Neighborhood and identity living together

Abstract

Neighborhood and identity living together proposes a formative process for city making, which employs transdisciplinary formative strategies and culminates in community workshops. The workshop framework links the participants, both as individuals and as part of a collective, and enables them to access knowledge from different fields of specialization -including traditional knowledge- as they focus on urban projects in community spaces at the neighborhood level. This proposal emerges as an alternative to the fragmentation that prevails not only in academia, but also in the cities and in one's very being; it is a process that integrates mind, body and spirit - with the environment, through participatory learning in situ. From theory, the proposed process was formed using the principles of transdisciplinarity as a research methodology. An essential trait of the process is that it stems from one's own endeavors and one's relationship with the "others" involved, regardless of whether the participants are aware of the unfolding process, to find out which levels of reality are included and which are excluded. In practice, is based in a review of ten years of teaching through a theoretical-experimental selfanalysis, allowed this study to observe and assess the evolution and relevance of this particular approach to teaching urban-architectural projects, and to propose a path to its further development. While the formative process and the construction of a trandisciplinarian approach is always a personal choice, there are principles and participatory strategies that foster the development of the process in the collectives involved. Participation in the process can lead to the transformation of students, from actors to authors of significant contributions both to their own training, and to the efforts to save the neighborhood and improve the quality of life of those within it. Thus, it offers a pedagogic contribution in that it grounds the philosophy of transdisciplinarity in the field of research and in the teaching of city making, a teaching that takes place both in the classroom and in the neighborhood, among students and neighbors, and involves real people rather than alienating abstractions.