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ABSTRACT
In this article we explore the dynamic between the pedagogical and the urban, attending to ‘agentive urban learning’. By this we mean processes by which young people build agency in the urban context, in using the resources of the city to develop their own agency, and of developing agency to act within the city. By agency, we refer to the capacity to imagine and act to create individual and collective futures. Our interest is how young people develop such agentive urban learning themselves and how it might be enhanced pedagogically at school and university. Three case studies explore different facets—the first how young people themselves develop this agency in situated settings and the tools that they use to reflect upon the future; the second how digital tools might be used to enhance students’ understanding of the city as a site of change, in this instance, climate change; and the third how such agency might be developed collectively in partnership with other city dwellers. We conclude that a diversity of students’ engagement in urban contexts of learning offers ways from which to further investigate how identity, setting, and stakeholder relationships matter as part of potentially sustainable agentive learning futures.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the participants in the projects as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback on this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Andrew Morrison
Andrew Morrison, Director of the Centre for Design Research at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design(AHO), leads design research projects on Communication and Interaction Design, collaborating on service, systems, and product design. He works on design writing, fiction and criticism, and design and technology critiques. Andrew collaborates with the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape at AHO, has coordinated the AHO PhD School, has supervised and examined widely, is on the board of several international journals and previously the AHO Board. Prominent projects include YOUrban and Future North; recent books are Inside multimodal composition (2010) and Exploring digital design (2010). Andrew was co-chair of the Design + Power NORDES 2017 Conference, a member of Anticipation 2017 Conference, and the Chair of the 2019 Anticipation Conference. He led the AHO Research Review 2014–2017 into ethnographically and mediationally unpacking discourses of research impact. Andrew has published extensively on digital media, learning, design, urbanism, and landscape. He is co-authoring books on doctoral design education and the network city, and his own on futures and design studies. Andrew has an academic background in literature, linguistics, law, digital media, and pedagogy, and a practice profile in interaction and communication design, publishing, community, and health.
Ola Erstad
Ola Erstad is Professor and Head of Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway. He is an internationally leading researcher with a focus on digital literacy, but firmly rooted in the wider social and cultural context of learning beyond the technological aspects. His areas of expertise are learning, technology and education, and children and youth in modern society. He has led several national and international research projects and is part of several international networks and committees. Ola is vice-chair of a COST Action and is a board member of several international journals. In 2016 he was elected as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of Science Europe. Recent publications are Learning identities, education and community (Erstad, Gilje, & Sefton-Green, Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Learning beyond the school. International perspectives on the schooled society (Routledge, 2019).
Gunnar Liestøl
Gunnar Liestøl is Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He has authored and edited numerous books and articles on rhetoric, narrativity, and digital design, among them Digital media revisited (The MIT Press, 2003, with A. Morrison & T. Rasmussen). He has a long track record of digital design for various platforms, starting with early hypermedia systems for museums, cd, and the Web, such as the award-winning Interactive Kon-Tiki (1995). Gunnar focuses on combining practical and theoretical experiments based in and informed by humanistic disciplines. He is currently directing the SitsimLab project exploring the storytelling, locative media, and indirect augmented reality for simulation of past and future environments in situ, <www.sitsim.no>. Several of these AR simulations are available for free download, such as the Roman Forum, Ancient Phalasarna, Omaha Beach, and Old Narva.
Nicholas Pinfold
Nicholas Pinfold, a lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, has a Master degree in Urban and Regional Planning—MURP (University of the Free State), B Honours—Spatial Planning (University of the Free State), and Bachelor of Technology—B.Tech Surveying (Cape Peninsula University of Technology). His research interests are indigenous knowledge systems and alternative teaching methods. His career as a land surveyor (engineering) began with local authorities in the Witwatersrand, Free State, and Cape Province (South Africa) in the 1980s and then as a private practitioner in the early 1990s. Nicholas spent 3 years in the United Kingdom (London and North Yorkshire) working on various civil engineering projects. In 1995 he joined the Ministry of Lands Resettlement and Rehabilitation in Namibia in the position of Chief Surveyor and returned to South Africa in 1998 and worked for a private land surveying firm in Cape Town until 2008. His professional affiliations are in the categories of Geographic Information Science GISc Practitioner and Professional Engineering Surveyor—South African Geomatics Council (SAGC).
Bruce Snaddon
Bruce Snaddon, a senior design lecturer and researcher at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, has an MPhil Education (UCT) and is currently a PhD fellow at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. His research interest is transformative design pedagogy that addresses sustainable design futures. He has recently published on the dynamics of experimental off-campus learning spaces that enable dispositional shifts in design students. Bruce worked in the design and advertising industry in Cape Town and the UK until 1995 before pursuing a teaching career. He has served on a number of boards including Cape Town’s 2014 World Design Capital implementation company, several academic institutions, and chaired the Cape Town Design Network between 2013 and 2015.
Peter Hemmersam
Peter Hemmersam (PhD, MNAL) is an architect and Professor in Urban Design at the Institute for Urbanism and Landscape at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design where he heads the Oslo Centre for Urban and Landscape Studies. His research interests include city centre retail design and place-making, digital cities, periurban landscapes, and Arctic urbanism and landscapes. Ongoing research includes the project Displacement, Placemaking and Wellbeing in the City and a book on Arctic urbanism. Recent publications include: Hemmersam, P., Harboe, L., & Morrison, A., Building the brief. Developing a place specific urban practice, in E. Lorentsen & K. A. Torp (Eds), Formation. Architectural education in a Nordic perspective (Nordic Baltic Academy of Architecture, 2018); Larsen, J. K. & Hemmersam, P. (Eds), Future north. The changing Arctic landscapes (Routledge, 2018); Larsen, J. K. & Hemmersam, P., Landscapes on hold. The Norwegian and Russian Barents Sea coast in the new north, in Maier, K. & Ray, S. (Eds), Critical norths: space, theory, nature (University of Alaska Press, 2017); Hemmersam, P., Arctic architectures, Polar Record, 52(4) (2016).
Andrea Grant-Broom
Andrea Grant-Broom is an independent design consultant and has a background in art direction, communication strategy, and new product development. With an additional 20 years as a communication design educator at the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, her great interest is in creating and facilitating design-in-practice environments which often include biomimetic methodology. Content development, innovative curriculum practices, experience design, communication strategies, and operational coordination within the sustainability and social innovation space are her dominant activities. Over the past 7 years, due to engagement with a range of universities in South Africa and internationally, and including corporate partners, she has been able to connect design students with globally competitive sustainability projects and to pursue her research interests.