L.06. Porous Educational Landscapes: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Democratic Spaces

Creating new educational landscapes means moving beyond the traditional notion of school as a closed and hierarchical space, toward environments that are open, dynamic, and porous – capable of fostering democratic relationships and inclusive learning processes. Drawing on Richard Sennett's notion of porous boundaries and recent research on threshold pedagogies, we understand porosity as the spatial capacity to enable fluid exchanges between formal and informal learning, between school and community, and between disciplines – resisting the compartmentalization that characterizes traditional educational institutions. This panel explores how the interaction between pedagogy, architecture, and design can generate educational spaces that actively enable participation and agency.

EDENSPACES, an interdisciplinary master's program developed at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, exemplifies this approach: a co-design laboratory where students, researchers, and professionals collaborate to envision sustainable, flexible environments that extend the concept of school into the community and the territory. In dialogue with the TRANSFORMER project at TU Vienna, which uses co-creative approaches and interdisciplinary methods to focus on the topic of climate and energy in and around a formerly vacant building, the panel will highlight how educational and civic spaces can overlap to address ecological and social challenges.

Through theoretical contributions and case studies, the panel will examine how materiality and spatiality can shift from instruments of control to mediums of emancipation: flexible learning environments, co-designed outdoor classrooms, and maker spaces that embody democratic values through their very configuration. The goal is to outline principles for designing democratic educational landscapes deeply connected to civic life.