Introverted and Extroverted Spaces – New Pedagogical Approaches to the House and the City

About

Modern urban planning has institutionalized a powerful visual representation of a distinction between the light shade of spaces, which can be publicly perceived, accessed, and scrutinized; and dark shaded blocks of private enclosed spaces, which are kept out of the public eye. This functionalist dichotomy lies at the heart of predominantly topological considerations of the relation between the house and the city and imbues both our perception of these spaces and lived experience with ambivalences. One such ambivalence manifests in the way we relate to the private space of home. Feminists argue that home is interwoven in the city as a rationalized category of a mono-functional intimate and female domestic unit. Such a space is viewed as ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason, which is why intimate struggles within domestic space often remain invisible. When it comes to struggles in everyday life, the transgression of the public-private boundary is one of the main preoccupations of the feminist thought and praxis, reminding that the studies of urban space through functional and spatial boundaries often also reproduce the modernist order of power relations and social hierarchies.

Target group

Master's and doctoral students in architecture, planning, social and humanitarian sciences and other disciplines

Course aim

The goal of the summer schools is to reflect on properties of urban space through a new conceptualization of the relationship between the house and the city. We will explore plural dimensions of space through lived experience and (visual) representations. Extroverted spaces are those that are and can be made visible in lived experience and (visual) representations. Introverted spaces are and should remain invisible. How the spaces will be categorized and how the relationship between the two types of spaces will be conceptualized will depend on accessibility, openness to experience (insight), ethical considerations of subjects’ lived experiences, internalized normative notions of justice, the capacity to transgress boundaries, or merely ability to translate lived experience into (visual) representations.