Book launch // Feb 20th at 17.30-18.30 // Tampere University Hervanta campus, Kampusareena auditorium
DATUTOP was founded in 1982, ostensibly as an English language publication series in architecture theory. Among the notable contributing authors to DATUTOP have been Stanford Anderson, Caroline Bos, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, M. Christine Boyer, Roger Connah, David Goldblatt, Doug Graf, Charles Jencks, Paul Kriesis, Jeff Malpas, Adriana Matei, Ákos Moravánszky, Riitta Nikula, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Nikos Salingaros, Vana Tentokali, Necdet Teymur and Anthony Vidler.
The 41st issue of DATUTOP is devoted to the theme of pedagogy within urban planning and design. The writers have all taught courses at Tampere University (or its earlier incarnation, Tampere University of Technology), specifically courses that were involved with understanding urban processes and offering a designer’s interpretation in responding to project tasks.
Among these there is also a chapter by researchers of Insurgent Spatial Practices, taking a look into the course we taught just when the COVID 19 pandemic pushed on. The course on Urban Activism was key in leading to the establishment of this collective, as it also kept us sane and inspired while surviving the pandemic. In the chapter we reflect on our course through the concept of critical-democratic engagement, where the purpose of all teaching should be to get different kinds of both conceptual and practical tools to have agencies in the contradictory processes with imbalanced power relations our societies have. Working with five cases of urban activism in Tampere we gained new critical perspectives on the city and got inspired by the actual examples of people having realized their dreams. One of the gifts of our course to the architecture students was that they got into a new learning environment, mixing with students from a variety of fields from youth studies to environmental policy and literature, who all nonetheless were excited of urban space. Our aim is to realize a new version of the course autumn 2024.