Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

Embracing a critical pedagogy of play as a spatio-temporal tool for negotiation, this presentation explores how first-year architecture students can be introduced to the sociocultural complexity of contested urban environments, while simultaneously cultivating their imaginative and creative skills in spatial thinking, representation and design practice. The pedagogical method adopts play as co-learning tool and situated design methodology to activate spatial performativity and foster community engagement in reimagining collectively spaces of co-existence within contested urban contexts. More broadly, play is expored as a pedagogical method to introduce first-year students to an understanding of the built environment as a dynamic, performative field—one in which urban phenomena, material and immaterial borders, as well as everyday routines of the inhabitants are in constant flux. Play functions as a spatio-temporal modality of negotiation for addressing real-world problems, within co-learning and design praxis. It enables the transgression of boundaries that typically separate academic and local/lived knowledge, theory and practice, designer and user, as well as the tangible and intangible dimensions of space. By positioning play as a critical and exploratory mode of engagement, students can begin to apprehend and interrogate the complexities of urban space through embodied, situated, and imaginative practices, fostering an educational culture that nurtures civic-minded architects. This pedagogical model was developed in the context of a first-year architecture design studio course at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, located in Nicosia, the last divided city in Europe.