American university in Cairo - Architecture Department
A panel discussion with audio-visual material on “innovative pedagogies and skill development for effective urban interventions”, which reports on the work of AUC’s Architecture Department for Egypt Urban Campaign (EUC) and World Urban Campaign (WUC) over the past six months. The panel will consist of students and faculty presenting videos, posters, and research covering a set of issues related to sustainable urban development and climate crisis in education, addressing transport mobility, earth construction and advanced technology. The panel will depict three main tracks for innovative pedagogies and experiential learning:
Urban sports as an active-learning approach: Bicycle urbanism in Downtown Cairo as a case study
Learning from the elsewhere: Earth Construction pedagogy from Siwa to Cairo
Spatial simulation from real to reel: Polemics of AI in design studios
The first track unpacks students’ engagement with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) through an MoU with AUC’s urban design studio for two years of collaboration regarding experiential assessment and community feedback for the active mobility and bike-sharing infrastructure of “Cairo Bike” project in Downtown Cairo. The second track reflects on students’ experience of design-and-build experiments in Siwa, bringing together Earth construction as a culturally sustainable process and practice to the design studio. The third track unmasks the multifaceted registers of AI and the transformative nature it brings to learning and architectural pedagogy. Drawing on the different terrains and evolution of spatial simulations, this round of discussion reflects on the lessons learned from text to imagination and from real to reel.
The three tracks draw a palimpsest of narratives on mobilizing different tools, methods and techniques towards exploring the sustainable development goals in pedagogy using innovative approaches and skills development for effective urban interventions in our cities.