Arya Arabshahi

Research

Research I have written alone or with others, from a study of city-led climate finance to essays from my years at the Architectural Association. Each entry says what it is and who made it.

Master of Studies research

University of Cambridge, 2026. Abstract and findings.

Blueprints for city-led urban climate finance

How can a city mobilise climate investment through a delivery vehicle and keep a usable say over what that vehicle does in its name? The study traces three vehicles through their public records, Bristol City Leap, Angers Territoire Intelligent and Stockholm Exergi, each with at least €100m in programme requirement, contract value or realised investment within five years of launch.

Formal control proved a poor predictor of the agency a city can use. That agency came from the city's competence as a client and from information rights it could enforce. Revision served the public only while it stayed publicly legible, since flexibility otherwise shifts power to whichever party holds the information. Equity did not follow from bankability and had to be designed in.

Five design features

  1. Construct the aggregation object deliberately.
  2. Keep oversight enforceable and usable.
  3. Make revision governable and publicly legible.
  4. Treat data and platform governance as core infrastructure.
  5. Build social licence into delivery.

Essays and reports

Essay · 2025

Master of Studies coursework

Bristol City Leap, an investable programme for urban decarbonisation

Bristol's twenty-year concession made decarbonisation investable, with risks of lock-in and weak oversight. Seven lessons for other cities.

Essay · 2025

Master of Studies coursework

Climate litigation and meaningful redress

Litigation strengthens accountability yet rarely compensates frontline communities. A proposal for a climate damages registry.

Essay · 2024

Master of Studies coursework

Policy instruments for urban heat and water stress

Two instruments designed at city scale, variable low-emission-zone fees over urban heat islands and tradable water-saving certificates, each with its own evaluation.

Report · 2021

Collaborative, Soil & People consortium

Luxembourg in Transition, Soil & People, Stage 3

Final proposals, scenarios and their implementation, by 2001, 51N4E and LOLA with specialist collaborators. I wrote the introductions and the chapters on land take, diet shift and transferable development rights.

Report · 2023

Collaborative, Greenbelt team

Ceinture verte, work sessions

Findings of the four Greenbelt sessions on growth, food, cooling and leisure, held on a car-park rooftop, in an orchard and across the Agglocentre in 2023.

Research synopsis · 2019

Public gardens in the age of climate crisis

Public gardens for Tehran shaped by water, native plants and the phased use of derelict land.

Essay · 2019

The fall and rise of new worlds

MVRDV's Dutch pavilion at Expo 2000 as an experiment in density and landscape, and what keeps a prototype alive after the event.

Essay · 2016

Architectural Association

The reactionary domestic

How housing exhibitions, their sponsors and publishing shape and spread models of home life.

Editorial

Critical Pages, issues 1 to 5, June 2019. Edited for Critical Practice and designed by AA Print Studio. Each invited author keeps authorship of their text. In 2020 Critical Practice and Unfolding Pavilion co-curated a contribution to Archifutures Volume 6: Agency.

Cover of Critical Pages 001.
Making it up as you go along. David Jubb and Steve Tompkins
Cover of Critical Pages 002.
Design as an attitude, an edited excerpt. Alice Rawsthorn
Cover of Critical Pages 003.
Not business as usual, IBA Basel 2010 to 2020. Ágnes Heller and Adèle Wickersheim
Cover of Critical Pages 004.
The human city. Christer Larsson
Cover of Critical Pages 005.
Thoughts on practice from a software company. Rory Campbell-Lange

Conversation · 2023

Citymaking in times of crises

The Grand Challengers podcast, episode 6, with Peter Marcus Bach. Adaptive planning, master-palettes, Luxembourg in Transition, C-Mine and Ruderal Acts, over an hour and twelve minutes.

Listen on YouTube

In preparation

Masterpalettes

A planning framework that short-term initiatives test and that is reset at each cycle, drawn from the soft grid at C-Mine.

The century in a hectare

Compensation for sealed land, priced over the life of the building that occupies it.