Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
Spatial Design Practices is a confrontational design lexicon embedded within the Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) program at Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU). It was developed as an attempt to problematising the practices of othering and epistemological injustices that are deeply absorbed into the structure of urban planning and design education in the UK and beyond. Spanning three semesters, the module challenges preconceptions of space as fixed and as an immobile script of urban dynamics and instead reframe the space conceptually, deconstruct it normatively and reconfigure it affectively. In this paper, we focus on our effort to develop a pedagogy grounded in a feminist lexicon; one that includes, among other concepts, Reframing, Problematizing, Pluralizing, Decolonizing, Dislocating/Decentering, and Reorienting—each forming a section of the paper. Our aim is to enhance embodied and power-sensitive engagement with space, its relativity and its underlying forces by designing extra-classroom practices such as urban walks, not only as a way of knowing, but also as a means of rewriting the urban and interrogating positionalities. We work with buildings as actors, listen to materials and plants, engage in storytelling, and explore the collaborative forms of life and frictions that emerge within constraints and urban struggles. In this paper we discuss how our approach cultivates alternative intellectual, pedagogical and political design research skills, how it recalibrates the Eurocentric urban design knowledge by grounding learning in the struggles of the community locally and how it deconstructs our philosophical apparatuses by engaging with the city as a contested timeline of lived experience, where silenced voices are brought to the fore.
Mahsa Alami Fariman: I am an urban researcher and educator with a background in Architectural and Urban studies. Prior to joining The Bartlett Development Planning Unit as lecturer in Just Urbanism, Societal Diversity and Citizenship, I have taught urban geography at Coventry University and lectured at Goldsmiths University of London. I received my PhD in Urban Sociology from Goldsmiths, studied MA in Architecture at the University of Westminster and BA in Architecture at Azad University in Iran. My research focuses on open city, feminist urbanism, and production of everyday urban life in the Middle East
Giovanna Astolfo: I am an urban researcher with an architectural theory and practice background. As an Associate Professor at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), I combine funded research, research-based teaching, consultancy, project management and action learning from several contested and ungovernable urban geographies in Southeast Asia, the Amazon region, West Africa, Southern, Eastern Europe and UK, with a focus on non-conventional urbanisms, continuous displacement and migration, spatial violence and housing justice