A Pedagogy of the Urban — Article published in the EUCANET eBook: City Agencies Working Papers

The Tamp team in collaboration with Swetha Rao Dhananka responded to a call for papers as part of the EUCANET project that looks into “City Agencies”

Read the full article — from page 88 here

Abstract

While a common urban agenda at the supranational EU-level, as foreseen by the Amsterdam pact has been established, there are very local knowledge requirements to harness the potential of an individual city and to tackle its social challenges and relay them regionally. To articulate local knowledge specificities for regional imperatives and inter-city cooperation, there needs to be an exchange about hyper-local, sensory learning of the city and situated deliberation.

This chapter argues that urban transformations rather than (innovations) ought to be borne by bottom-up processes where individuals come together through common urban experiential learning to shape resilient networks of solidary urban communities.

We first, contextualise our argument on knowledge institutions by discussing such particular actors in cities that are creating local hubs of knowledge and argue for a new role for higher education institutions to take on more independent and open roles to catalyse and facilitate a process of “pedagogy of the urban”. In the second section we analyse the process of “pedagogy of the urban” induced through a partnership financed by the EU project – Urban Education Live – to develop a high school curricula involving civic engagement to produce local knowledge hubs in the Finnish city of Salo. We finally conclude by presenting a new situated model in view of engaging and creating conditions and access mecha- nisms for participation in knowledge co-production “in, with and for the urban”