Taking as a point of departure the notion of FORUM – historically seen as a place of civic and political significance – the project aimed to re-imagine the high-street and the public space in the city, searching for alternative modes of urban regeneration, and exploring new ways of consuming and socialising. By involving the Development Company, the Moorgarth Group as a client, the project offered an opportunity for working with a real site, the Broad Street Mall in Reading – a large indoor retail centre built in the 1970s in the heart of the town. Known as the Minster Quarter, the area is a part of a long-awaited regeneration project aiming to transform Reading in a vibrant cultural hub. In this context, the ambition of the project was to imbue the existing commercial unit of approximately 742m2, located in the basement of the BSM, with ‘new’ life and civic value, exploring multiple forms of collaboration and engagement with diverse stakeholders. 

Addressing a host of contemporary challenges at both local and global scales, students explored what it means to create a FORUM, in which social, economic, and ecological boundaries are addressed in radically different ways. In doing so, the projects explored a tension between a contemporary understanding of the shopping mall as an epitome of an immersive ‘hyperinterior’ that abolishes an outside world (Sloterdijk, 2009), and its re-imagined status of a FORUM – a place with expansive and porous boundaries and transformative power. A place that can play a key role in Reading’s ongoing meaningful urban and cultural change, inviting reflections not only on social agency, but also the agency of materials that become critical in re-imagining a sustainable future, unlocking key principles of adaptive reuse and circular economy.