Five principles for de-centred urban learning

Human beings are a force of nature, and nowhere is this more evident than in sprawling building sites around the world. "The Future We Want", invoked at the 2012 Rio+20 Conference, will depend on the cities we want, and these in turn will be shaped by the knowledge and skills we inherit from higher education. As current urban planners, architects, geographers and engineers engage with the almost unthinkable dimensions of scale and speed of urbanisation, academies around the world seek to equip their next generation with the skills and wisdom commensurable to the challenge. This challenge was the focus of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2004–2014) advocating the need for universities to embed sustainability in all learning areas across the curriculum. In this short paper, we look at the specific case of urban studies education and how this embraces the challenge of sustainable urban development...

Performative urban education: exploring action-based international teaching approaches Today, the world is more globally integrated than ever before. However, it is still composed of locally defined constituents, describing our socio-spatial framework (Massey, 2005; Robinson, 2006). Our built environment is therefore characterized by a socio-spatial diversity and there is no singular trajectory for the production of space. Thus, built environment disciplines face the challenge to address both, local and global phenomena as well as their reciprocal dynamics. During the last decades, these dynamics changed drastically, responding to different logics. A simple and linear relationship between need, demand and offer and their resulting production and consumption processes turned into a complex matrix of marketing strategies and policies focusing on image-building, short-term profits and maximum efficiency in increasingly specialised and fragmented urban environments (Soja, 2001). Urban education needs to adapt to equip students with appropriate knowledge and multiple sets of tools to encounter these challenges. This knowledge needs to incorporate not only theoretical insights but also locally applied knowledge, and especially increasing the social, political or environmental commitment to these local cases (Latour, 2005). Scholars have argued that this kind of acquisition of knowledge requires an education beyond the classroom which examines the margins of its own disciplinary protocols; and which is less informative and more performative (Colomina, 2012; McLaren, 1999). While first lessons are learned in several test cases (examples of academic action-teaching at higher eductaion institutions acrosss the globe or non-academic groups, e.g. Centre for Urban Pedagogy, New York) we would like to suggest ways to implement performative urban education by focusing on action-based international collaborations amongst educators and students. Our common insights from the ARQA ’14 (Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura Académica at Universidad de Cuenca, Ecuador, March 2014) build the base for discussing the format of this international event as a model for high-impact teaching across different contexts and backgrounds

Park Books, Zurich, 2022

This book is a collective effort of faculty and students, a unique collaboration between different traditions, set in different urban worlds—Basel, Cape Town, and beyond. The contributions in this volume show our commitment to immersion into the everyday past and present realities of cities, to embed our approach in practices of engaged research, critical pedagogy and collaboration, to take seriously the insights, the possibilities, and the limits of the complex urban and institutional terrains in which we move. The book will introduce the readership to Critical Urbanism’s specific form of interdisciplinarity, a pedagogy that relies on deep commitment to dialogue within and beyond the university.

JIDA

Organiza e impulsa GILDA (Grupo para la Innovación y Logística Docente en la Arquitectura), en el marco del proyecto RIMA (ISBN 978-84-9880-797-4 (IDP, UPC) eISSN 2462-571X D.L. B 9090-2014 © de los textos y las imágenes: los autores © de la presente edición: ÍNDICE 1. Arquitectura ficción: pensamiento lateral para el diseño social del espacio. Fictional Architecture: Lateral Thinking for Social Design of Space. Hernández-Falagán, David. 2. Nuevas representaciones, Nuevas concepciones: "entender y hacer entender". MBArch ETSAB. New representations, New conceptions: "to understand and to make understood". MBArch ETSAB. Zaragoza, Isabel; Esquinas-Dessy, Jesús. 3. Diarios creativos: el dibujar como germen del aprendizaje productivo. Creative diaries: drawing as the seed of productive learning. Salgado de la Rosa, María Asunción. 4. La percepción en la revisión de proyectos arquitectónicos. The perception in the review of architectural projects. Sánchez-Castro, Michelle Ignacio.

Frontiers the Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 2011

Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 1997

In recent times, spatial metaphors such as border crossing, border pedagogy, speaking from the margins, spanning the abyss, occupying in-between spaces and diaspora space have emerged to characterise educational and other cultural practices. This is particularly the case in critical, feminist and postcolonial pedagogy influenced by poststructuralist and postmodern theory. This article argues that the increased emphasis given to spatial metaphors can itself be located in contemporary globalising trends where forms of location also and inevitably entail forms of dislocation-of disidentifying and being positioned as other. We suggest that the term '(dis)location' provides a useful, non-essentialising metaphorical resource through which to analyse, understand and develop changes in pedagogy in conditions of globalisation. A pedagogy of (dis)location signifies an ambivalent pedagogy or a pedagogy of ambivalence in the uncertain reconfigurations taking place under contemporary conditions. Significant Locations Although we are wary of over-arching explanatory forms-post-industrial society, the learning society, postmodernity-the growth in explanatory significance of globalisation cannot easily be ignored. While there is now much debate as to its nature, extent and significance, there is also much reference to globalisation in both the academic domain and the more public domain of the popular media. To a lesser extent, this is true also of discussion in education. Here, the emphasis has tended to be on the significance of open and distance learning as a response and contributor to globalising influences (Edwards, 1994; Evans, 1995; Rowan et al, 1997), the need for 'multiliteracies' to SPATIAL METAPHORS AND EDUCATION 253

London Review of Education, 2006

The urban has been studied by students of geography, politics, aesthetics/culture, architects and politicians. Educational researchers in defining the urban as a field of research and practice have looked at schooling and its institutionalized role in cities. A wider discussion of the very character of urban experience and its relevance for pedagogic reflection and practice is a topic that still has to be explored. There are of course some exceptions, such as the Center for Urban Pedagogy in the US and its interest in environmental experiences in an urban context and researchers looking at the community–school relationship or the role of the family and locality. This essay makes an argument for urban pedagogy in the twenty-first century. The inspiration for this proposal is taken from psycho-geographers, both classical (the dialectical imagery of Walter Benjamin) and contemporary (Iain Sinclair) and their emphasis on erfaringspedagogikk (the pedagogy of experience). A number of topi...

EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN PRACTICE Urban School Ruhr Series, 2017

Both a learning platform and a pedagogical experiment, Urban School Ruhr is built upon the foundational belief that experts and amateurs can, together, build a space of critical exchange and knowledge transfer. USR prioritises exchange and dialogue that is not necessarily attached to specific outcomes, results or interventions in built reality, instead understanding conversation as the first step to co-producing cities. Explorations in Urban Practice, the first edition in the Urban School Ruhr Series, draws from and reflects upon USR’s experiences to date whilst also looking to the future of urban practice in contemporary cities. The book presents the reader with key current questions in the field: how can we learn city making? How should we understand the political concept of commoning for this purpose? And how can we discuss intervention as a strategy for enacting urban change? Spatial practice and urban studies have seen a diversification and politicisation over recent decades. Although professional and institutional forces still dominate, approaches grounded in relational thinking, activism, art practice, socially engaged initiatives and counter-economic strategies have a powerful lineage. Entwined within these histories of spatial practice is a narrative concerned with crucial questions of how we might learn about such spatial praxis; about the historical and contemporary urban condition and the relation of the subject within it; about future imaginaries of what it might mean to be, or to become, an architect, urban designer, or spatial practitioner; and about learning how to learn. Global crises around capitalism and climate change, including extreme inequality, mass displacement of people, and devastation of biodiversity, make urgent the need to take responsibility and understand the potential agencies of a spatial practitioner. At the same time, the increasing bureaucratisation and the limited imagination of the neoliberal institution about what society might be are reducing the scope of educational programs. This limitation extends to the understanding of the roles and competencies such practitioners may require, and where and how they might intervene. How might we make better accounts and take responsibility in the way we learn, practice and research? Such complex concerns are not limited to one domain, and require operating transversally 1 .This means working across disciplines and practices, uniting practice and theory and bringing together the social, political and pedagogical: "Learning to think differently is both a political and a pedagogical project since both pedagogy and politics involve processes of change and transformation. Indeed, change and transformation are critical in the area of environmental education and environmental politics, both of which… presume and reinstate a separation between what constitutes 'us' and the 'environment'." 2 The Spaces of Learning traversed and established by Urban School Ruhr in response to these conditions reflect a historical lineage of critical activity that transposes pedagogical experiments within and across the urban realm. It is the specificity of this relationship that we would like to pursue in particular as a line of flight through this complex entanglement of the spatialities of alternate pedagogies 3. If pedagogy is, as Friere suggests, about challenging relations and subject positions, spatiality and the urban are crucial, since as Margaret Kohn states: "[s]pace is one of the key ways in which the body perceives power relations. The physical environment is political mythology realised, embodied, materialised." 4

and issues related to the academicization of its curriculum. Although urbanism is a firmly established discipline in many curricula, in The Netherlands it has entered higher education as a practical and vocational discipline from the engineering tradition. The experience of the implementation of a stronger academic approach in such an environment reveals differences in worldviews among practitioners and academics, which result in frictions about the role and the form of academic research in Masters' education. This is becoming more evident as urbanism is confronted with the need to situate research actions and outcomes in relation to other more established disciplines, for example through research assessments. We have found problems related to a dysfunctional relationship between research claims and research actions, problems with assessment, trans-disciplinary dialogue and other issues common to areas of knowledge and practice recently entering academia. Here we discuss how new courses and requirements were introduced, that aimed to encourage an academic attitude and improve outputs in relation to academic standards, and how this was done by seeking a dialogue between research and design practice. The experience is examined both from the point of view of staff's expectations and students' reception.