Abstract:
This paper describes three approaches to an ‘urban pedagogy’; a postgraduate lab, an under-graduate event studio, and a primary school performance walk. To think through what is going on in such an urban pedagogy, where the city is our school, the idea of ‘technical democracy’, a move towards democratising expertise by fostering collaboration among experts and lay-people, is borrowed from science and technology studies. In the urban realm technical democracy is sought through ‘hybrid research forums’ that coalesce under dimensions of ‘shared uncertainty’ and ‘material politics’, to engage in ‘collective experimentation’ with an impetus towards the ‘fragile democratisation’ of knowledge and expertise. These dimensions are explored as the conceptual field in which this urban pedagogy takes place. Considering design research teaching and learning as social labour set within these dimensions, re-frames the subjectivity of teachers, students and communities as collaborators in the work, and, it is argued, prepares students for contemporary forms of expanded architectural practice.