BUILT / UNBUILT: Relational Pedagogies and Participatory Spatial Practice

As part of this inquiry, the project resulted in an exercise booklet titled “Is a Safe Space Possible?”, co-curated with architects Njood Alhussain and Haifa Alrassi. The booklet gathers questions, reflections, and care-driven examples of learning practices from across the Arab world, framing safety not as a static condition but as a continuously cultivated relational process.

Contemporary creation is often shaped by the geographical, spatial, and ecological realities in which it unfolds. Equally, the ability to learn, design, build, and connect reflects time-specific conditions. In negotiating space and time, research-based practice may shift into practice-based research, allowing knowledge to emerge through doing. Contributors were invited to reflect on how their practices engage with proximity:
How does your practice remain close to the context that once ignited it? How do you position yourself in relation to the far and the foreign, the flourishing and the familiar? Their responses were further expanded through a visual and textual mapping exercise, locating projects and initiatives within a shared field of coordinates.

The work pursued with the pavilion has been immortalized in the publication Connections as Method: Relational Pedagogies and Participatory Spatial Practice. Featuring architects, artists, educators, urbanists, and writers, the publication pilots methodologies of knowledge exchange to establish south-south networks of coproduction across disciplinary boundaries. Tracing transnational alliances, case studies, and thematics from the Um Slaim School first year, subjects of inquiry challenge established architectural canons, centering alternative spatial histories and material practices to address urgent ecological and social concerns. Within it, the chapter Pedagogies of Proximity and Relation: Prototyping Alternative Education platforms IPS and a network of global collaborators to engage with Um Slaim School as a driver for rethinking architectural education as integrated forms and modes of knowledge focused on collaboration. Thus,  leveraging the agency of spatial practitioners in shaping and preserving equitable spaces and rituals of shared life. The contributors and their alternative pedagogical case studies center the notion of a safe space within a culture of relatability, harnessing multidisciplinarity, hospitality, and mentorship-over-professorship, while honoring contextual legacy and empowering transgenerational transmission of knowledge and forms of embodied learning, ecological, and social resilience.