Teaching the City: Exploring Pedagogies of Urban Becoming (original) (raw)
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Urban pedagogy: a proposal for the twenty‐first century
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...
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...
The Urban Question as Cargo Cult: Opportunities for a New Urban Pedagogy
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008
Urban research is unreflexive toward its object of study, the city, compromising its methodologies and theoretical capacity. This polemic draws on examples such as 'creative cities', which have been profiled and analysed for their local recipes for economic success. 'Global cities' have become stereotypes of a neoliberal form of the 'good life' to which much recent urban research is a handmaiden, a hegemonic knowledge project. These 'metro-poles' of value are a form of urban pedagogy that presents lesser local elites with lessons to be followed. A form of cargo cult theory suggests, build it and wealth will come-hence the symmetry of urban scholarship with the fad for city rankings in pop journalism. In contrast to neo-structural analyses of the global city, other research focuses too closely on regional geographies, local forces and urban affordances. A synthetic level of theory is proposed to bridge the divide which marks urban and regional studies. The 'urban' needs to be rediscovered as a central question. The urban is an object of theory and the city is a truth spot. The urban is more than infrastructure and bodies but an intangible good or 'virtuality' that requires an appropriate methodological toolkit. The knowledge space of urban questions 'Global cities' have become stereotypes for understanding the 'good life', at least in the case of urban living. 1 Their de-industrialized service economies, flexible labour forces and the rising value of cultural goods and services are seen as configurations to be admired. These are the 'capitals' of our age. Cities are obviously not isolated. Their prestige leads elites elsewhere to strive to approximate the structural character of the so-called 'global city' (New York, London, Tokyo), even if they do not necessarily function as a global or even world city (for example, by being more strongly tied transnationally rather than regionally to other cities; King, 2004: 79; Taylor, 2004). Understandings of these 'metro-poles' of value are based in large part on a refined focus on global networks of cities developed by urban and regional researchers. However, the critical spirit of the urban question seems lost (Castells, 1977). Qualitative and quantitative indicators have been laudably combined in frameworks that now transcend preoccupations with national urban hierarchies. It is possible not only to contrast but also to compare across space and time cities such as New York and Cairo (today and historically) for their similarities, such as the social complexity and economic polarization of their diverse ethnic, racial and social mixes, their occupational structures and cultural heterogeneity (Abu-Lughod, 1971). 1 My thanks to the inspiring circle of colleagues and students in the Space and Culture Research Group at University of Alberta, and more specifically thanks to Ondine Park whose forthcoming doctoral research considers the good life in detail.
A RENEWED EDUCATIONAL FORMAT TO EXPERIENCE THE CONTEMPORARY CITY
2018
A renewed approach is required to study and intervene in contemporary cities, considering the t global flow of people, the emerging social practices and the pressing needs for public spaces of democracy. On these premises French-Italian research project Stop City conceived a 240 h workshop to be held every year in a different town, to be immersively experienced with students and teachers with different cultural backgrounds and coming form different European schools. The No-Stop City concept by Archizoom is here the background to reflect on the fragmentation of contemporary cities as an opportunity to foster local behaviours and bottom up projects of public spaces.
What is Critical Urbanism? Urban Research as Pedagogy
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.