Spaces of Learning
Julia Udall2017, EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN PRACTICE Urban School Ruhr Series
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
