Walking The City: An Alternative Approach in Architectural

Pedagogy Through Collaborative Networks

Hafiz AMIRROL
Department of Architecture
School of Architecture, Planning and Policy Development
Institut Teknologi Bandung
Jl. Ganesha 10 Bandung 40132
INDONESIA
h.amirrol@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

The process of teaching and learning architecture in today’s complex and diverse condition can
sometimes be difficult and also challenging. One of the great mistakes most architecture schools make
is to think that they are simply in the business of producing great architects. However, there should be
a greater ambition to this – a school of architecture must also be on top of all: a promoter and
collector of new architectural ideas, ambitions, techniques, agendas and act as a malleable platform to
all new minds that are interested to join this platform. By seeing this as an agenda to promote a more
reflexive and progressive kind of architectural education, this paper try to discuss an alternative
approach in architectural pedagogy by promoting a technique in teaching and learning, which is
known as dérive, or the practice of urban drifting. This situational-based technique in learning things
related to our everyday life and the city is an attempt at analysis of the totality of daily life practice,
through the passive movement through space. Amidst of Bandung’s complex arrangement of
interwoven layers of city and lifestyle components, this technique of walking or drifting the city can be
an effective method in approaching issues of the psychological aspects of the built environment. This
kind of architectural pedagogy is a concept of exploring the built environment without preconceptions,
and to discuss the reality of actually inhabiting the environment. By using Bandung as the city context,
coupled with its wide myriad of creative inhabitants/ city users, walking in the city as a new tool in
teaching and learning architecture may promote the participants (teachers, students and collaborators)
as having a key role in understanding, participating, portraying and intervene the city in a more
responsive way.

Keywords: architectural pedagogy, dérive, psychogeography, urban drifting, direct urbanism,

Bandung, collaborative networks

INTRODUCTION

In the book Occupying Architecture (1998), Mark Cousins described architecture as a discipline which
involved the collection of prior knowledge from various fields except architecture. He further
elaborated architecture as a field immeasurable and indeterminate. Thus, if this is the case, architectural
design, which also include its process of teaching and learning, is an ‘indeterminate’ act that
encompasses humanistic value of the physical and the emotional. This paper tries to examine the
potential of urban drifting as an alternative act or tool in designing architecture in promoting a more
reflexive, progressive and ‘real’ kind of architectural education; focusing on how by the simple act of
walking and wandering through the city can generate alternatives design and architectural pedagogy
approaches.

Walking deals with the wide myriad of phenomena in life – the mundane and the dynamics. It provides
unexpected accumulation of the physical and the social, and has been long associated with the city.
Looking at the city and its inhabitants today, they provide the values to understand urban infrastructure
and ‘stories’ at the most intimate, humanistic scale for architects to understand its complexities and
hidden dimensions that sometimes are barely noticed without the act of walking through the city.
Immemorially, it has been noted that famous philosophers, artists, writers and poets had their works
inspired by their city through the daily walking activities; strolling and observing the phenomena that
took place on a daily occasion. (Sulaiman, 2007)
The city, which is the subject of the wanderer, has been the focus of many literatures in urban theories
where scholars, teachers and students try to understand and design. Cities have been the best laboratory
for architectural studies, and notable architectural schools such as London’s Architectural Association
School of Architecture and The Bartlett, New York’s Columbia University, Pratt Institute and Cooper
Union, Rotterdam’s The Berlage Institute of Architecture and many other prestigious institutions have
long been using the city as their laboratory and playground in understanding design issues. Their
architectural pedagogy approached the city as a unified element – as an overall synthesis of different
disassociated parts. At the same time, these schools also recognize the need of realizing the city by
parts, i.e. singular element or place in order to really able to understand it.

The process of teaching and learning architecture in today’s complex and diverse condition can
sometimes be difficult and also challenging. One of the great mistakes most architecture schools make
is to think that they are simply in the business of producing great architects (Steele, 2009). However,
there should be a greater ambition to this – a school of architecture must also be on top of all – a
promoter and collector of new architectural ideas, ambitions, techniques, agendas and act as a malleable
platform to all new minds that are interested to join this platform. It is the interest of this paper to
delineate the potentials and importance of walking through the city as an alternative tool in the process
of architectural education.

The concept of the city as a playfield in understanding architecture and urbanism shall be explored to
the smallest and detail scale, and only by exploring the city by wandering through it will provide
students and teachers of architecture to really experience its phenomena and the real story behind it.
This paper will focus on the issues of the generic architectural pedagogy that is happening in most
architecture schools, and to re-examine it by proposing this alternative approach using the method of
urban drifting and through collaborative networks. In order to share the idea of this method, the paper
will discuss several theories that were constructed based on the same idea, and will also lay some case
studies that show examples how architectural education may progress by utilizing this method. It is
hoped that by the understanding and execution of this method, architectural discoveries will soon arrive
in a more unexpected of ways, made possible by the perceptible shifts in ways of observing cities,
space, structure and social life.

ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY AND THE CASE OF BANDUNG

Mark Wigley, architect, educator and the current Dean at Columbia University’s GSAPP believes that
the best teacher of architecture embrace the future by trusting the students, supporting the growth of
something that cannot be seen yet. He believes that this is a kind of emerging sensibility that cannot be
judged by contemporary standards but must foster from a way of thinking and actions that draw on
everything that is known in order to reach the unknown (Wigley, 2009). Architectural education
becomes a form of optimism that gives our field a future by trusting the students to see, think, and do
things with the goal to achieve a certain evolution in architectural intelligence. The process towards this
kind of evolution is not an easy task for an architectural school to achieve. The direction of the school
must be clearly defined, supported with dedicated academic staffs and students that should see
architecture as a set of endlessly absorbing questions for the society rather than a set of clearly defined
objects with particular effects.

Architectural knowledge, known for its complexity and wide-ranging process may involve an endless
kind of enquiries. One of them is by gaining through experience (Purwono, 1989). Bacon (1967)
emphasizes the importance of personal experience in movement through spaces in the design of cities.
Bloomer and Moore (1977) suggest the importance of introducing architecture to students from the
standpoint of how buildings are experienced, rather than how they are built. This kind of approach in
teaching, learning and experiencing architecture might have been developed by speculating human’s
psycho-physical properties, and draws much influence from the works of the environment
psychologists such as James Gibson and phenomenologist, such as Christian Norberg-Schulz and
Gaston Bachelard. These methodologies in architectural pedagogy may provide interesting results by
engaging participants directly with the city as the field of study.

The city, seen as the best experiment in understanding architecture and most of its components, shall be
considered as the product of the generative functional systems of its architecture and urban spaces. This
system suggests that the city is derived from an analysis of political, social and economical systems and
is treated from the viewpoint of these disciplines. The city, with its complex spatial structure shall also
be drawn into deeper understanding by analyzing its significant structure, problems of description,
classification and typology, individuality of urban artifacts, and its urban dynamics and the problem of
politics of choice (Rossi, 1984). These matters must be explored and developed further with
understanding and perceptions that are not restricted with a preconception, thus the notion of exploring
the city to its finest detail must be conducted to establish a complete panorama of architectural studies.

This paper will emphasize on the potential of Bandung city (Figure 1) as the testing ground to apply
this alternative method in architectural education. Bandung is located in the province of West Java and
is one of Indonesia’s cities with a rapid growth rate. This is indicated by the existence of large-scale
economic activities with large capital such as industrial activities, communication facilities, creative
economies and comprehensive transportation networks in supporting social mobility, facilities for
education and religion practice as well as adequate health facilities. These conditions had forced
Bandung to develop as a city that should provide decent living, working and playing environments to
all of its inhabitants due to the accelerating density growth. Nevertheless, it is a sad fact to know that
Bandung, with all of its potential, rich resources that are readily available, and its wonderful
geographical features, is still facing many urban problems due to the lack of proper and decent
infrastructure and facilities, added with poor maintenance of readily available infrastructures.

Bandung has also been the center for knowledge and creativity for Indonesia for many decades. The
high numbers of higher institutions, many of which focus on arts, science, engineering, and technology,
help in projecting the image of Bandung as a creative and intellectual city. The city’s geography and
strategic location play key roles in the characterization of its creative community. With the initiation of
the Bandung Creative City Project and it being chosen as the pilot city for East Asia Creative City
Project in 2013, the creative industries in Bandung showed significant developments and trends
affecting young people from various cities. Bandung will soon become a central point in the future
creative-based economic development and this promise great potential for Bandung to be the testing
ground to promote the notion of dérive in the process of architectural teaching and learning through
creative collaborative networks.

Figure 1. Bandung – city map and aerial view

Source: www.mapsntrails.com, 2009.

However, these potentials seemed to be underutilized by those involved in the practice of architectural
education by not using the context of the city to its fullest in the effort to understand urban paradigms.
The complex composition and deep-rooted problems of the city actually is a positive platform that
provide conditions that may help students and teachers of architecture to progress with an emerging
kind of architectural explorations since it offer numerous examples of indeterminate potentialities to
activate many kind of spaces. Successful spaces are usually parceled up into places by people through
the manifold identifications of events that revolve in their daily life. People’s understanding of space is
dependent on their experience of the places they identify themselves within the broader context of
generic spaces surrounding them. (Zubir, 2009)

The question of conventional or ‘standard’ architectural education system haunts the advance
progression of architectural institutions in Bandung. Currently, there are seven accredited higher
institutions in Bandung that provide formal architectural education. Ever since the beginning, students
and teachers have been prescribed to generic architectural education syllabus that is valued far greater
than any agenda that promotes creativity. Even though the current system that is being offered is not
wrong and is efficient enough to produce architects and designers for the industry, more serious
concern demanding architectural schools to secure their position as educational centers rather than
training institution is also an important agenda that all architecture schools need to take note (Vidler
and Chadwick, 2004). This agenda and other creative or alternative pedagogy systems are those that
make architectural discourse unique.

From here, the paper will try to see alternative yet relevant methods that may encourage architectural
education to be seen as a comprehensive creative process, rather than as a rigid system that is being
formatted to respond to the economic and capitalistic demand of the industry. The examples that will be
discussed here involve creative collaboration networks that are loosely formed by those that see the
importance of non-standard methods in approaching architectural and urban studies in a more holistic
point of view. Urban drifting will be the focus of the discussion of the case studies.

THE NOTION OF DÉRIVE AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Stalker, Rome

Stalker is an interdisciplinary collective involving architects, landscape architects, artists and others
from various disciplines, formed in the early 1990s when radical Italian student movements were at
their peak. The group was mainly inspired by the radical collective research groups such as Archigram,
Superstudio, Archizoom and UFO, as well as some experimental architects of the 1960s including
Cedric Price and Yona Friedman and Situationist theories. Their main subject of observation engages
research and actions within the landscape with particular attention to the areas around the city's margins
and forgotten urban space, and abandoned areas or regions under transformation. These investigations
are conducted across several levels, around notions of practicality, representations and interventions on
these spaces that are referred to here as ‘Actual Territories’ (Stalker, 1996).

The collective focuses its projects on interstitial urban spaces, migrations of non-European cultures,
urban social mobility and living patterns, observation, mapping, site-specific interventions and new
media. The multi-disciplinary roles are disposed to confront at once the apparently unsolvable
contradictions of salvaging through abandonment, of representation through sensorial perception, of
intervening within the unstable and mutable conditions of the city. Stalker’s ‘Actual Territories’
constitute the built city’s as spaces of confrontation and contamination between the organic and the
inorganic, and uses walking as a mean by which to witness these spaces, which anticipate the future
form of the city. This process is an unconscious observation of the urban system – abandoned spaces or
spaces which are in the process of transformation, seeing the interstitial and the marginal, and learning
the city’s nature and artifice elements.

The Situationist International, Paris

The notion of dérive formulated by Guy Debord, the founder of the influential Situationist International
group, which later expounded as a theory related to psychogeographic relief of the city of Paris
recognized the potential of wandering across the city – seeing the city in a new and completely different
perspective, experienced in the many paths through it (Figure 2). The city becomes a mobile,
kaleidoscopic playground which produces chance of happenings, unexpected events, and coincidences,
which all represent the needs and desire of the city inhabitants. Only by urban drifting, one may get the
chance to experience all these from an in-depth perspective. The alternating, surprising, disorientating
psychological and playful effects set off by the behavior and daily practice of many individuals, were
linked to an analytical and ecological observation of the urban environment in all its precise
morphological, economic and social construction. (Bandini, 1996)

By participating in urban observation through urban drifting, behavioral observation may be conducted
that track and record movement, use and interaction of people with urban spaces and the built
environment. This method is useful in understanding the physicality of the built environment that
affects activities and social behavior. These observations and understanding can help direct design
development and changes to urban spaces and places. Through systematic observation and recording of
patterns of human behavior through diagrams, mapping, notes, or categorization of activities may help
in conducting these ‘behavior mappings’ and capture all the hidden dimension of the city. Urban
drifting also involves recording on plans or map the pattern of people’s movement and spatial usage in
a particular area of observation, and may include getting users themselves to plot how they use spaces
through direct interaction with the city’s inhabitants. The possibilities of gathering information and be
surprised with many notions of unexpected elements that are happening in the city are always endless
through this method of dérive, and this walking activity will act as a valid method in spatial assemblage
for design education process.
 Figure 2. The Naked City – Psychogeographical map of Paris through urban drifting by Guy Debord
Source: Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism, 1996.

Walking Activity as Spatial Assemblage

By learning from these two protagonists that uses urban drifting in formulating a method in
understanding and researching urban place or city, the daily walking activities around an area is
translated through assembling and sorting fragmented urban spaces as layers of abstracted elements.
The mapping study therefore is an assemblage of fractured parts of the daily activities and other things
that take place within the city. Simultaneity, fragmentation, and ephemerally characterize this condition
with intertwined walking paths and networks that create places, which enhance aesthetics and social-
cultural-political awareness. This method of study also explore the permeable streetscapes that expose
the myriads of the ordinary people and sees opportunities for spaces to be meandered, maneuvering and
exploring the spatial and physical repertoire of an area.

The real gift of the best architects is to produce a kind of hesitation in the routines of contemporary life,
an opening in which new potentials are offered, new patterns, rhythms, moods, sensations, pleasures,
connections, and perceptions. These qualities were often left out in the design vocabulary in
architectural education, and even if they were stated in the design brief, most students failed to
encompass and actualize these qualities in their design propositions. Learning from various sources and
history might help the process of translating these phenomena in architecture into more tangible
dimensions, and one of them is to learn from the traditional Japanese prints, also known as Ukiyo-e
(Figure 3). Ukiyo-e is one of the most prolific print making practice in Japan, depicting social and
cultural transformations with changing habitats and the transient effects of life on the move.

These traditional printmakers try to capture these latent qualities from the daily experience, which also
mainly involving the procession of walking and observing their surrounding into graphics that
represents a world of impermanence. The ambition of the print images is to record and narrate social
happenings that took place, and as students and teachers of architecture, Ukiyo-e might help in
initiating an approach in learning the city through the process of walking and recording (Dawes, 2008).
The ambition shall be to capture sequence of spaces that encompass the fleeting condition of daily life,
at the intersection of real and fictional worlds. Urban drifting and mapping techniques shall help in the
development of study process by navigating each route taken in a given context and the spaces and
conditions encountered. To further unravel inherent complex territories and topologies of the city, two
and three-dimensional approaches will have to be developed in helping to reframe specific site
conditions for appraisal and project interventions.
 Figure 3. Ukiyo-e and Hiroshige book narrating and recording social and cultural conditions
Source: Journey to the Floating World, Jonathan Dawes, 2008.

URBAN DRIFTING: DIRECT URBANISM AND COLLABORATIVE

NETWORKS

From the conception of urban drifting and its potential to contribute towards a more progressive
architectural pedagogy, the question that arises now deals with ways to implement it into the education
system. How can the simple act of dérive can contribute to urban processes by using alternative tools
and methodologies that are not yet institutionalized or accepted within the professional field, but is
important and relevant in the sense of needs? How can the practice of urbanism, architecture, art and
other related disciplines achieve acknowledgment in their own rights, as a new force, which can
counteract and confront the pragmatism of standard architectural academia? These questions lead to the
formulation of direct urbanism, which encompass the process of urban drifting and collaborative
networks.

Direct urbanism employs tactical interventions and strategic thinking in its process to learn about a
place. The fundamental basis for direct urbanism considers planning as a participatory principle and
places the emphasis on the complexity of the situation and those involved (Brandt, 2008). This mean
that urban intervention will negotiate a wide range of tasks and possibilities, and the way to tackle this
in a holistic way is by having collaborative networks between the urban drifter and the collaborators.
Collaborators here include those involved, directly or indirectly, in the process of dérive, such as:

1. Students of architecture
2. Teachers/ tutors of architecture
3. Residents/ dwellers
4. Planners, designers and policy makers
5. Other participating community that inhabit the area (i.e. traders, artists, refugees, marginal
society, homeless, transit dwellers, tourists, etc.)

The methodology of direct urbanism is then applied in situations in which the objectives is not
immediately clear and is free from any pre-conception – a notion of exploring and understanding the
context as an open-ended processes inherent to urban and architectural practices in the public domain,
which obviously will involve many other elements and disciplines. Direct urbanism, through the
process of urban drifting promotes an anticipatory fiction that operates and may open latent, hidden
dimensions of a place that we usually ignore or misread due to the limitations of the conventional and
standard of architectural teaching (and learning). This alternative approach describes the modest initial
stages of latent qualities which acquire collective actions and desires, and so become the impetus for
transformation in strategic thinking in the process of understanding a place.

In this investigation of direct urbanism, the projected techniques are examples that indicate the potential
of dérive in architectural applications. It may devise ways of developing an appropriate and extensive
architectural language incorporating all pertinent direct elements in drawing and representing the
efficacy of the emergent concepts, interventions and results (Figure 4). They define new and
unexplored territories for the active involvement of architecture and urbanism, create new definitions of
architectural and urban space understanding, and provide alternative experiential relationships within
the context. These applications shall be adapted to the society in which they take place, they come into
being, its space-time relationships, and are more than an analysis of culture and society, but contribute
towards the larger extent of cultural and political paradigms through architectural means. (Hill, 1998)
 Figure 4. Urban drift and psychogeographical elevation map of Tower Hill, London
Source: Hafiz Amirrol, 2008.

Coming back to the issue of Bandung as the research field for urban drifting and collaborative
networks, the fine urban fabric of the city has always been the best area that provides hidden
dimensions that are barely known to most people (Figure 5). Untold stories, unique behavioral
characteristics, specific social and cultural practice, and many other interesting facts that may be
gathered from urban drifting are things that may drive the thinking of design studies and development
into more progressive and advance level. Usually, imaginative projection involve thinking about a
place’s memorable qualities, memorable events that happened there, memorable people associated with
it, even memorable fictions that have been made up about that place. In this way, we become more
associated to places related to the conditions of life (Zubir, 2009). To stimulate these imaginative
projections of a place, systematic urban drifting techniques are required in the process of learning and
experiencing architecture in a non-generic way.

Urban drifting can be made more systematic by utilizing advance technologies and new gadgets that are
commercially available in the market. Global Positioning System (GPS) installed on mobile phones,
video cameras, sound recorder and other tools will help making urban drifting more comprehensive and
interesting, allowing more accurate data and events to be recorded and analyzed. The relationship
between psychogeography, mapping, architectural and urban study, social research, urban intervention,
mobile and wireless technology studies, art, media and many other disciplines merge as a systematic
method in the learning process. Exploring the connection between urban landscapes, and the emotions
and actions of the inhabitants of the space, and looking to see what new technology and media may
offer, psychogeographical mapping gathered from the action of dérive promise better insights for the
learning process of architectural and urbanism.

Figure 5. Alleys in Bandung that expose many hidden dimensions of the city
Source: Hafiz Amirrol, 2010.
CONCLUSION

From the examples and arguments that have been laid out, it is the interest of this paper to see this
alternative tool in architectural education to be realized in the academic system, especially in the
context of architectural schools in Bandung. There is no doubt that the city, such as Bandung has a lot
to offer – it is the most interesting field to learn and understand architecture and urbanism, and urban
drifting will reveal many hidden qualities, with different pacing and ambiences of the urban spaces to
encourage progressive architectural thinking for the students. The latent qualities of the city – its
transformations, impermanence, instability, characters, ‘stories’, and many others are important
elements that need specific approach in trying to understand them. One of the best approaches is to
participate in the act of urban drifting, as they will directly help in the process of understanding and
defining the characteristics and activities of a place by revealing patterns of behavior, movements, traits
and programs.

Disparate elements of information of the city gathered from the process of dérive need to be
systematically organized in analyzing and learning from the city. Strategic operations through visual
and graphical representations are the best method in further revealing the gathered data for useful
purposes in the process of designing. Visual accompaniment to assist with perceiving the experience
from the walk can be collaboratively done in unconventional methods of representations – video,
pyschogeographic maps, sound recording, diagrams, projective drawings and modeling, chronotographs
and many other techniques are useful for students and teachers of architecture to produce progressive
design and help in the organizing and strategizing design thinking. The only way for architecture
students to master these representative techniques is to start with collaborative networks. Collaborative
networks in these processes may involve participation from the society of the city themselves (i.e.
dwellers) and other participatory networks from others such as artists, filmmakers, videographers,
sound artists, bookmakers, photographers, social researchers, etc.

The relationship between designers – users – context is at the most pleasurable when concept and
experience of spaces abruptly coincide (Tschumi, 1990). To achieve this pleasure, strategic operations
of architectural learning need to be formulated in a progressive and up-to-date way. Multi-disciplinary
and inter-disciplinary acts need to be popularized in the already well-establish concept of education
system. Collaborations on the conception and realization of innovative projects through expressing and
representing the experiences in psychogeographic ways will continue the investigation in the learning
process into a more holistic point of view, perceived from the dichotomy of architecture, urbanism,
social sciences and humanistic disciplines. Today’s unprecedented development in technologies and
new media also help in the idea of approaching architecture from a wider perspective.

Through the combination of basic architectural knowledge, the act of urban drifting and collaborative-
participatory networks, a new set of architectural teaching-learning system may be established in
progressing the pedagogy of architectural education. Mnemonic meaning and qualities of the city
disseminated from this new approach are great potentials in promoting the agenda of ‘non-standard’
architectural study, which have long been the subject of debates between great schools of architecture
around the world. A clear direction and objective of the schools need to be understood and absorbed by
all teachers and students in securing the position of architectural school as promoter to creativity, not
only as producers of workers for the industry. This article might suggest the basic idea of walking as a
catalyst in architectural education and design approach, but participative and collaborative networks are
the most important in validating this approach as a tool in the context of the academia and practice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BACON, E. (1967) Design of Cities. New York: Viking Press.

BANDINI, M. Surrealist References in the Notion of Dérive and Psychogeography of the Situationist
Urban Environment, in ANDREOTTI, L. and COSTA, X. (1996) Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism.
Barcelona: Actar.

BLOOMER, K. and MOORE, C. (1977) Body, Memory and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University
Press.

BRANDT, C.V. (2008) Direct Urbanism vs. Direct Architecture (AA Diploma 10, Unit Brief). London:
AA School of Architecture.

COUSINS, M. Architecture as a Weak Principle, in HILL, J. (1998) Occupying Architecture. London:

Routledge.

DAWES, J. (2008) Ukiyo-e: Journey to the Floating World (AA Intermediate 6, Unit Brief). London:
AA School of Architecture.

HILL, J. (1998) Occupying Architecture. London: Routledge.

PURWONO, E. (1989) Inquiring Into Architectural Text: Towards an Interpretation of Architectural

Knowledge (MSc Thesis). Cambridge: Department of Architecture MIT.

ROSSI, A. (1984) Architecture of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press.

STALKER (1996) Stalker: Un Laboratorio Urbane. Rome: www.stalkerlab.it

STEELE, B. (2009) Building Audiences, Not Architects or Buildings: AA Book 2009. London: AA
Publications.

SULAIMAN, W.A. (2007) Walking in The City: REVUE 3. Shah Alam: Department of Architecture
UiTM.

TSCHUMI, B. (1990) Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture. London: AA Publications.

VIDLER, A. and CHADWICK, M. (2004) Back to School: Architectural Design Vol. 74 No. 5.
London: Wiley Academy.

WIGLEY, M. (2009) Dean’s Statement: The Future of the Architects. New York: Columbia GSAPP.

ZUBIR, S.S. (2009) Offerings by Design. Shah Alam: University Publication Centre (UPENA), UiTM.