Finding common ground and co-developing new skills towards a more just and inclusive city-making
The course centers around the lived experiences of migration, displacement and exile as key perspectives to understand how urban spaces can produce or challenge exclusion. In doing so, the course explores how urban planning, architecture and spatial practice can contribute in making cities more welcoming and inclusive for everyone, while encouraging social awareness and responsibility in the mainstream academic teaching.
Cross-border/international
Italy
Germany
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Belgium
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Other
Milan, Berlin, Bruxelles, London
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
ERASMUS
The course emerged from two EU-funded collaborative projects, titled DESINC – Designing Inclusion (2016-2019) and DESINC Live – Designing and learning in the context of migration (2019-2022). Funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ programme, Key Action 2. Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices.
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Department of Architecture and Urban Studies - Politecnico di Milano Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Francesca Last name of representative: Cognetti Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Policies Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: via Bonardi, 3 Town: Milano Postal code: 20133 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 02 2399 5441 E-mail:francesca.cognetti@polimi.it Website:http://www.mappingsansiro.polimi.it/en/
Name of the organisation(s): Refugees Welcome Italia Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Giorgio Last name of representative: Baracco Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Stakeholder manager and programme coordinator Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Agnello 18 Town: Milano Postal code: 20121 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 329 980 4621 E-mail:giorgio.baracco@refugees-welcome.it Website:https://refugees-welcome.it
Name of the organisation(s): Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Markus Last name of representative: Bader Gender: Male Nationality: Germany Function: Professor of Architecture and Building Planning Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Hardenbergstraße 33 Town: Berlin Postal code: 10623 Country: Germany Direct Tel:+49 30 31852297 E-mail:m.bader@udk-berlin.de Website:https://www.udk-berlin.de/en/person/markus-bader
Name of the organisation(s): S27 – art and education Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Vera Last name of representative: Fritsche Gender: Female Nationality: Germany Function: Program coordinator, social worker with an educational background in landscape architecture Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Schlesische Str. 27b Town: Berlin Postal code: 10997 Country: Germany Direct Tel:+49 6177 67315 E-mail:v.fritsche@s27.de Website:https://www.s27.de
Name of the organisation(s): Department of Architecture, KU Leuven Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Viviana Last name of representative: d'Auria Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Assistant Professor in International Urbanism Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 1, Kasteelpark Arenberg Town: Heverlee (Leuven) Postal code: B-3001 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 16 37 76 63 E-mail:viviana.dauria@kuleuven.be Website:https://be.linkedin.com/in/viviana-d-auria-365a634
Name of the organisation(s): Architecture Sans Frontières International (ASF-Int) Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Lígia Last name of representative: Nunes Gender: Female Nationality: Portugal Function: Chair of the Board of Director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Société Française des Architectes (SFA) – 247 Rue St Jacques Town: Paris Postal code: 75005 Country: France Direct Tel:+351 966 852 670 E-mail:info@asfint.org Website:https://www.asfint.org/en
The Practices of Urban Inclusion course explored the role that urban space and design practice play in creating conditions of exclusion or inclusion in cities. The project is set within the European context and centres on migration as a key component of urbanisation, and an important lens for understanding how dynamics of power, oppression and emancipation relate to city-making. The project was mainly concerned with knowledge and learning. What knowledge about cities and migration informs the definition of urban policies and plans? What knowledge underpins the design and material construction of buildings and places? Whose perspectives are taken in consideration in the making of the city, and why? And what can social work and design activism gain from a broader understanding of how the built environment works?
The project attempted to address these questions by developing an experimental learning programme that links together professional and experiential knowledge, art practice and urban policy, theory and action. The educational programme aimed to provide current and future practitioners with the conceptual and practical tools that will enable them to develop new ways of fostering inclusion in urban space.
The basis of the work is a framework of principles, methods and pedagogical tools, developed by the team through a consolidated strategic partnership and including the perspective of displaced persons. These components were tested ‘live’ with specific learners, partners and sites of engagement.
Practices of Urban Inclusion was co-designed, co-taught and co-assessed by a network comprising four architecture and urban planning schools and three civil society organisations based in four European countries, bringing together students, local activists and residents, practitioners and academics to learn from each other and co-produce knowledge about the implications of observing, making, designing and planning urban space through the lens of movement and migration.
Inclusion
Migration and displacement
Action-Learning
Critical Urban Practice
Trans-disciplinary thinking
The project revolved around three main aims, all linked to sustainability:
1. A new educational offer to encourage transdisciplinary thinking on city-making, taking into account the different social, economical and ecological challenges posed by today’s urban transformation processes. Several participants with a deep understanding of sustainable and circular design projects worked closely with territories and communities, to encourage processes of city-making built on care and inclusion.
2. Engagement and participation to build a diverse set of narratives about the city, as well as to enhance the capacity of all participants to envision longer-term scenarios for urban transformation and design, beyond the most immediate needs. Two live workshops, held in Berlin and in Milan, were pivotal moments to experiment and experience alternative processes of producing space through collective engagement. The projects were mainly designed and realised with waste and recycled materials, most of which were found on site. The workshop results shared the aim to investigate, together with local communities, new ways to appropriate public space and to re-discover a sense of belonging with their surrounding environment, transcending city/nature binaries.
3. Skills development to support educators in renewing their own teaching approaches and to enhance their capability to promote digitalization and the open sharing of knowledge. The course was conceived (from inception, meaning in pre-Covid times) as a blended educational offer that would strategically rely on online teaching and learning. The strong blended component avoided unnecessary CO2 emission from traveling and facilitated access to many participants who would have otherwise been unable to join because of their citizenship status or financial condition. Moreover, today a «living» collective archive continues to act as a shared platform for bonding and bridging participants, including materials in various languages.
The team co-wrote a manifesto to highlight the project’s core values and to emphasize the paradigmatic shift from product-oriented to experience-oriented research, considering the value of shared experiences and the construction of a spatial, social and cultural common ground as a founding value to design space and society. Aware that introducing an aesthetics of care into urban areas featuring vulnerability and neglect corresponds to an act of design justice, in the live workshops we embraced an aesthetics corresponding to the main processual foci: “making” and “narrating” space. This did not match a particular canon but considered aspects of locally sourced materials, craft(wo)manship and a critical open-endedness that resonated with the manifesto’s main points:
Learning together - ‘learning with’ rather than ‘learning about’ - to elevate the voices of those who have experienced exclusion, and cultivate mutual engagement and collaboration
Unsettling hierarchies through the horizontal and mutual exchange of knowledge and skills, and peer revieiwing
Acting in space by promoting playfulness, exploration and experimentation (as forms of inquiry and creative engagement with the city)
Making space for diversity (bodies, voices, ways of knowing)
Unlearning through discomfort by going beyond established ways of thinking and engaging in difficult conversations
Embracing joy by creating together, cooking, building, playing) as different forms of deep learning that come from direct action
Imagining together possible alternative futures, experimenting how things can be done differently to produce urban and social change
The whole initiative is inclined towards action-learning and cultivates skills for a critical, relational approach as a way to encourage the participants (learners, teachers, inhabitants, other stakeholders) to practice a positive attitude, a sense of belonging to common spaces and the promotion of a collectively authored design based on care.
Inclusion is the project’s hallmark and a declared part of its mission, as its title demonstrates. The Practices of Urban Inclusion course is an embodied, horizontally conceived, threshold space co-produced within and across multiple urban settings. This space linked people and stakeholders spanning academia, civil society, and residents, to learn together about urban inclusion and the forms of spatial practice that might promote it. It stemmed from the urgent need to involve newcomers and displaced persons as fully-fledged participants in the discussions, not only as learners, but as represented through well-established CSOs.
The partnership aimed for a clear alternative to the dangers of approaches based on quick and “empathic” thought processes based on one-time “participation", namely to partner with well-established and long-standing community-based organizations. The CSOs involved have history and recognition and deep ties and accountability to communities that course participants may not have a shared lived experience with, and were involved from the beginning through all stages of the course’s design process.
The initiative also intended to take course participants’ varied profiles seriously. This meant that because of their disciplinary backgrounds, geographic origins and varying relationships with their respective institutions, as well as with the city and country they were residing in, the learners required a varied spectrum of support along their trajectory. This led to the design of tailored Learning Journeys and Learning Journals.
The combination of tailor-made infrastructure, shared course components hosted through an online platform, and situated site-specific design interventions created an exemplary trans-local network of sites, urban practitioners and engaged citizens whose action extends well beyond the duration of the project, as shown by the design interventions remaining on-site after the workshops to pursue their space-changing role.
The active participation of communities, CSOs and residents was one of the key elements of the project. It contributed to producing new and unexpected perspectives on (and with) the places of action-learning, opening up new scenarios for future transformations, including bottom-linked and bottom-up processes. In particular, on-site workshops, intended as opportunities for situated and embodied action-learning, enabled participants to develop relationships across the partnership and with local residents, and constituted a key tool for building the trans-local connections between sites, community-based activism and local knowledge.
During the workshop in Berlin, inhabitants residing locally (even with different statuses) were involved, amongst others, in the design process and the realization of facilities for collective activities, such as a theater and an outdoor classroom. Inhabitants were also involved in a performance for the re-activation of a natural area surrounding the neighborhood, with the aim of re-appropriating and co-designing new ways to inhabit the city.
During the workshop in Milan, local residents participated in the collective work of re-narrating personal and common migration stories, re-drawing the geography of their biography and reaffirming their connection with the territory, taking part in a decade-long on-going research by the university and local CSOs on inclusion and the de-marginalization of the neighborhood.
Embracing the idea of co-learning as a situated, interpersonal and engaged practice that requires time, special attention was paid to the legacy of this experience for the actors involved. The project is part of a broader path of presidium and work with the territory in the context explored, where partner universities and the CSOs involved are carrying out extended research-action projects. Such continuity catalysed the collection, sharing and development of the project’s outcomes with the local community.
Questioning the limits and spaces of what teaching and learning can mean for more just cities, and where teaching and learning actually can take place, was a prime premise for the partnership as a whole. To address these issues and the project objectives, the team was composed of different stakeholders with various and complementary competences. Several partners explicitly advocate for the rights of refugees, asylum seekers - and migrants more generally - to be not only acknowledged, but viewed as the starting point to renew perspectives and reshape values in fundamental ways.
The project framework included, overall, 4 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and 3 Civil Society Organisations (CSOs): Politecnico di Milano and Refugees Welcome Italia in Italy; Universität der Künste Berlin and S27 in Germany; KU Leuven in Belgium; London Metropolitan University and ASF-UK in the UK. Following a selection process, the group attending the course consisted of 29 learners from across the institutions involved in the programme (i.e. including university students as well as CSO staff and learners), partly with a background in architecture and urban planning. A second tier of learners was formed by the grassroots networks and residents of the two neighborhoods with whom we engaged and continue to work locally.
All partners involved in the course became part of a system of commoning governance that defined boundaries, rules, and systems for collaborative decision making. This happened at various levels: at the macro scale, the Erasmus+ partnership and the whole-course meetings acted as a shared governance system; locally, micro-networks governed the experience: in Milan, Politecnico di Milano, RWI and stakeholders in San Siro neighborhood; in Berlin, through the Urban Praxis initiative and Stadwerke Marzhan. These macro and micro networks of commoning created a distributed governance system, and they engaged with conflict productively throughout the whole project.
The project was centered around the conception and implementation of a pilot course and a number of ensuing activities. The course was built by a plural team composed of university-based researchers and teachers, CSO members with various roles (social workers, artistic directors, urban practitioners and more) as well as critical friends and experts from both academia and practice.
As a multidisciplinary team thus composed, the main question we posed for the research was: how can we plan, build and put into practice cities that promote inclusion? The first pilot course devised focused on the lived experiences of migration, displacement and exile as key perspectives to understand how urban spaces can produce or challenge exclusion. In doing so, the course explored how urban planning, architecture and spatial practice can contribute to making cities of care and conviviality, where more people feel welcome in more spaces.
Both the learners and the educators that engaged in this action-learning initiative came from architecture, urban design and planning, anthropology, social policy, social work and other creative and social disciplines concerned with migration and/or urban space and the built environment. Interactions happened at every level, since there was a trans-disciplinary outlook from inception grounded in the conviction that understanding cities as well as migration requires a pluralist and trans-disciplinary lens.
The course was evaluated by an equally diverse group of people, ranging from the educators and learners themselves, to internal and external commentators. Here too, the added value of a truly trans-disciplinary discussion - not only between disciplines but between various kinds and types of stakeholders - helped the course gain clarity, relevance and agility. It especially helped in gaining an understanding of migration as a key contributor to city-making that implies unlearning and discomfort in order to embrace new perspectives on city-making.
Learning about migration is not a conventional part of the academic curriculum in architecture and design schools. We consider it, by contrast, as a key component of city-making. Relatedly, we believe that learning about migration and urban inclusion must be firmly grounded in the approach known as critical pedagogy and the posthumanist understanding of difference and diversity. It challenges knowledge injustice by acknowledging the variety of positions and perspectives in the world. According to this vision, we worked in two directions.
On the one hand, the trans-local team intended to create a community of practitioners and integrate different forms of knowledge on urban inclusion into their future practice. On the other hand, the international workshops, the local units and learners’ individual experiences, were designed so participants could take up more than one role (designers, translators, organizers, activists, mediators, researchers), and this through an immersive and self-reflective course.
These objectives were pursued by proposing a mix of online and on-site activities and numerous self-reflection moments and outputs. Such combination can trigger in-depth learning that extends beyond the formal initial and final moments of the educational process, which is rather understood in the context of the longer learning trajectories of both learners and teachers.
Both CSO and HEI participants stated that the course was stimulating because it put them in situations where such skills were essential to connect meaningfully, navigate challenges, and achieve outcomes. This in turn highlighted the value of placing oneself in a position of mutual engagement and vulnerability, and created the conditions for participants to mobilise their own biographies, as complex intersectional subjects who are simultaneously students and migrants, experts and learners, that speak multiple languages, and that move across multiple cultures in their daily lives.
The Practices of Urban Inclusion course was designed from inception as an experimental pilot project with the clear intention of replicating its amended form after a rigorous and multi-dimensional evaluation. The latter was geared towards a deep reflection on both the improvement points and the challenges that are still in place when teaching and learning about migration and inclusion in the context of the spatial and design disciplines. At the same time, the initiative stemmed from a situated and embedded understanding of significant sites in Milan, Berlin, Brussels and London, and could not have emerged otherwise. In its post-evaluation phase the course has gained in agility and significant aspects of its trajectory are considered replicable under the following conditions:
- A long-lasting and site-related HEI-CSO partnership
- A trans-disciplinary team of learners and educators
- A basic and genuine endorsement of the manifesto’s values
- A specific socio-spatial condition that can be addressed
To mention only some of the main takeaways and replicable results that extend beyond the implementation of the course itself, the following relevant learnings are of value to a broader arena and pertain to replicability:
- Collaborative teaching: the course is constituted by muliple components and an open and flexible format that has proven particularly suitable for binding teaching, learning and action together
- Blended and hybrid format: the combination of on-site and « live » components introduces a pedagogy that is both self-paced and open in the design of some of its deliverables as well as more intense and directive in the jointly run experiences
- Alternative recognition and assessment methods through the Learning Journey and its corresponding support infrastructure
- Partnership pacts: through agreements and a multi-stakeholder governance system, the experience also tested non-centralized, ‘hybrid’ management model with no hegemonic leadership.
All course activities took place within a framework of joint learning and continuous exchange, embracing an idea of knowledge production as a collective and relational process. Learning, therefore, is not based on accumulating information or performing sophisticated exercises of description and representation, but through being aware of one’s situated position and fostering “a form of correspondence” with the sites of interaction and potential design.
Firstly, the course has a strong emphasis on learning from experience, making common space through collective conversations, explorations and reflection, immersively experiencing the complex reality of local contexts and conditions. We have experimented with different forms of ‘being in the field’, with the common characteristic of inviting learners to ‘inhabit’ the sites they would conceive an action or intervention in. We can define this as “a situated approach to learning” , centered on lived experiences, particularly those of exclusion, rather than embracing a neutral and ‘technical’ role.
Secondly, there was a strong focus on co-learning; on the relational dimensions of our pedagogical experiment. We aimed to build a collaborative learning community that linked our individual, subjective positions into a multivocal knowing subject that was explicitly multidisciplinary, cross-institutional and translocal – valuing diverse learning trajectories and connecting across disciplines, institutions, places and identities. The ambition was to build a learning community, by producing “spatial knowledge” across common experiences. Collaboration emphasized the importance of skills such as active listening, empathy, critical thinking, mediation, communication. Peer reviewing was a commonly used tool.
Both points above highlighted the value of placing oneself in a position of mutual engagement and vulnerability, creating the conditions for participants to mobilize their own biographies, as complex intersectional subject.
The challenge of welcoming displaced persons is strongly related to inclusion. In European cities this touches upon several areas, including that of education and training. Displaced persons, who are frequently experiencing hardship in many ways, also tend to encounter obstacles in the recognition of their skills and must divide their efforts to access fundamental rights – and related services – which are often sectorially defined, e.g. housing, employment, language training, etc.. In this context, the planning of cities and the design of inclusive, welcoming, and safe urban spaces and infrastructures is an undoubtably crucial issue.
Moreover, the Coronavirus pandemic has been increasingly challenging for those people who were already experiencing life at the margins, and, like all global crises, this pandemic too has disproportionately impacted those who are most vulnerable. The world-wide health crisis has intersected and exacerbated other existing crises, such as that of affordable housing, of migration, global warming, and climate change.
In the urban planning and architecture context, embracing complexity and critical learning implies proposing an approach to social change that is not divorced from how space is socially and materially constructed. This approach also views the production of knowledge as inherently specific, locally produced and “situated” in and within its territory. Nonetheless, it would be naïve to consider site-specificity as a nested spatial scale such as the neighborhood. Rather, the project recognizes the interconnectedness of global and “wicked” problems with the resourcefulness and the vulnerability of sites that have geographical, political, social and historical legacies. It is through a process of immersing oneself on-site and producing shared, situated knowledge that the world-wide challenges of spatial and social justice can be tackled in a trans-local way, reducing inequalities through solidarity across sites of engagement.
The pilot version of the course lasted 6 months, between May and October 2021. It was designed as a blended learning experience consisting of online and offline activities to be carried out among different groups of learners. The programme was organised around two live workshops in two neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany and Milan, Italy. The Berlin workshop focused on co-design and making and addressed the inclusion of refugees and asylum seekers living in the peripheral district of Marzahn; the Milan workshop focused on how to produce alternative narratives of migration in the marginalized and stigmatized neighborhood of San Siro.
Open online lectures, two student-led public seminars, individual tutoring and local cluster activities punctuated the course, confirming the close synergy between digital environments and physical activities. An online Collective Archive accompanied the training process. Three pan-European meetings were held to introduce the course, share the outputs of the experience and reflect on the whole experience.
The programme had the ambition to link together professional and experiential knowledge, artistic practice and urban policy, theory and action and —albeit temporarily — learn from processes grounded in different localities. The trans-local dimension of the partnership was crucial to this end, as the sharing of space and experiences across different settings also made it possible to generate cross-linkages at an urban and international scale that exceeded the scope of a single site.
The project team is currently at work on the creation of a collective book, which displays and further reflects on the work and experiences of the project participants. It will moreover provide a toolkit for action-learning processes in urban contexts. The project has tested a replicable teaching format with a more sophisticated and agile follow-up in the pipeline as an international summer school centred around a live workshop experience.
The project promotes renewed perspectives on city-making, while encouraging social awareness, responsibility and criticality in the mainstream teaching of architecture and urban planning.
Spatial and situated knowledge is broadly defined as embracing multiple (and not necessarily consensual) ways of understanding space, moving beyond technical perspectives towards a holistic, shared and practical spatial ‘understanding’ of facts, interdependencies and relationships. Creating a supportive, interdisciplinary community of learners and teachers, international by nature but locally rooted, makes it possible to combine different "cultures" that transcend disciplinary boundaries and enhance a sort of continuous co-learning ecosystem.
Secondly, the partnership emphasized the importance of skills such as active listening, empathy, critical thinking, mediation and communication. For the academic partners and students specifically, the intentional linking and commoning of different knowledge forms allowed for the de-construction of the privileged perspective of academia, and the re-contextualization of knowledge production amongst others, different and equally valuable processes of learning, sense-making and knowing.
A continuous concern for students was the question: “was this really architecture or planning?” This question opened a stimulating debate around the question of disciplinarity and the position of the urban practitioner in a network of relationships—as well as around the question of what architecture means beyond the design and construction of built objects. Engaging with the architecture of social encounters, the construction of networks and common spaces, in order to sustainably re-orient the question of spatial practices beyond building, was a new perspective for many. This was a process of learning as well as unlearning requiring the deconstruction of preconceptions.
