Urban Education Live, 2017-2021

UEL:Sheffield team examined how communities might improve their neighbourhoods through collaborations with their local universities, with a specific focus on collaborations between community groups and staff and students of spatial disciplines. Building on the rich tradition of live pedagogy at Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA), and drawing on findings from the three-year JPI/ESRC co-funded research project Urban Education Live (2017-2021), we discuss the opportunities and challenges around forming and sustaining fruitful and meaningful co-production. Placing our research within the context of other national and international examples of university/community collaboration we explore the opportunities and challenges afforded by this type of work. Recognising the underlying imbalances of power between universities and communities we propose ways in which the production of knowledge can be reframed to open up and democratise the processes of the production of the built environment. We demonstrate how the design research of academic spatial practice can foster genuine, equal and meaningful participation on a long-term scale. A focus of this research has been testing and documenting the concept of ‘local hubs’, physical spaces in the city and outside the university, where communities, researchers and students can work together to develop shared knowledge, build capacity and influence change in their local built environment. We have carried out this action research through the use of SSoA’s permanent city centre space Live Works, and through multiple pop-up initiatives engaging local people in the residential neighbourhood of Burngreave. This has enabled us to test the effectiveness of different spatial and temporal scenarios in creating spaces for creative, responsive and sustainable engagement and collaboration. Using feedback from surveys, interviews and creative activities we present how local people perceive their local university, both in terms of barriers to engagement and desire to access academic support and resources. Removing these barriers and enabling this access to achieve new sustainable practices of co-production requires transformation of traditional academic structures. We speculate upon how the use of situated local hubs can offer more agile interdisciplinary and cross-sector interfaces between grassroots, civic institutions and academia, resulting in communities being much better supported to improve their buildings, streets and neighbourhoods.Urban Education Live (UEL) aims to contribute to the making of inclusive, vibrant and accessible urban communities. The three-year project brings together university partners from Finland, the UK, Slovenia and Romania to develop and test new models of collaboration between universities, urban communities, NGOs and public bodies. It proposes that universities act as independent brokers, curators and catalysts of positive urban change and aims to build urban capacity between multiple stakeholders by employing innovative socio-spatial mapping and activation tools. This trans-educational approach - which engages universities, NGOs, vocational colleges, primary schools, businesses and municipalities in the design of urban spaces - will be supported by mapping techniques and technologies which will allow a high degree of sensitivity to emerging patterns of use, desire and need. Local hubs - akin to corner shops - will be set up to provide a locus for discussion and debate on these forms of producing and thinking space while also serving as centres for learning and doing for citizens, students, academics, city authorities and others. Through this "Super Site Specific" the project aims to establish agendas, methods and transformative spatial strategies that can address current socio-spatial complexities and challenges. UEL is founded upon interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture, urban design and urban planning but its findings will also be useful for furthering knowledge in the social sciences, education, community development and service design disciplines. By aiming to understand urban issues from the bottom-up, UEL will assist partners and other educational institutions in finding new modi operandi. In the UK context, the project seeks to specifically examine the increasingly devolved planning framework, whereby local communities are passed rights to develop buildings and neighbourhoods but without the adequate support necessary to translate these rights into radically inclusive spaces. On the local level, we aim to analyse, test and map models of collaboration between different actors that strengthen local innovative ecologies; while, on the national level, the project will contribute to discussions on creative collaborations between universities and local authorities to develop transformative spatial strategies that address 'austerity policies' and public sector funding cuts across the UK. The findings will contribute to the project's 'Dynamic Archive', to which each partner will contribute; it will be further articulated and developed during a series of symposia and summer schools; and will be critically examined through a series of non-academic reports and peer-reviewed academic articles.