THE COMMON ROOM: SITUATED KNOWLEDGE IN MAKING A NEIGHBOURHOOD (original) (raw)

2017, Edge Conference: University College London

Christopher Alexander in 1977 dedicated several patterns towards the role ‘situatedness’ can have on the built environment and understanding its complexities, ethics, and citizen actions, although he never used the term. Years later Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave in their book Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation talk about the role of situated knowledge within communities of practitioners in local environments. They considered situated learning being about the “comprehensive understanding involving the whole person rather than ‘receiving’ a body of factual knowledge about the world; on activity in and with the world; and on the view that agent, activity, and the world mutually constitute each other”. This paper will use the case study of The Common Room in Bow—a three-year project that incrementally claimed land for a local neighbourhood through situated tactics, creating a space on the Roman Road that the community could use to implement a neighbourhood plan, part of the then coalition government’s Localism Act of 2011. This paper will draw from Christopher Alexander’s related patterns, mapping them against the citizen-led development in Bow.