Info — Urban Lab - Design Agency

Urban Lab - Design Agency
What are the politics of your design & What is the design of your politics?_{School of Architecture - Iceland University of the Arts

designed and led by: Massimo Santanicchia massimo (at) lhi.is
contributors: Aðalheiður Atladóttir & Falk
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The Context
If designers are to find effective solutions to the most pressing problems of the 21st century we will need to re-design not only artefacts and habits but also the design process itself and our role as architects in the society. Since 1970s some members of humanity have used more than 50% of the world’s oil reserves, 30% of its forests, and 25% of its topsoil, whilst 52% of our species have disappeared. This condition of utter disaster has also created social and economic inequalities that have no precedent in human history (Klein, 2014). We need to design a new system that encourages societies to work with Nature and more closely and fairly with each other. We academics need to prompt critical thinking, social awareness and action in our students and work together. To educate is not only to ignite an idea but also foster the courage to pursue that idea beyond the classroom. (Resnick, 2016, p. 137).

Cosmopolitan Citizenship Architecture Education
Urban Lab - Design Agency is based on the theory of Cosmopolitan Citizenship Architecture Education CCAE. Understanding therefore our roles as agents of change in a world that is deeply interdependent where each local context is strctly related to the global. Becoming a cosmopolitan citizen architect requires the development of knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and behaviours to see, understand, image and act for the betterment of the world. It requires the development of fundamental social skills such as communication, collaboration and cooperation. Creativity is a collective trait not an individual one, and an intelligent caring creativity is ecological and socially responsible. Each project happens in a local ang global context not just in the mind of the designer. This context needs to be understood and valued, as all projects happen in a tabula plena not in a tabula rasa. Architects need to understand therefore what is on the tabula: people, activities, cultural traditions, ecological and social forces. CCAE is about awareness and activism, it is about acknowledging the context and its elements and find ways to work with them, activating them, editing them, to create more possibilities for all the Earthlings a more caring environment. We need to protect what it is of value, enhance what is underperforming, and even add new elements that have the capacity to create new source of values to be intended in multiple ways: social, ecological, economic (Ellin, 2012).

The need to understand our environment, to think in cooperative terms, to rebuild and protect the communal, the ecological system is imperative in order to face current ecological and social emergencies. CCAE is illustrated as a transformative learning process that helps designers acquire power by developing strong social awareness and collaboration skills within their communities and beyond. A powerful designer is a powerful citizen (Heller & Vienne, 2003, p. ix). The three fundamental pillars of CCAE are critical thinking, social awareness, and social action (Giroux, 1980; Guðjohnsen, 2017).

Critical thinking means opening the classroom to the world, to students’ interests and concerns creating the conditions for dialogue, for knowing, for developing empathy, and personal accountability. A classroom must be a safe haven where students and teachers become dissident intellectuals that is people who have the courage to “challenge the status quo as they dare to make their voices heard on behalf of justice” (hooks, 2003, p. 187).

Social awareness among students and teachers is developed when schools act as social platforms receptive of the society’s different voices and sensibilities. This happens when students and teachers have the courage to bring cogent and painful issues into the classroom, to discuss them, and expose them to an audience that goes beyond the classroom. By allowing students to participate in the learning process, teachers create the condition for citizenship education (hooks, 1994; Giroux, 1980). Educator Paulo Freire speaks of conscientization as the process of awareness that ultimately make feel us part of the same, bonded together in our problems, possibilities, and hopes. Conscientization requires time, trust, and dialogue among the participants. Conscientization is not a just pensive mode but it is reflection in action to intervene in reality in order to change it (Freire, 2013).

Social activism in education is about igniting students with “a concern for social action” (Giroux, 1980, p. 352) so that students can have the courage to think critically and express their voices, beyond the classroom. Social activism is based on the assumption that to trigger real empathy and genuine compassion, we need more than being informed—we need action. Philosopher and political activist Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others states: actions should reconnect us to the world, to its people and places (2004). Political theorist Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition defines actions as the essence of our existence: “A life without speech and without action is literally dead to the world” (1958).

Promoting citizenship in design education continues the Icelandic higher education’s scope that is to:

“develop systematically the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that strengthen the individuals’ future ability to be critical, active and competent participants in a society based on equality and democracy” (Guðjohnsen, 2016, p.169). A new national curriculum for education was published as a response to the economic collapse of 2008 under the Minister of Education at that time: Katrín Jakobsdóttir. The curriculum is based on 6 pillars core values:

1) democracy and human rights,
2) equality,
3) sustainability,
4) creativity,
5) health and well-being,
6) literacy.

Each of these pillars is presented by the Minister of Education Science and Culture with stressing the importance of schools for developing critical citizens (Jónsson, 2018). Wolfang Edelstein’s paper titled “Education for Democracy” states:

“The importance of learning democracy in school is linked to the present crisis, a crisis that presents the system in which we live with perilous challenges and risks, for which both governments and citizens in general are ill prepared. Beyond the recent crisis of the financial system that determines the present social and economic experience and the political disillusionment of millions worldwide, political scientists, have identified serious threats to the very foundations and basic components of democratic systems: the corrosion, as Münkler calls it, of the sociomoral resources of democracy” (Jónsson, 2018, p. 67).

We need to react to this. Inspired by the words of Milton Glaser: “good design is good citizenship” (Heller & Vienne, 2003, p. ix) we educators at Iceland University of the Arts believe that good architecture is good cosmopolitan citizenship by stimulating our civic consciousness, the awareness of the interconnection of everything and the desire to engage with our community, and therefore our world.

At the core of CCAE is the concept that creativity is a social not an individual trait (Sergison, 2018; Cuff, 1995). CCAE shifts the design process from individualism to cooperation and reciprocity, from abstract thinking to real life experience, through empathic collaboration and actions to redesign how we live together and therefore our meaning of democracy (Klein, 2014; Giroux 1980; Guðjohnsen, 2016). Education should create the condition that allows us to see, feel, understand, criticise, change, and be part of the world; in other words, education should empower us to be active citizens (Boyer, 1990, p. 65). Socially active students are the genesis to develop socially responsible designers (Lorentsen & Torp, 2018; Guðjohnsen, 2017).

John F. Kennedy in his famous speech Ich bin ein Berliner, on June 26th, 1963, urged the world to empathize with the citizens of Berlin in order to solve its problems. Today we are confronted with global social and environmental emergencies that require the same attitude: to stand together. We believe the centre of this shift is the notion of cosmopolitan citizenship. Martha Nussbaum explains the concept of cosmopolitanism, as the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world (Nussbaum, 1994).

Today we must all state: “I am a citizen of the world”: a cosmopolitan citizen. Education is about social awareness. It is about cultivating and developing not only scientific factual knowledge, but empathy, emotional intelligence, social and design skills to face and solve global and local challenges. Education for cosmopolitan citizenship is fundamental to facing the problems of the world because citizenship is about caring for the common good. Architects need to have the intellectual and moral ability to respond to the important issues of our time. Becoming a Cosmopolitan Citizens Architect means being:

A Dissident Intellectual: a person armed with confidence and critical thinking, who understands the many roles and ways of being architect and uses architectural thinking beyond buildings’ production. A person that contributes in the solution of current crisis. A person that has matured personal awareness and developed sense of responsibility, that has defined her/his moral position in the world.

An Ethical Professional: a person with knowledge of making and sensibility to operate in our multicultural societies. A person who understands the connections and implications associated to our design choices and understands that we are never alone: architecture is never a private matter. A person who never stops learning and knows that designing the right thing is more important than designing the thing right.

An Engaged Storyteller: an active member of the community, a person capable of understanding the world, willing to engage and communicate with it, a person capable of building a common ground, a person capable of working with different people. A person willing to engage with the diversity of the world. A person that supports education as a platform for dialogues with the world and collaborative social activities.

A Co-Creative Partner: a person who understands creativity as a collaborative practice inclusive of diverse forms of knowledge (Cuff, 1995). Educating co-creative partners means helping students to relate to the physical and social context, to the natural and built environment, to establish meaningful and profound links with them, and to make the whole partners in the process of co-creating.

A Carer of the World: a person who understands the local-global interconnectedness and makes the Other co-partner in the design process, co-creates alternative ways of knowing, expands sensibilities, stretches cultural horizons, and contributes to making us understand that we live in a fluctuating multitudinous rich and complex web of connections and interrelationships, wherein we are never alone, we always think with others

Massimo Santanicchia

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Ellin, N. (2012) What is Good Urbanism? journal of ARCHITECTUR E AND UR BANISM

Giroux, H. (2011). On Critical Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury.
Giroux, H. (1980). Critical Theory and Rationality in Citizenship Education, Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 329-366 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto

Guðjohnsen, R. Þ. (2016). Young People’s Ideas of What It means to be a Good Citizen. The Role of Empathy, Volunteering and Parental Styles(published doctoral dissertation). University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland.

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Jónsson, Ó. P. (2018), “In Search of a Democratic Society: The Icelandic Kitchenware Revolution and an Educational Response to a Socio-Economic Collapse”. In Democracy and Education in the 21st century: The articulation of new democratic discourses and practices. Social Strategies Vol 54 edited by Jordi Feu & Oscar Prieto-Flores. Bern, peter Lang 2018.
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Lorentsen, E. & Torp, K.A. eds (2018). Formation, Architectural Education in a Nordic Perspective. Copenhagen: Nordic Baltic Academy of Architectural, Publisher B. Nussbaum, M. (1994). Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, The Boston Review.
Resnick, E. (2016). Developing Citizen Designers. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Sergison, J. (2018). Teaching/Practice. Zurich: Park Books.

Texts by AQQ