New Cityscapes Redesigning Urban Cartographies Through Creative Practices and Critical Pedagogies (original) (raw)

Abstract

This chapter engages in a critical analysis of urban inequalities as they are experienced at the juncture of the local and the global. I do so by discussing a collaborative project based in London, called Sonic Futures, that resulted from cooperation between the London College of Communication (LCC) and May Project Gardens, a community organization. The project was conceptualized as a way to support students in their academic endeavors by combining participatory action research1 (Selener, 1997; Ulvik, Riese, & Roness, 2018) with hip-hop music and critical pedagogies. These theoretical aspects were coupled with gardening, a practical activity that allowed participants to reflect on several local themes within this global city, including social justice, diversity, and sustainability. As unusual as it may sound, these disparate elements worked well together, prompting participants to question social structures and the inequalities they generate, alongside considerations of well-being and community formation. Funded by the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund at LCC, this innovative approach to understanding urban spaces and inequalities concretized in a series of five workshops that took place between October 2018 and April 2019. The activities were open to students from both LCC and London South Bank University (LSBU), another partner in this venture. The original aim of the workshops was to support student attainment, retention, and engagement in academic activities. Yet, despite the original goal to support students who might be struggling and unprepared, the students who participated were all international students from relatively privileged backgrounds. As a consequence, while maintaining a keen interest in exploring how pedagogical practices could respond to student needs, one of the questions at the heart of the workshops shifted to reflect on the positionality of instructors and students. As we all shared some experiences of migration, this reflexivity allowed us to examine the complex urban inequalities framed by the many migratory movements visible within London. Considering the location of LCC and LSBU, we decided to concentrate primarily on the area where both universities are located: Elephant and Castle in South London, within the Borough of Southwark (see figure 9.1). The workshops made connections between past and present within this site, seeking to make sense of the ways in which resources were distributed, the means by which communities gathered, and how various urban processes that produced "new (in some cases expansive, in some restrictive) notions of membership and solidarity" (Holston & Appadurai, 1999, p. 189) within this global city. The question of urban inequality was central to the workshops and was approached from two angles. First, the workshops bore testimony to the very structures of inequalities that underlie differentiated access to spaces and resources within the global city, seen in the inability to recruit local undergraduate students from marginalized backgrounds.2 The students who did participate were all graduate students from different regions of the

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