This very first Urgent Pedagogies public event was presented as a part of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial in the autumn of 2018, and became the starting point of this IASPIS project. The full original video documentation of the event is now available from the Urgent Pedagogies Archive.

From the Archive re-surfaces pieces that have previously been published as part of Urgent Pedagogies Issues.

Contra-Urban Conditions, Periphery Scales and Localism, panel with Markus Bader, Sepake Angiama and Tor Lindstrand.
Photo courtesy of IASPIS

Learning and unlearning through spaces of exception

This first Urgent Pedagogies public event gathered international professional educators and pedagogical practitioners from the fields of design and architecture, to present on-going pedagogical practices, discuss cases, questions of methodologies and means of pedagogies.

The seminar presented and discussed diverse perspectives including 20th century utopian design and social approaches, to examples of pedagogical practice dealing with border ecologies and occupations, from eastern Turkey to Cyprus to Palestine, as well as urban and periphery conditions.

The first session dealt with the issue of decolonization methodologies in contested territories, how border realities may create pedagogical structures and how a border becomes itself a methodology. It discussed what kind of social co-existence and pedagogical alliances may be possible in divided zones. The second session focused on initiations of small scales of open school or pedagogical platforms that deal with different urban issues, periphery scales and localism. It highlighted how open pedagogical initiations can engage with inhabitants and how such design methods can influence localism and the idea of commoning practices.

Participants included Sepake Angiama, Markus Bader, Joseph Grima, Sandi Hilal, Onkar Kular, Peter Lang, Tor Lindstrand, Mark Wigley, Merve Gül Özokcu, Magnus Ericson and Pelin Tan. The event was presented at Arter and as a collaboration between IASPIS and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (Iksv).