primary management team
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KNOW
Work Package 5
multiplying translocal learning in higher education
about
Work Package 5 addresses the question:
How do pedagogies of practitioners, institutions and networks become generative to urban equality?
We are moving four intricately linked cogs of research and practice, which we identified as hosting significant room for manoeuvre to address this question.
Click the circle on each cog in the figure below to find out more about:
To learn about our collaborations with KNOW City Partners and others, go to ‘Teams and Partners’
The relations between planning education and urban equality are multifaceted, and can be both positive and negative, challenging or reproducing epistemic injustice. Through researching epistemic justice, we focus on how discriminatory and oppressive practices of producing, sharing and using knowledge are currently manifested in learning processes, and how they can be disrupted through generative pedagogies and the urban practices emanating from them.
Our work package documents and challenges how the education of urban practitioners – including professional planners, grassroots groups, academics and everyday city-makers – is currently driving the production and reproduction of urban inequality due to outdated curricula, inadequate teaching methods or exclusive learning cultures. These shortfalls oftentimes relate to broader underlying issues such as colonial legacies, an understanding of learning as a transaction of knowledge between the expert educator and the novice student, and limiting urban practitioners to government planners with an accredited university degree.
Moreover, supporting processes to build epistemic justice also calls for making visible, consolidating and expanding the power of existing pedagogies that generate pathways to urban equality. This includes the ways in which pedagogic approaches trigger learning in individuals, collectives, networks and institutions, which strengthens emancipatory capacities for strategic urban practice. You can find more details about our approach to epistemic justice in ‘In the KNOW 3’.
WORK PACKAGE 5 team
The WP5 team is jointly lead by Prof Adriana Allen and Prof Aromar Revi and brings together researchers from The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. We work with city partners and regional networks across Africa, Asia and Latin America, and bring the Indian cities Jaipur and Indore as pedagogic sites to this project.
Lead Co-Investigator WP5
Bartlett DPU, UCL
Lead Co-Investigator WP5
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
IIHS Co-Investigator
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
IIHS Researcher
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
IIHS Co-Investigator
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
Gautam
Bhan
IIHS Researcher
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
Nandini
Dutta
IIHS Team for WP5
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
Vikas
John
IIHS Researcher
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
IIHS Researcher
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
IIHS Team for WP5
Indian Institute for
Human Settlements (IIHS)
Acknowledging that the construction of generative pedagogies takes different routes in different contexts, more specific questions include:
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How do urban practitioners acquire the capacities to work with rapidly urbanising areas in the absence of university-level planning degrees in Sierra Leone and large parts of West Africa?
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How is space for activism as a pedagogy and a mode of urban practise being created in Indian planning institutions?
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How does networked urban planning education in Dar es Salaam challenge conventional norms of the planning profession in the city, country, and region?
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How can curricular changes and pedagogic strategies keep pace with, and steer, the transformation of Cuban cities in an era of decentralisation and economic liberalisation?
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How do Latin American members of the Habitat International Coalition practice popular pedagogies and how do they facilitate learning across them?
Much of the WP5 research and capacity building is anchored in networks of academics, applied researchers, urban practitioners and pedagogues, which we consider key for building collective capacities to address urban inequality. We therefore collaborate with an extended group of partners at the regional and city scale with different levels of engagement.
These are shown on the map below.
WP5 Engagements with KNOW City Partners and Collaborators
SLURC*
Freetown
HIC-LA/
Regional LAC
Ardhi University*
Dar es Salaam
IIHS*
Jaipur/Indore
University of Moratuwa,
Sri Lanka
Chulalongkorn University, ACHR*
and CAN
Bangkok
KEY
Re-inventing Planning Education
Translocal/ Networked Learning
Generative Pedagogies in Practice
KNOW City Partners
*
Re-inventing Planning Education
What is the role of higher education institutions in building the capacity of urban planners and practitioners to challenge epistemic injustices?
This area of inquiry reflects on the changing ability of higher education institutions to spearhead efforts to de-colonise education and planning, and to carve and claim spaces that allow for addressing the structural conditions and political economy, while also promoting alternatives to top-down pedagogies at scale.
A qualitative analysis of planning curricula examines the approaches adopted by higher education institutes across programmes in Asia and Africa.
WP5 contributes to grappling with the changing roles of higher education institutions in collaboration with three different city partners:
We support SLURC in Freetown in developing a postgraduate MSc programme that responds to existing gaps in the country’s planning education. We, moreover, collaborate with Ardhi University to examine its historical and contemporary role in shaping planning education in the region, which is closely related to liberation struggles and de-colonising agendas in Southern and Eastern Africa. In parallel, we reflect on the challenges and innovations within planning education in pioneering institutions in Sri Lanka at University of Moratuwa and Thailand at Chulalongkorn University. Finally, we explore together with CUJAE in Havana how trans-disciplinary, problem-based pedagogies and a critical reflection on urban pedagogues can support the changing role of the university in Cuba’s political and economic transition.
Learning Trajectories
How do urban practitioners learn and acquire fundamental capacities to promote urban equality?
Understanding and making visible how, why, and what urban practitioners learn is crucial for developing generative pedagogies that are embedded in the context of existing formal education, continuous learning and learning on-the-job.
Across our engagements with the different partners in Latin America, Africa and Asia, we are conducting a series of in-depth interviews with alumni of higher education institutions, young professionals, educators and urban pedagogues, to trace their learning trajectories. These trajectories help to capture key moments of codified and tacit learning, motivations for engaging in the field of urban development and planning as well as how different modes of education and institutional environments shaped their skills, capacities and values to act on urban inequalities.
Translocal / Networked Learning
How does learning travel across different contexts and is critically shared through networks
to address epistemic injustices?
There are many contemporary and historical examples of generative learning in networks of urban planners and practitioners, in which urban practitioners are equipped with values, skills and capacities to challenge urban inequality.
After critically examining the geographies of networks of higher education and urban planning, the WP5 team is now conducting a series of pedagogic ethnographic and institutional studies with networks of grassroots and higher education institutions across Africa, Asia and Latin America. As networked pedagogies often remain fragmented or understudied, our work aims to make visible, consolidate and support critical translocal learning within and across networks.
For example, we work together with the Habitat International Coalition and its Latin American members to investigate their notion of a ‘School’ which is based on principles of popular education and the social production of habitat. We are also engaging regionally with the Association of African Planning Schools as well as the Community Architects Network in Asia.
Find out more about thre HIC Co-Learning Spaces here:
https://www.hic-net.org/co-learning-spaces/
In this stream of research, we also facilitate regional learning exchanges to multiply translocal learning and to foster the articulation and mobility of a variety of knowledge and capabilities to learn the city and act upon urban equality.
Find out more
Generative Pedagogies in Practice
WP5 engages with several sites of practice to validate and challenge our learning throughout the project and explore generative pedagogies, learning environments and innovative tools.
In the cities of Jaipur and Indore, India, we explore and implement pedagogic practices with different groups engaged in everyday forms of urban practise, that are often not recognised by institutionalised planning processes, or within conventional educational structures.
We aim to recognise the role and wealth of communities engaged in everyday practises of planning and activism, and strengthen technical capacities to engage with planning and governance processes, through a process of collective teaching and learning. Following such an approach, the team holds a series of workshops for housing rights activists, follows practitioners’ learning trajectories and devises pedagogies that pay particular attention to considerations of scale, strategic intervention and continuity of learning.
In Freetown, we work with City Partner SLURC and colleagues from the DPU to develop an MSc programme called “Development and Planning in African Cities”, which is due to be launched in autumn 2021.
With City Partner CUJAE, in Havana, we are co-organising an Itinerant School, which aims to facilitate translocal learning of community practitioners, public officials, academics and other urban practitioners across Cuban cities.
Finally, we are supporting WP6 in the conceptualisation and implementation of a Doctoral Training Course in the UK, which will provide PhD students aiming to conduct their research in cities of the global South with an introduction to co-production approaches, and helps establishing a UK-based KNOW Urban Learning Hub.
