Assembling the socio-educational spheres within contested urban environments: The Role of a Community Learning Hub in a Contested Urban Environment

Abstract

Within the context of this dissertation, community transformative education is regarded as a pathway to an explicit community lifelong learning culture of learning. It aims to liberate marginalized communities from states of oppressive socio- economic status-quos within contested urban locations.

The dissertation explores the manner in which architecture can play as a networking tool, in a form of facilitating the social construction and distribution of local knowledge & resources within a contested urban location. Through the identification of global and local issues, new perspectives developed through the consideration and incorporation of local socio-educational networks act as crucial points of focus. The intention of these networks of focus is to use them as tools to improve the contextual circumstances of the contested urban location, through the empowering and transforming community learning.

The conceptualized architectural approach of this dissertation, is seen as a tool in which the relationships between communities of different socio- educational backgrounds in contested urban contexts are enabled and encouraged to collaboratively construct and employ their own local knowledge and skills in order to flourish together as one community. Local support is essential for community enablement- as every developmental progress hinge on it as foundation. It is therefore, access to local knowledge and resources that form the foundation of the social production of the explored space.

This, in turn, has the ability to create an urban environment rich in livelihood-enriching programs and functions, aiming at improving the lives of its inhabitants, and consequently giving rise to atmospherically and spatially rich and improved urban fabric and inclusive learning environments.