The value of detailed maps at the neighborhood level

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The author claims the need of a systematic approach “that brings together the design of built environments with the best scientific knowledge of processes of change in complex natural and social systems.” Urban planning must work within these systems that require local info (through participatory practices) and the creation of technical solutions. He thinks the challenge is mapping informality as cities grow in unpredictable ways. He also claims that cities are about connections: “the socioeconomic and physical links that allow each one of us to make a living, obtain services that make our lives easier, and learn and invest our time and resources.”

The effects of connections can be traced as the concentration of social networks in space and time where the value of a group is not proportional to the group’s numbers, but to its interactions. GPS tracking, and smart phone technologies can help track the networks.

New methods from urban science allow the accelerated evolution of these neighborhoods to follow natural urban processes. They are based in part on the mathematical analysis of detailed maps, including the development of algorithms to optimize building access, delivery of services, formalization of land, and taxation, with minimal disturbance and cost.

Planning through the development of detailed maps at the neighborhood level is also an effective way to capture local, person-centric knowledge, providing a clear vehicle for better local politics via the coordination of priorities and action from communities, local governments, and other stakeholders. The convergence of a networked science of cities, quantitative methods of spatial analysis, and information technology tools is key to allow users to participate.

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Luís M. A. Bettencourt (2019) Designing for Complexity: The Challenge to Spatial Design from Sustainable Human Development in Cities Technology|Architecture + Design, 3:1, 24-32, DOI: 10.1080/24751448.2019.1571793

AESOP Congress, 10-14.07.2018, Gothenburg, Sweden

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H. Chang: Stakeholder workshops as a pedagogy for experiential learning in collaborative planning education: An action research at the Department of Urban Planning, NCKU, Taiwan (photo credits: me)

This was perhaps one of the most interesting conferences I have ever attended. I followed the track of education since day 01 and I was amazed by the high levels of participation and engagement until the end. I met a lot of interesting people and I am very pleased to have worked with them, shared my thoughts with them and discussed with them on the future of urban planning education.

I was very excited to have been able to gain some relevance compared to what we have been doing, especially on transdisciplinary learning. The Round table on Friday was a great experience for me. I think that all of us present agreed on being advocates of collaborative practices, social inclusion and cultural empathy as basic prerequisites for co-creation in urban planning and planning education.

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Round table brainstorming on the competencies of the future urban planners (photo credits: R. Rocco)

 

 

Use of VLE for threshold concepts

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DS AS LIMINAL SPACE

First Year students/ 30 students – one tutor/ Phase One

collage workshop – evaluation of learning through anonymous post-it notes:

  • what did you grasp today? what’s still a bit confusing? (if a student didn’t understand something, however small and seemingly inconsequential, it would be
    heard (anonymously) and acted on.)
  • whose work did you find successful? ( to remind students that whilst their drawings grow from personal values and engagement, they succumb to the viewers’ interpretations)

collage workshop – online summary from the session was prepared

  • The online space of the VLE with content structured in the form of a tutorial session served to allow students to repeatedly go over moments of uncertainty or trouble from the workshop.

The demands of project based learning are rigorous: the need to generate elements of work continuously (or fear falling behind) puts pressure on students to sidestep conceptually difficult elements by creating works that seem correct yet do not demonstrate a grasp of the underlying principles

First Year students/ 30 students – one tutor/ Phase Two

learning orthographic projection – evaluation of mistakes & omissions

  • double approach: hand design and CAD design of the same process_images looked right but were not right in both design environments

learning orthographic projection – online tools for tutoring

  • fifteen minute podcast and sample sketchbook as online handout

Removing activities from the scheduled studio sessions offers a strategy for responding to a stuffed curriculum and frees up time to focus on elements of transformative learning

 

References

Williams, J., 2014. The design studio as liminal space. In Charrette 1(1) Summer 2014.

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The “Connected Curriculum”

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CONNECTED CURRICULUM

UCL’s twenty-year vision and a wholesale commitment to changing programs of study/ its goal is to enable students to participate in research and inquiry throughout their education/ allows students to make connections both vertically across a program’s year groups and horizontally across disciplinary divides, even beyond the university setting/ research-based education aspires to widen the notion of what constitutes legitimate research and who has the authority to contribute to it.

The University is changing: new ways of knowing in order to thrive in a unknown future/ in the age of supercomplexity a new epistemology for the university awaits, one that is open, bold, engaging, accessible, and conscious of its own insecurity (Barnett)

SIX DIMENSIONS OF CONNECTIVITY

  • students are encouraged to connect with staff and learn about ongoing research
  • connected sequence of research activities throughout students’ programs (scaffolding)
  • research is inherently social/ students are encouraged to connect their learning across the subjects they are taking and with the wider world
  • students are encouraged to connect academic learning with workplace learning and develop a full range of professional attributes and skills
  • assessments: critical questions concerning their forms or types of skills they address
  • interpersonal connections between people from different disciplines, cultures and backgrounds

 

References

Carnell, B., 2017. Towards a connected curriculum in architectural education: research-based education in practice. In Charrette 4(1) Spring 2017, pp. 14-26

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The “Learning” Space

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LEARNING SPACE

  • (…) any space became a learning space because of the social practices being performed, informed by a variety of cultural norms and expectations, in fact it was made of these two [Harrison, 2018]
  • it is not a container in which the world proceeds, but it is a co-product of these proceedings [Thrift, 2003]
  • dynamic relationship between social norms, how material and social structures influence these norms and how they are then embodied by individuals/ it is a set of relations between individuals [Kuntz & Berger, 2011]
  • space is constructed through orderings or operations of objects and social relations (regional: where object/relations are clustered within boundaries, network: where the distances between elements and relations account for difference and fluid: where boundaries allow for leaking or transformation) [Mol & Law, 1994]
  • material space such as the design and use of classroom is not the equivalent of place and not the object, background or container of study, it is instead, a dynamic multiplicity that is constantly being produced by simultaneous practice-so-far and is enacted, turbulent, entangled and hybrid [Fenwick, Edwards & Sawchuk, 2011]
  • they are not merely material spaces but also conceived spaces [Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1989]
  • space dependent on software-driven technologies is identified as a code/space where software and the spatiality of everyday life become mutually constituted, produced through one another [Kitchin & Dodge, 2011]
  • web-based spaces are not containers in which online learning activities take place but rather fluid sociomaterial assemblages that take on particularities as people and things -both online and offline- negotiate how they move, mix and mobilize in their correspondences [Thompson, 2014]
  • virtual learning environments not only are places where social and cultural production processes occur, they are also bound by preexisting conventional systems that are defined by HE cultural processes and norms [Goodfellow & Hewling, 2005]
  • LMSs/ VLEs often reflect institutional, hierarchical perspective
  • when working online we work in destabilized classrooms engaging in spaces and practices which are disquieting, disorienting, strange, anxiety-inducing, uncanny [Bayne, 2010]
  • online environments can also be walled, hierarchical and traditional as F2F classrooms and they can also be “wild and open” where social technologies are hailed as “interactive. connected, free, easily accessed and accessible, enabled to create dynamic and nuanced communities of learners/ but binary versions of learning spaces allow us to avoid examining the complex relationships between learning and the spaces it takes place [McRae, 2014]

 

References

Michelle Harrison, 2018. Space as a tool for analysis: Examining digital learning spaces. In Open Praxis, vol. 10 issue 1, January–March 2018, pp. 17–28 (ISSN 2304-070X)

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Critical Reflections on Schön’s Reflective Practitioner by Helena Webster

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REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER

Schön’s failures:

  • there are other cognitive, affective and corporeal dimensions to learning that take place both within the studio and in other settings/ he produced notions of reflective practice at a time when there was a significant paradigm shift from “behavioral” and “cognitive” psychology to “humanist” and “situated” theories of learning.
  • students experience arch education as the sum of its explicit and hidden dimensions and it is this total experience that effects the development of students from novices to professional architects/ Schön confines his notion of student learning to formal pedagogic encounters
  • in his long explication of students’ encounters with design tutors suggests that the role of the design tutor is to ‘correct’ students’ designs, he fails to acknowledge that arch is a dynamic and contested field or the ramifications that this might have on the design tutorial interaction
  • Schön’s description of teaching is arguably akin to a teacher-centered model; described by the learning and teaching literature as a ‘transmission’ model of teaching/ Schön fails to recognise that Quist, as a representative of a particular institutional habitus, uses his power to direct Petra’s learning towards alignment with his normative habitus
  • the plausibility of temporal aspects of Schön’s concepts are also questionable: at what point does action become reflection-in-action and at what point does reflection-in-action stop and reflection-on-action start?

Today’s truths are constructed by cultural groups, Webster argues. There are struggles of power between the groups about the dominance of their particular truths. Architectural professional knowledge is constructed and contested both within and between groups. In this context presenting arch knowledge as unproblematic is odd.

 

References

Webster, H., 2008. Architectural Education after Schön: Cracks, Blurs, Boundaries and Beyond. In Journal for Education in the Built Environment, Vol. 3, Issue 2, December 2008 pp. 63-74 (12)

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Digital Citizenship through Hybrid Education

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Citizenship

  • Marshal/1950: Citizen is bestowed on those who are full members of a community-Educations as a social right/ Right of the adult citizen to have been educated instead of the right of the child to go to school.
  • Banks/2008: Citizen should be expanded to include cultural democracy and cultural citizenship as all liberal democracies are multi ethnic or multinational.
  • Mossberger et al./2008: Citizen defines as representing capacity, belonging, and the potential for political and economic engagement in society in the information age

Becoming and Belonging and the Capabilities to do so.

  • Capabilities to do so_McGillivray et al/2016: pedagogies need to be aligned with technologies to prepare both students and teachers to deal with the opportunities and threats of a digitally mediated world (…) Kymlicka/ 2002: Education for digital citizenship is not simply a matter of information, knowledge and know-how but it is also a matter of interpersonal and inherently ethical relations (…) Sen/1976: shift from mere technologies to what they enable people to do.
  • Becoming_Arendt/1958: the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, human condition is connected to labor, work and action. With action in plurality we become a someone. Education is when we decide we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.
  • Belonging_Bauman/1997: Inclusion as difference. Difference is not merely unavoidable but good, precious and in need of protection. A chance to reconsider individual freedom in diversity. Lingis/1994: community of those who have nothing in common is constituted by our response to the stranger (…) in our system of laws and our social institutions we recognize our formulated experience, our judgement, our debated consensus-in our rational enterprises we find nothing alien to us, we find ourselves (…) Biesta/ 2004: communication is ontologically prior to community but establishes community in the act of our response. What constitutes this other community inside the rational community is our responsiveness (…) Giroux/2011: pedagogy is a mode of witnessing, a public engagement in which students learn to be attentive and responsible to the memories and narratives of others

Hybridity: term originates from Latin and has roots in biology. It refers to cross-fertilization or amalgamation, the adoption and integration of elements from foreign cultures for Greeks and Romans, the international style in archaeology where no culture predominates (…) the term is closely connected to post-colonialism and multicultural awareness, it is an effort to remove negative connotations from words such as bastard or mongrel (…) Bhabha/1994: it is not a sequential blend of sth like flipped classroom or blended learning but it is sth other, a new breed, sth that is at least at two places at once.  (…) an effect of globalization/ hybridity emerges through the multitude of identities as a reality of the global classroom (…) Deleuze-Guattari/1980: a seamless and continuous flow wothout beginning and end akin to a rhizome (…) as a philosophical concept it suggests hesitation at a threshold (…) Stommel/2012: hybrid education is characterized by disruption, open-endedness, risk-taking, experimentation, empathy, dialogue and critical creativity.

 

References

Pedersen, A.Y., Nørgaard, R.T., Köppe, C., 2018. Patterns of Inclusion: Fostering Digital Citizenship through Hybrid Education. In Educational Technology & Society, 21 (1), 225-236

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How soon is now?

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  • Real Virtual: virtual environments that represent the real world.
  • Virtual Augmented Real: use of ubiquitous augmented information systems connected to the real world objects (ie. GPS data, pilot’s line of sight measurement etc)
  • Real Augmented Virtual: information from the real world gets embedded into the virtual realm. (ie. Kinect Sports Video Game)
  • Fantastic Virtual: products of unrestrained imagination

 

Reference

Pak, B. Newton, C., Verbeke, J., 2012. Virtual Worlds and Architectural Education: A Typological Framework. In Proceedings of the 30th eCAADe Conference – Volume 1, Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Architecture (Czech Republic) 12-14 September 2012, pp. 739-746.

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3rd International Conference on ‘Changing Cities’_Paper: Mapping connections in online learning communities: architectural knowledge creation in the ‘connectivist’ paradigm

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THEORY

The paper contributes to the understanding of social learning in architectural education through the examination of online collaborative practices and the connectivist paradigm in particular. Urban research conducted by NTUA educators and PhD students was used to create the body of content for a postgraduate course that ran for two consecutive years. The course format was hybrid; beside the traditional in-class meetings, an online platform was used to share content and exchange information between teachers and students. Students also were requested to establish their personal blogs. Their interactivity was monitored and evaluated in regard to their submitted projects and their overall performance. The way individual learners appropriated the information and the way they collaborated in a learning community with shared goals opens up to another form of knowledge creation and sharing between individuals.

Keywords: learning community; interactivity; analytics; data contextualization; connectivity; learning patterns.

Design Studio Education in the Online Paradigm: Introducing Online Educational Tools and Practices to an Undergraduate Design Studio Course

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Abstract— the architectural design studio, the prevailing form of design education, has resisted opening up to online educational tools and practices. Yet its affinities to the newest theories of learning such as connectivism are many. This paper describes an experimental configuration of multiple learning environments in diverse mediums for an undergraduate design studio at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens. The aim of the studio’s layout transformation has been to explore its physical boundaries and to create a collaborative milieu between peers that facilitated communication and thus, the exchange of information and knowledge.

Keywords—design studio; design research; collaborative design; online education; complexity theory; connectivism

research & Research definitions [OED]

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RESEARCH

research: the act of searching, closely or carefully, for or after a specified thing or person (in detective stories in 1577, in 1794, and in Bronte’s 1847-search for an overnight accommodation) also means investigation, inquiry into things, art practice, personal quests and clues of evidence which a detective must decode. [OED]

Research: in partnership with the word development, work directed towards innovation, introduction and improvement or products and processes. all listed usages are from chemistry, architecture, physics, heavy industry and the social sciences. It is professional practice.

design as research as in applied research where the resulting knowledge is used for a particular application/ action research where the action is calculated to generate and validate new knowledge and understanding/ fundamental research

 

References

Christofer Frayling, 1993. Research in Art and Design. In Royal College of Art Research Papers, Vol 1, No 1, 1993/4

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