{"id":2,"date":"2020-05-15T11:10:12","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T11:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/ccpp\/?p=1"},"modified":"2020-05-15T11:10:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T11:10:12","slug":"ccpp-a-position-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/ccpp\/ccpp-a-position-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"CCPP: A POSITION PAPER"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Globally-Informed City Climate Pedagogy & Practice: a position paper.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>

Initiated by Verdini, G., Alkhani, R., Beech, N., Cascone, P., Lamb, T.,\u00a0<\/i>Woltjer, J.,\u00a0<\/i>University<\/i><\/span>\u00a0of Westminster.<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

This position paper aims to generate a debate on how architects and urban planners should be educated<\/strong> to tackle effectively global challenges, climate change being one of the most urgent. By recognising the limits of current practice, it suggests a deep exploration into the process of knowledge production behind it.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

The purpose is to formulate ideas for a new city climate pedagogy & practice<\/strong>. This will contribute to the UN-HABITAT Initiative \u2018Planners for Climate Action\u2019, which attempts to define future new and effective city climate actions<\/strong>. In doing this exercise it endeavours to bring to the table a set of considerations, which are increasingly interrelated. These are as follows:<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

  1. Urban and architectural knowledge, and therefore solutions for urban problems including climate adaptation strategies, has been predominantly produced in the Western world, and, more critically, used in the Global South where most of the urbanisation is today occurring (IPCC, 2014);<\/span><\/li><\/ol>
    1. Universities across the world have been challenged as institutions failing to recognise the limits of their knowledge production, and have been asked to incorporate a diverse contribution of people and approaches. This is part of the broad ambition to decolonize Universities (Bhambra, et al., 2018).<\/span><\/li><\/ol>

      Taken together these two strands point to the need to develop a more context-based knowledge, as highlighted in post-colonial architecture and urbanism (Hosagrahar, 2012). At the same time, it suggests that Universities need to embrace an overall transformative education model, which implies reconsidering both the process of knowledge production, and the development of suitable skills, values and dispositions to deliver a more ambitious education for sustainable development (EDS) model, as promoted by UNESCO (2017).<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      Overall, decolonising education and practice<\/strong> is here interpreted as the move towards \u2018alternative ways of thinking about the world and alternative forms of political praxis\u2019 (Bhambra, et al., 2018, p. 2), centred on multiplicity beyond the hegemony of unilateral Western civilization (Dennis, 2018). In the following part some of the concepts in use in this paper will be defined more accurately, explaining why we refer to \u2018globally-informed knowledge\u2019 when we talk about \u2018city climate actions\u2019 and why we refer to terms such as \u2018localising<\/strong>\u2019 and \u2018reimagining<\/strong>\u2019 when we talk about decolonising urban education and practice. This will be used to outline a series of coherent research questions that will drive our research in this area in the near future.<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      Towards Globally-informed City Climate Actions <\/strong><\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      While cities are recognized as major contributors to climate change, urban planners and architects might promote and develop low-carbon and climate resilient urban settlements. In particular, urban form (density, land use, connectivity and accessibility), housing and infrastructures are drivers of energy and GHG emissions (IPCC, 2014) and this has informed a newly launched UN-HABITAT initiative called \u2018Planners for Climate Action\u2019 to promote better planning for cities facing the impacts of climate change (https:\/\/www.planners4climate.org<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      Admittedly, the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognises that existing literature on urban form and infrastructures as drivers of GHG emissions, and therefore mainstream spatial planning and climate change mitigations strategies, is \u2018dominated by case studies of cities in developed countries\u2019<\/em> (Seto, et al., 2014, p. 949). Solutions such as compact cities, TDO, and even ways of financing urban development and to enable successful private-public partnerships, are generally tailored around mature socio-economic systems, in particular North America (Seto, et al., 2014). A clear example in this respect is the set of solutions for sustainable neighbourhoods based on the \u2018new urbanism\u2019 movement. Although attempting to prevent urban sprawl, they have responded, at best, to middle-class North American and European neighbourhoods development issues, without offering plausible and really sustainable solutions to countries in Asia, Africa or in the Middle East (Sharifi, 2016).<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      Overall, current urban and architectural practices still retain connections with modernist assumptions and paradigms formulated during the Twentieth century, with a risk of perpetuating long-lasting urban problems and preventing sustainable solutions from being found on a global scale as highlighted in the so-called \u2018Quito Papers\u2019 (UN-HABITAT, 2018).\u00a0 This book proposes \u00a0a critical reflection around the \u2018New Urban Agenda\u2019, the document that should pave the way for sustainable urbanisation for the next two decades (UN, 2017). Eminent scholars such as Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassen and Ricky Burdett and the former executive director of UN-HABITAT, Joan Clos, have highlighted the dominant modernist euro-centric ideology implicit in many new urban developments across the world, such as: the over-specification of forms and functions, the ideology of \u2018tabula rasa\u2019, and the 20th<\/sup> century bureaucrat\u2019s horror for disorder, particularly in large megalopolis of the global South. This has only amplified existing social and environmental problems in cities, leading to advocate for changing the mind sets of architects and city planners, and a new critical imagination of cities based on open-system thinking (UN-HABITAT, 2018), transformative city changes (Fokdal, Verdini, and Bina, forthcoming) and even experimentations of \u2018designing disorder\u2019 (Sendra and Sennet, 2020).<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      A globally informed knowledge for city climate actions means to develop critical mass on climate-related diagnosis and solutions to urban problems in diverse cultural and geographical contexts, particularly from the Global South. While this debate has been more generally framed as \u2018comparative urbanism\u2019 (Robinson, 2016), being increasingly hosted in journals such International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, <\/em>the focus on climate change is still loose and ill-defined.<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      Decolonising Urban and Architectural Education and Practice <\/strong><\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      Education for sustainable development (ESD) requires a profound transformation of \u2018how we think and act\u2019 towards developing knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to achieve a positive impact in the real world (UNESCO, 2017, p.7). This has been recognised crucial in face of addressing grand societal challenges such as climate change. Recent studies suggest that the concept of ESD, being rooted in the goal of wellbeing and common good, bears similarities to emerging approaches of curriculum decolonisation (Padayachee, Matimolane and Ganas, 2018). In the context of urban and architectural curricula, the fostering of a more critical pedagogy, implicit in decolonised approaches, has addressed concerns regarding both contents (new knowledge) and learning processes (ways of constructing new knowledge).<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>

      In respect to contents, <\/strong>this means advocating for:<\/span><\/p>

      \u00a0<\/p>