team:

Emre Akbil, module leader, MA Urban Design Programme Students, School of Architecture and Landscape, Urban Design [Architecture, Spatial] Practices

project summary &  operationalising the notion of the future

The 'Trajectories in Spatial Practices' module of the MAUD Programme at the School of Architecture and Landscape employs a design-based pedagogical approach where fictional storytelling is facilitated to reimagine urban design in an uncertain future. For the final assignment of the module, students engage in a creative process to envision their future practice, producing speculative objects that serve as tools for conversation within an exhibition setting. (Figure 1) 

This approach supports students’ future visions in two key ways. First, it provides a creative platform to articulate their ambitions and aspirations for emerging spatial practices, rooted in the sites of students' imagined contexts that are dispersed over the planet - such as China, Indonesia, and Sudan. Second, designing an artefact from the future practice liberates students from the negative critique of the present and supports them to engage with their future through a generative and productive critique across a relational timeframe of past-present-future. 

This module is structured around three interlinked pedagogical infrastructures: the Future Practice Forum, the Archive of Spatial Practices, and the Future Artefacts Exhibition (for more information: https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/trajectoriesofspatialpractices/home ). 

methods to project future(s)

The module’s pedagogical structure builds towards activating Speculative Archeology through interlinked steps. It begins with the Future Practice Forum where multiple urban design and spatial practices respond to the call for exploring the conditions for future spatial practices. The practices and their narratives presented in the Forum become the foundation for students to start exploring their own trajectories.

With the Archive of Spatial Practices, students actively engage with alternative research trajectories within defined clusters - such as decolonising praxis, gendering praxis, and commoning praxis. This framework enables them to develop a structured method for analysing practices and produce video-based narratives as group work.

This collective research then informs the individual explorations, culminating in the Future Artefacts Exhibition, where students contribute speculative objects and narratives that envision their future practices.

entanglements of justice in future(s) & design   

Spatialising justice (Cruz and Forman, 2022) is central to the fictional storytelling facilitated by the future artefacts. Along the process, students are encouraged to situate the ethical terrain and relationscape (Petrescu, 2012) of their envisioned practices, foregrounding justice in future-making. The three research clusters supporting this - decolonising, gendering, and commoning praxis - are curated to disentangle complex narratives surrounding spatial practices by addressing the extractive, patriarchal and financialised sedimentations which have historically contributed to the great acceleration and climate breakdown processes. Through speculative artefacts, students engage with these systemic conditions, imagining alternative futures that challenge entrenched injustices and propose new modes of collective spatial practice.

references:

• Cruz, T., & Forman, F. (Eds.). (2022). Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks (Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG, 2022) 

• Akbil, E. module leader, ARC6975 Trajectories in Urban Design [Spatial] Practices module of MA Urban Design programme, School of Architecture and Landscape, University of Sheffield. 

• Haraway, D. J, (2013) ‘SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no.3, p.18.

• Petrescu, D. (2012) ‘Relationscapes: Mapping Agencies of Relational Practice in Architecture’, City, Culture and Society, Traceable Cities, 3.2, p. 135–40