EDUCATING AND RELATIONAL CITIES

Foto de Ryan Conrow.

The design of a city can bring us closer to or distance us from others. For example, we might naïvely assume that a circular bench or one divided by an armrest responds to a civic need. However, most of these designs were created to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. The design achieved its intended goal, but it overlooked that a bench should foster conversation and awaken curiosity about others. A bench is a shelter for stories.

Projects like Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench, which have given urban furniture a communal and even caring purpose, remind us that urban design only makes sense when it includes the presence of others. This requires a perspective rooted in Relational Education—education understood both as lifelong learning and as the process that facilitates it; and relation, understood as the act of humanizing the spaces we inhabit.

A relational city is built through the bonds and recognition that make those around us visible. Relational Education invites us to reactivate how we see and perceive the spaces in which we live. All of them, without exception, form part of the networked system that sustains us.

Do schools and classrooms offer safe and calm spaces that foster dialogue with others? Are there workplaces that render certain people invisible? Do playgrounds respond to children’s needs or to adults’? Do the environments we pass through every day make relationships easier—or do they promote individualism?

The Charter of Educating Cities of the IAEC, revised in 2020, advocates for the right to an inclusive and diverse city, open to intergenerational dialogue—“whose purpose is to build community and a free, responsible, and supportive citizenry, capable of living with difference, resolving conflicts peacefully, and working for the common good.” It is clear that Educating Cities have only one path: relationship.

Space is not neutral—nor is our gaze. We must generate knowledge and actions that help us create cities not just to live in, but to be lived through.

By Sílvia Penón, Head of the Relational Education Unit.