Deviations and Thresholds: teaching as a field of experimentation for other practices of urbanism

Abstract

Despite the countless criticisms of the exaggerated functionalism and rationalism of modern urbanism, the modern methodological foundations on which the disciplinary field of urbanism has been consolidated have not yet been fully questioned. In fact, in most undergraduate courses in architecture and urbanism in Brazil, these bases, inherited from the 19^th century, remain operative and still do not seem to have been sufficiently problematized. That modern orientation more purist, positivist, functionalist, teleological, that follows a certain idea of technical, ineluctable progress, which exacerbated the notions of order and control, became hegemonic in the field of urbanism. However, another modern line also criticizes the excesses of functionalism, its simplifications, in urbanism itself as a scientific discipline that above all sought to control, order and thus also limit the complexity of the urban experience. Our proposal is to return to these pertinent criticisms in order to think of urbanism and, above all, its teaching as an expanded or expanded field of experimentation, based on a series of other less positivistic, simplifying or homogenizing methodological experiences that may attempt to encompass the multiplicity, heterogeneity and complexity of contemporary cities. It is a proposition that puts at the center of the teaching (and professional practice) of urbanism the relationship with the practitioners of the city, their experiences, the other rationalities and norms in relation to the hegemonic models, the dynamics of self-production and self-management, and, first and foremost, the disputes they prompt.