Strategies for the Convivial City: A New Agenda for Education for the Built Environment

The problem of urban sustainability will concern many disciplines during the first decade of the 21st century. One aspect of this will be an urgent reappraisal of notions of ‘the city’ in face of the crises of urban living represented in popular culture and substantiated by actuality; another, a search for alternative models of what urban professional practice, and urban settlement, might be, such as ‘action planning’ or ‘new genre public art’, or the Open City at Ritoque, Chile, or the village of New Qurna designed by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. A possible third aspect may be a multi-disciplinary approach underpinned by critical attitudes to the professional ideologies of planners, architects, designers and artists. Urban forms are produced historically through processes of planning and design; a number of possible futures are thus open. Whilst the dominant conceptualisation of ‘the city’ reflects the dominant values and structures of power in a society, these values and structures, like the model of a city, are contestable. Education has, then, a responsibility to interrogate received notions of both urban form and the methodologies through which it is produced. This paper asks how education might construct design as a critical practice, how imagination might reconfigure notions of ‘the city’