Dr Julia King

Julia King worked at LSE Cities for a decade on a range of projects including Super Diverse Streets, High Streets for All, and Incremental Infrastructural development with a focus on low-cost, community-led sanitation projects.

In 2020 she founded and directed the ‘Apprenticeship Programme in City Design’ and ‘Researcher-in-Residence’ at LSE Cities. Both schemes are novel outreach models for investigating and designing urban spaces with local young people - a constituency normally excluded from planning and development processes and is structured as a series of paid learning and working experiences that engage local young people– and notably young women – in public space research, planning and design processes.

In 2024 she started her own practice, Social Place (formerly JK&A), to focus on brief-development, community engagement and participatory design. Social Place devises tools and processes that enable diverse voices to contribute to design and planning decision-making, and to shaping the future of places in imaginative and equitable ways. JK&A offer policy guidance, research (including literature reviews), workshops and training, and advocacy work (published papers, conferences, masterclasses and public speaking) to advance the public discourse around inclusive cities. JK&A’s core work delivers innovative forms of public consultation and community design services. Current clients include Chelmsford County Council, Railpen and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Julia gained her doctoral degree at the Cass School of Architecture with the Department of Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR). She has taught previously at the AA, LSE, UCL and UAL. She has won numerous awards for her work including Emerging Woman Architect of the Year, NLA Award, Civic Trust Regional Award and short-listed for a Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award. Recently her work has been recognised as best practice on a European-wide basis at the recent Eurocities Awards as an example of how young people can lead the way in designing inclusive solutions to local needs. Her projects have been widely publicised, and she has authored chapters in ‘Home Economics’ and ‘Infrastructure Space’ and co-authored a chapter in ‘The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City’.