VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY
Abstract
Contemporary architectural education increasingly relies on digital tools such as satellite imagery, GIS platforms and Google Street View for urban analysis, encouraging students to understand the city mainly as cartographic information. While these resources allow the visualization of morphology, infrastructures and spatial patterns, they fail to capture everyday dynamics that constitute lived space: informal uses, social rhythms, sensory atmospheres, memory traces and temporary transformations. Consequently, design decisions often lack contextual depth and risk becoming detached from the socio-territorial reality of neighborhoods. This research proposes the phenomenological urban transect as a pedagogical methodology that integrates technological mapping with fieldwork, embodied observation and experiential reading of territory. Drawing on Patrick Geddes’ ecological and regional vision, Duany’s Rural-to-Urban Transect and the perceptual approach of Atelier Bow-Wow, the method situates the student within the city as an active observer, transforming the urban environment into a laboratory for learning. The methodology was applied in the course Urban Analysis 2025, where students developed transects in La Serena and Coquimbo, registering topography, land use, soundscapes, textures, practices and perceptual data. The results demonstrate that the phenomenological transect fosters more comprehensive territorial understanding and generates design proposals aligned with community conditions and everyday life. The study concludes that the urban transect is a relevant contemporary pedagogical tool capable of bridging digital analysis and lived spatial experience, promoting critical, situated and sensitive learning in architecture.
Aurora Damke Díaz is an architect and Architecture graduate, Master in Higher Education, and PhD candidate in New Territories at the University of Zaragoza. Her research focuses on phenomenological and multisensory territorial analysis, integrating digital and analogue graphic strategies to approach urban space as lived experience. She teaches architectural design studios, urbanism courses and visual-digital representation, developing pedagogical methods that combine technology, fieldwork and creative observation of the city.