Holcim Silver Medal for Sustainable Construction Asia Pacific Region in 2023. He has written three books, Becoming Urban: The Mongolian City of Nomads, 2023, Border Ecologies: Hong Kong’s Mainland Frontier, 2017, and Rural Urban Framework: Transforming the Chinese Countryside, 2014. Joshua’s work has been acquired by MOMA , New York (2020), the CCA (2020) and MPlus (2023). He has exhibited his work internationally notably at the Venice Biennale (2016, 2018, 2021) the Milan Triennale (2025,2019), Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2022) the Design Museum London (2017) and the Chicago Biennale 2015.

This talk is part of the ARCSOC Conversations series.

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• ARCSOC Conversations
• Lecture Room 1, Department of Architecture, 1-5 Scroope Terrace, Cambridge

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