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African Urbanisms>programme>session-22-schade

Learning from Brazil: Postgraduate education for the Right to the City

Session 22

Authors: Christina Schade (Federal University of Bahia)

Keywords: University Extension, Technical Assistance, Right to the City

Session 22: Unlearning the Known: Developing Future Capacities for Informal Settlement Upgrading

Friday October 25, 9:00–10:30, First Floor Seminar Room, John Moffat Building

Learning from Brazil: Postgraduate Education for the Right to the City

Abstract

By enacting the City Statue in 2001, Brazil inscribed the right to the city into national legislation and contrasted the previously prevailing modernist planning tradition by adopting a participatory urban planning and management model (Friendly 2013, 158) to “organise the full development of the social functions of the city and urban property” (Brasil 2001) by means of a series of municipal instruments. One of those instruments is the provision of technical assistance for marginalised communities, where participatory methodologies are postulated to enable knowledge sharing and innovation (Brasil 2008). To train professionals from multi-disciplinary backgrounds in this liberating practice, in 2011 the Federal University of Bahia in collaboration with public universities of other states implemented the specialisation course in “Technical Assistance, Housing and the Right to the City” as “Professional Residency in Architecture, Urbanism and Engineering”. In a truly educational commitment that perceives counterparts from civil society as agents of change (Freire 1983, 28f), 92 residents engaged with 30 communities to develop 82 projects up to now (RAU+E/UFBA 2022, 4–7), unlocking the potential for a critical, dialogical ‘practice of freedom’ (Freire 1983, 13f) in which people overcome alienation created by a the subalternised conditions of their daily life (Santos 2021, 225ff). Actively valuing their viewpoints, the course in an epistemological opening abandons existing hierarchies and reformulates the terms and contents of knowledge production (Fernandes et al. 2022, 23) and commits to an ethics of social engagement in favour of democracy, cultural diversity, and social inclusion (Gordilho et al. 2020, 12).

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