Urban pedagogy, participatory processes, commons, and commoning practices allow citizens to participate in decision-making to shape and manage the built environment and city policies — the res publica. These participatory tools build a communal social infrastructure that empowers individuals and communities, but how do they change the role of the architect?
This conversation is part of KoozArch’s Issue #03 | New Rules for School.
VALERIO FRANZONE / KOOZ Your works gravitate around the relationship between the built environment and the communities inhabiting it. Would you each briefly introduce what you do?
MARCELO LÓPEZ-DINARDI I am trained as an architect and in critical and curatorial practices, and a full-time faculty member at a school of architecture. The university is my primary community. My activities are one part teaching and one part research. My work emphasises the university as a real space that allows for advancing thoughts, experiments, and temporary suspension of the status quo. Considering the university as a community significantly defines how I teach and research, this is why I sometimes work with it directly.
"My work emphasises the university as a real space that allows for advancing thoughts, experiments, and temporary suspension of the status quo."
- Marcelo López-Dinardi
DAMON RICH I'm a partner at HECTOR urban design with Jae Shin. We practise design, planning, and civic arts, participating in the private design market. Our projects involve public spaces, parks, smaller buildings, neighbourhood plans, and some work on regulation.
PILAR FINUCCIO I’m the Executive Director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) — we collaborate with community organisations, schools, visual designers, and artists to make information about the public policies, processes, and systems that make up New York City, accessible. Our mission is to ensure that people, specifically marginalised communities, have the information they need to meaningfully advocate for their rights, access services, and transform systems of injustice.
KOOZ Damon, you are the only licensed professional; how did you become interested in civic and participatory practices?
DR I didn’t learn much about it in architecture school. In my early career, I worked for the New York City Parks Department, which was a fundamental educational experience in the politics of public space. It was a great demonstration that whether or not you're interested in politics and participation, those things are interested in you. Seeing the messy process used to justify design decisions made it plain that I was in the middle of these things — contrary to the sophisticated ways I was taught to set them aside. Working for the city was how I first met spatial and environmental justice organisers and advocates.
"When we came up with the name CUP, 'urban pedagogy' was not something you do but something that's done to you. It was about the pedagogical function and potential of architecture."
- Damon Rich
KOOZ What is urban pedagogy, or pedagogy on a civic scale? How does it differ from academic pedagogy regarding scope, methodology, and roles?
DR Going back to ancient times when we came up with the name CUP, “urban pedagogy” was not something you do but something that's done to you. It was about the pedagogical function and potential of architecture. I think about bell hooks’s essay on black vernacular:1 she talks about when, as a small child, she was assigned to design her dream house, and later gaining awareness of the broader politics of architecture, environments, and cultural legitimation. In the 1960s, people like Stephen Carr and Kevin Lynch, in "Where Learning Happens",2 and Denise Scott Brown, in “The Meaningful City”,3 highlight the informational and meaning-making aspects of the environment, and how that connects to behaviour, identity, and power — the whole bucket of social norms, including riot cops clearing the students’ encampment at Columbia University.
"We design the programs to introduce young people to the community organisers, activists, elected officials, and government workers that impact the social justices (or injustices) they see and experience."
- Pilar Finuccio
PF Our youth education programs work with young people to provide the space and support for them to learn about the history, decisions, and people that define our lives in New York City. We design the programs to introduce young people to the community organisers, activists, elected officials, and government workers that impact the social justices (or injustices) they see and experience. Our goal is that they learn from different people, different perspectives to ultimately cultivate their own. We also want them to see that knowledge doesn't always come from a book, or a person with a specific education; but that knowledge, too, lives within the experiences of communities. The practices we encourage are to identify what affects you and the people you care about, learn from different perspectives, and work with others to create a personal and shared understanding of what’s happening. We want to encourage young people to see themselves as people who can create new futures and support them with the resources and knowledge to practise creating it.
"We want to encourage young people to see themselves as people who can create new futures and support them with the resources and knowledge to practise creating it."
- Pilar Finuccio
ML-D I love the idea of urban pedagogy as something that’s done to you or that you participate in instead of something you do. In architecture, the urban refers primarily to a knowledge about cities and their built environments, but also about the discourse of what is the public. It has been clear that understanding the city comes from how people manifest in space, along with what’s called civic and its behavioral expectations. Understanding the limitations of those definitions is crucial, so I try to infuse academic pedagogy with spatial practices, including social and environmental justice practices, political economy, racial policies, etc., which should be taught as foundations in architecture school. In 2010 when we traveled to Brasilia with students, we saw how ridiculous is walking in a city to be experienced by automobiles; this is an example of how I use walking as a practice and a tool of urban pedagogy that I bring into the academic space—I’ve done it now in Texas too. The university aims for an enclosure that serves as protection and isolation, and that's the paradox of that space. The value of urban pedagogy is that things are approached, learned, and experienced from the scenario itself.
"The university aims for an enclosure that serves as protection and isolation, and that's the paradox of that space. The value of urban pedagogy is that things are approached, learned, and experienced from the scenario itself."
- Marcelo López-Dinardi
DR Listening to you, Marcelo, I reflect that most architecture schools where I've studied or taught are about singular structures, and usually, there's one studio in a degree program where students design a building that's next to other buildings, and that’s called the urban studio. Basically ghettoising the idea of collective life within the architectural curriculum. A vital ingredient in my teacher training was supporting a reading and writing group at the Queens Public Library Elmhurst Adult Learning Center. They use a popular education approach that can be traced back to educators and activists like Septima Poinsette Clark and her work with the Citizenship and Freedom Schools during the Black Freedom Movement. Myles Horton, who was associated with the Highlander Folk School,4 wrote a memoir called The Long Haul5 that discusses the dynamics of movements and struggles, their internal relationships, and what he calls “conflict situations,” where the cohabitation of fundamental rules is being contested or renegotiated, valuable teachable moments in how the world is put together. When we disconnect building practices from social realities and conflict situations, education depoliticizes planning, architecture, and design, evading questions of power and reinforcing the status quo.
KOOZ As a practising architect, I’ve coordinated several participatory design processes and have always been interested in their value. Participatory design is not just about being responsive to needs; it shapes a social infrastructure by creating and strengthening communal relationships, awareness and identities. Can you tell me about the pedagogical role of participatory processes?
ML-D This past semester, I collaborated with a university program called Texas Target Communities (TxTC), which works with “low-capacity” communities that need resources to spark urban projects. In a group effort coordinated by Tyrene Calvesbert from TxTC, we worked with a community in Dallas, the East 10th Street Historic District Community, one of the few remaining freedmen towns in the U.S. and the largest in the immediate region. During the 1990s, the neighbourhood became a designated historic landmark, which brought both opportunities and challenges. Since then, many houses were demolished as they were deemed unsafe by the city, or the owners didn’t have the resources to maintain these historic buildings. As a neighbourhood in the city centre, it is under pressure from development. We worked with the community to design houses for the vacant lots that comply with the historical legacy through their typology. It's something very disciplinary, and there is also a delicate negotiation between the neighbourhood’s character, which has been blurred, and its current needs as an African American neighbourhood with a growing Hispanic population. Although not strictly a participatory design process, we worked on designing specific architectural types that may be helpful for the conservation of the neighbourhood and to avoid its gentrification. In this case, it is our participation — and expertise, that would allow the community to advance their goals. Understanding property changes over time and mapping ownership models was a fundamental strategy since we decided not to test lots owned by LLCs6 but only by individual people. With the students, we gathered information from the community, visited the neighbourhood, and developed a design process where our role was key in offering input.
"One critical question in aspiring participatory situations is to ask who has social control in the built environment and how it is exercised."
- Damon Rich
DR If we understand the design process as legitimising and justifying decisions for how something is or will be, we must see pedagogy as a characteristic of those processes: it’s how we designers learn to judge and articulate our work. John Forester’s chapter ‘Designing As Making Sense Together,’ in the book Planning in the Face of Power,7 helps me understand that in this legitimation process, we're always dealing with pre-existing interpretive frameworks, like how we understand power, what a good decision is, and what the collective or the meaning of “inclusive” might be. So often these days, the overwhelming amount of attention paid to fabricating evidence of participation — though not collective sensemaking — shows how power is being exercised and how we might change this landscape. Practising planning and architecture, it was a revelation to learn about the US tradition of community design from people like Roberta Feldman, Ron Shiffman, and Matthias Heyden, which lives on through organisations like the Association for Community Design, or advocacy planning and Paul Davidoff's work, and other things that appear too rarely on architecture syllabi. One critical question in aspiring participatory situations is to ask who has social control in the built environment and how it is exercised. Looking at how relations are formed between capitalist principles of property and democratic principles of personhood through zoning, building codes, and investment helps orient and give us cues we need to keep working together to understand.
KOOZ Marcelo, you recently published an incredible book, Architecture from Public to Commons.8 How do participatory processes and their pedagogical value intertwine with the discourse of the commons and practices of commoning?
ML-D Thank you; the book is a collection of work situated within two ideas. One is the idea of a transition of architecture from public to commons, which is about not abandoning the concept of the public — still our best connection with democracy — but by extending the notion of public into the commons. The second is about the commons itself. On one side of it is the history of land and its transformation into property in English law since 1604. On the other side of the commons is Elinor Ostrom’s on Governing the Commons,9 which relates to the distribution of resources. These two ideas — problematising land as property and resources — drive my attempt to think about the commons related to participatory processes and practices of commoning. I could highlight a few chapters in the book, in particular the work of Janette Kim in California and Nandini Bagchee in New York who engage with participatory methodologies and thinking with a commons’ lens, as well as Pelin Tan with commoning practices.
Janette Kim presents a work called In It Together, where she elaborates on a complex game involving diverse participants, and engages with practices of agonism and agreements. In this context of participatory design practices, and processes, the important thing about the commons is not limited to choosing a people-centred effort. Janette Kim's game design acknowledges shared climate risk, entangling it with people's voices and framing with it the idea of an accidental commons—or the result of a complex negotiation. Architect and professor Nandini Bagchee works with various communities, including community land trusts in New York City and their efforts to remove the land from the process of speculation. One example — the HEArts centre in the South Bronx — is currently moving forward after an intense years-long process where the architect used her skills to advance the transformation of an existing building by demonstrating how to repurpose it to the benefit of an intricate and organised community. An organised group is crucial for participatory processes. There's also a chapter by Turkish sociologist and curator Pelin Tan, who describes and discusses the forms in which people create relationships of sharing and exchange in refugee camps in Palestine and Turkey, discussing commoning practices as thresholds, as spaces of constructing commonalities where there’s no expert involved.
"Bringing the commons as a lens aims to be more inclusive of the elements participating — not just those civic bodies that make democracy, but all actors and agents shaping natural and built environments and their rights."
- Marcelo López-Dinardi
Today, there's a desire in some architecture schools to learn about participatory practices with a focus on cities. I also propose in the book to decentre the city as a site, since it still represents the projection of the nation-state project, and I’m interested in acknowledging its decline. Bringing the commons as a lens aims to be more inclusive of the elements participating — not just those civic bodies that make democracy, but all actors and agents shaping natural and built environments and their rights.
DR I appreciate people who insist on the importance of the social construction of space. Often, we talk about the status quo and all the resource-hungry mechanisms necessary to make it seem normal. I worked in a planning office and, in the US system, that’s a main negotiator with private real estate interests. Municipal planners are there representing the public at the moment when negotiations happen. One of the biggest challenges is convincing elected officials — and regular residents — that everything built in town is a negotiation. The design and programming of a building is never completely determined by external requirements, whether financing or zoning, that wipe out the agency of the public. When negotiating with a developer and looking to push any kind of issue, we knew that we could come up with technical proposals that work. Still, those technical proposals were worthless unless connected to political power. Without that, it would have been our easily dismissed and picky professional preferences. But suppose there were organised and visible forces making that same demand?
PF I think to follow Damon’s point, a lot of participatory processes to decide on the distribution of resources—space, water, sunlight—requires meaningful conversation about what people with power are truly willing and ready to do to care for the commons. I’ve spent a good deal of time learning about how difficult it is just to understand how anything happens in the city—how a vacant lot became a private pickle ball court or how affordable housing becomes so unaffordable. So much of what happens around us is overwhelming to understand, poorly communicated to the most impacted communities, and hardly designed for participation. If we want people to have a meaningful say in what happens to the commons, we need to provide people with meaningful information, time, and power. I think without meaningful care and prioritisation of that, we’re always going to be wondering what participation could have done for the practice of commoning.
"If we want people to have a meaningful say in what happens to the commons, we need to provide people with meaningful information, time, and power."
- Pilar Finuccio
DR Pilar, you remind me of an example from Septima Clark and the Citizenship Schools set up across the southern US focusing on reading, writing, and civics: one of the most common discussion starters for these popular education programs was "Where do roads come from?" Starting from this question, everyone in the group could add a sentence, collectively composing an essay. Andrew Young said that in the 1950s, one immediate association was that roads in Black neighbourhoods were dirt while those in White neighbourhoods were paved. The discussion then might continue by asking who's in charge of deciding which roads are paved, how that person gets their job, and so on, starting to pull these threads that connect what we could call built environment education to revolutionary action, which in the case of Septima Clark and Citizenship Schools led to undoing legalised apartheid in the United States. Architecture became a teachable moment for the purposes of critical democratic civics.
ML-D Many others have made links to the role of commons in the production and primarily reproduction of the built environment, including Silvia Federici in her book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.10 Her work framing women's reproductive labour has been crucial in terms of how I approach the commons, because it grounds life reproduction and resources through labour. She also discusses the university’s role as a knowledge commons. That idea inspired me in 2021 to do a project called Making the Public Commons to reflect on the public, public issues like the border, and public universities. The work of Federici was crucial for me to think about the commons in the context of the university, regarding the land grant mission and how universities — including the one where I teach — appropriated land11 from indigenous populations through the Morrill Act and how its lower paid workers sustain the university. Engaging with the commons as a form of knowledge production in the university questions the status quo of capital relations in today’s neoliberal research enclaves.
KOOZ One last question: how does urban pedagogy reshape the profession of the architect?
PF I’ll answer for the profession of the architect, as the profession of a designer. No matter your medium, urban pedagogy asks, if not demands, that we take on more responsibility and cultivate a deeper stake in our future, and the futures of others that our work impacts. I strive to do this in my work — reckoning with my privilege and the resources that affords me. It’s shaped my role as a designer by asking me to be in a deeper relationship with where I live and the lives of everyone around me. I use that to inform and create the best work I can with the resources, influence, and power I have. I think urban pedagogy has shaped the role of people who make decisions about the world by expanding our responsibility and accountability to others, and cultivating a genuine care and tenderness for the people involved in anything we do.
DR I’d like to replace “urban pedagogy” with “non-power evasion” in your question. Many conventional practices within all types of design evade direct discussions about power. I can share an attempt to learn from this observation by trying to put conflicts in a central place and reconfigure relationships of control. HECTOR led a large team project about a year and a half ago to produce a neighbourhood plan for five and a half square miles on the far west side of Detroit. The project’s sponsors, city government and foundations, agreed that, in addition to typical neighbourhood planning topics like housing, mobility, parks, and business, this plan should also focus on the neighbourhood’s children. This opened the door to add a Phase Zero to our scope, working for twelve weeks with nine teenagers to investigate the nature and potential usefulness of a neighbourhood plan coming from this big white city hall tower downtown. With these young people, we interviewed neighbourhood leaders, city officials, and advocates, digging into all the questions we had about how things work, and things that we wanted to see changed.
Like most teens, our group was very tuned into issues of equity and fairness, and had little practice or patience with euphemisms of power evasion. Having observant and knowledgeable young people in the room not only created these slightly different dynamics than usual, but also necessitated the active negotiation of rules in a way that’s often assumed passively. After the investigation, these young people led the public kickoff for their neighbours, during which they shared an hour of material and discussed the issues they had investigated. One of the biggest arguments we had, as hired design consultants with our clients, was who would have the mic at the beginning of that meeting. And it was enormously uncomfortable for many of our urban planner and designer colleagues to accept that the meeting would start with a mic in the hands of a 16-year-old. That change in the game of roles, the negotiation in public over those roles, and the exercise of power gives me hope for the continued usefulness of some kind of figure of the architect.
ML-D I studied architecture and have a professional degree but I'm not licensed, I cannot call myself an architect. However, I teach in an architectural school as a design faculty and scholar. The reason that I cannot call myself an architect is because that title has been appropriated by a system that primarily forces a professionalisation of the work and the knowledge that someone in architecture could provide. One answer is that we must also reshape what we teach in school and how. The projects we participate in can challenge the power relations involved in the client-architect culture, and a critical pedagogy can help us repoliticise our education. Today, we see our students taking their campuses, occupying land and creating liberated zones, manifesting against—and I fully support them, the oppression of Palestinian people and the latest injustices of imperial and hegemonic actions of our time. When I taught at Barnard and Columbia back in 2016, my students had explored the subjacent issues of their campus by researching its history—lawns’ landscape as group control strategy, the university as real estate developer, etc., and it all just came back. There is no question we should reshape the role of the architect by listening to what students are saying. It would also help us to rethink our power dynamics and practices.
"We should reshape the role of the architect by listening to what students are saying. It would also help us to rethink our power dynamics and practices."
- Marcelo López-Dinardi
Many people and practices — like CUP and HECTOR — are not reproducing the corporatisation of architectural offices and the attendant business model, which is the reason many of us have been a fan of them for years. We need to decouple the profession status quo from the practice; many are already questioning the forms of practice and who we are working for. Questioning the contents of our practice and expertise is one of the reasons I'm motivated to push this idea of the public because, by definition, the professional practice attention for the health, safety, and welfare (HSW) of the public is a legal imperative. But what is included and excluded from today’s HSW? We need to reshape both the profession and the definitions of health, safety, and welfare — not just for the public, but for the planet, at all scales, and the commons is a lens to try that.
Bios
Pilar Finuccio (she/her) is the Executive Director of CUP. She was born and raised to a big Cuban family in Miami, where her community design practice began at O, Miami designing projects imagined by the people of Miami Dade County. Her introduction to New York City’s policy landscape began at The Department of Small Business Services and Public Policy Lab. From there, she found a creative and community-driven home in CUP's collaborative design practice. Before becoming Executive Director, Pilar was a Community Education Program Manager. Her leadership is guided by a commitment to creating information that empowers communities, holds people with power accountable, and shows us the just and equitable futures that have yet to be created. She has a personal bookmaking practice, gives presentations about mangos to anyone who will listen, and loves to talk about CUP's work.
Marcelo López-Dinardi is an Assistant Professor of architecture at Texas A&M University. He is the editor of Architecture from Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023) and Degrowth (ARQ, 2022). He is working on the project Cemented Dreams, a project that examines the role of cement and its colonial legacies in Puerto Rico, as a fellow of the Mellon-funded study group Bridging the Divide: Post Disaster Futures of CENTRO (Center for Puerto Rican Studies) at Hunter College, CUNY. In 2022, he was nationally elected At-Large Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) Board of Directors for 2022-2025. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and an MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices for architecture from the GSAPP at Columbia University.
Damon Rich is an architecture worker and partner at HECTOR, an urban design, planning, and civic arts practice whose projects include the memorial for eco-feminist Sister Carol Johnston, a housing crisis learning center within the Queens Museum, and a youth-centric development plan for Detroit’s west side, which was recently recognized with the 2023 National Planning Award of the American Planning Association. Damon previously served as planning director and chief urban designer for the City of Newark, New Jersey, chief of staff for capital projects at New York City Parks, and founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), an internationally recognized nonprofit organization that uses art and design to increase meaningful civic engagement. His work has been recognized by the MacArthur Fellowship, Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, MacDowell Artist Residency Program, and Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies.
Valerio Franzone is the Managing Editor at KoozArch. He is a Ph.D. Architect (Università IUAV di Venezia), and his work focuses on the relationships between architecture, humanity, and nature, investigating architecture’s role, limits, and potential to explore new typologies and strategies. A founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura, he later established Valerio Franzone Architect and OCHAP | Office for Cohabitation Processes. His projects have been awarded in international competitions and shown in several exhibitions, such as the 7th, 11th, and 14th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. His projects and texts appear in magazines such as Domus, A10, Abitare, Volume, and AD Architectural Design.
Notes
1 hooks, bell. “Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice,” in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995, 145-151
2 Stephen Carr, Kevin Lynch, “Where Learning Happens“, Daedalus, Vol. 97, No. 4, The Conscience of the City (Fall, 1968), pp. 1277-1291
3 Denise Scott Brown, “The Meaningful City,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 43, January 1965, pp. 27-32
4 Now named Highlander Research and Education Center.
5 Myles Horton, Judith Kohl, and Herbert R. Kohl, The Long Haul: An Autobiography, 1st ed (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
6 A Limited Liability Company is a United States specific type of private company.
7 John Forester, “Designing As Making Sense Together” in Planning in the Face of Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 119-133.
8 Marcelo López-Dinardi, ed., Architecture from Public to Commons (London New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2024).
9 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2015), [online].
10 Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2019).
11 For more on universities land appropriation see [online]
