Turning Circles in Neverland

Whilst it has become something of a trope to suggest that successful design education requires the development of programmes which advance interdisciplinarity, agility and job-ready skills, in reality this too often seems to translate as little more than competence in IT graphics and environmental data analysis, in combination with a knowledge of building regulations and u-Values. Consequently, abstract and god’s-eye-view design techniques remain the foundational logic of architectural design education, mediated by precise technical information. In contrast, the reality of the human person still remains a sort-of cipher, a Vitruvian Person, devoid of values and desires. Henri Lefebvre’s proposition for a return to the senses remains just as remote, the rhetoric of architectural phenomenology notwithstanding, and responsive, situated practices remain niche. Likewise, the site remains abstract, fantastical, viewed online or filtered through photographic capture, devoid of the specificities of sensory and hands-on encounter: the what, where and how of the techno-social context. Consequently, the output of architecture schools continues to walk this strange line - students tyrannized by turning circles and door swings, but on projects located in Neverland. The nuance of everyday urban dwelling, of what it means to be a citizen on a ground in a specific urban space remains the subject of speculation rather than knowledge. The political content of architecture is thus reduced to near-enough zero; outrages against workers’ wellbeing are brushed aside, rarely penetrating the spectacle. The possibility of an architecture or architects tooled up to do something good in a place remains unlikely.

This paper describes a research programme of long-term situated community engagement in north and east Kent that builds community resilience and supports social and mental wellbeing through in situ intervention-making, facilitated play and structured reflection, documented through critical ethnographic tactics. It proposes that the model of engagement described, whilst building on established pedagogical examples of live projects and community-engaged practice, offers forward a new way of conceiving of community practice, which situates learning in the socio-technical, and perceptual context to hand, eschewing superficial environmental and spatial analysis and the reductivist and subjective notions in genius loci-ism, and that has specific value to contemporary design-based education. The approach outlined enables student and research learning to quickly go beyond superficial engagement and contextual analysis, instead coproducing with communities a rich picture of urban reality as it is lived and perceived. Further, it argues that the simple model described is an effective tool for meaningfully encountering, and collaboratively assisting communities to improve wellbeing outcomes, enhancing what Tahl Kaminer termed ‘the efficacy of architecture’. Through this, the described model serves to reinfuse the political into design practice, emancipating it from the twin tyrannies of technology and fantasy. These three outcomes – accurate contextual knowledge of the social site, impactful design-making work and the reintegration of theory into design studios - are of specific value to current architectural education, as it seeks to foreground socially and environmentally just practices.