Living Continuity is a collective inquiry on the challenges and opportunities of working towards spatially just neighbourhoods. Session V looks critically inwards to explore work that challenges the current frontiers of architecture and urbanism. How can praxis enable critical engagement, and what does it reveal around current issues of access, exclusion, precarity and participation in neighbourhood planning?  Jason Carlow examines Sharjah’s industrial zones, analyzing how working-class, migrant ‘bachelors’ transcend the limited infrastructure available to them and use informality to create spaces of leisure, commerce, and housing.

Jason Carlow holds a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and an MArch from Yale University, and is Associate Professor of Architecture at American University of Sharjah. Prior to AUS, he taught architecture, with a focus on compact housing and urban informality, at University of Hong Kong for ten years. His recent work focuses on issues surrounding housing for dense urban environments. He is co-author of the forthcoming book, Cities of Repetition: Hong Kong’s Privately Developed Housing Estates (AR+D Publications) and a book chapter entitled, “Industrial Promises: New Speculative thinking for Sharjah’s industrial districts,” in Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf: Obsolescence and Opportunity, edited by Roberto Fabbri and Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi (Routledge). Carlow’s design and research work has been published and exhibited internationally at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Venice Biennale of Architecture, and Beijing Architecture Biennial, and he is the recipient of the 2020 AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award.