Paper short abstract:

This research studio was designed to provoke the boundaries of radical thinking by inviting students to act as facilitators for a unique and individual experiment. The underpinning inquiry revolved around the productivities inherent in the mechanisms of absurdism and the process of policy making.

Paper long abstract:

This research studio was designed to provoke and test the boundaries of radical thinking by inviting students to act as facilitators for a unique and individual experiment. The underpinning inquiry, which revolved around the productivities inherent in the mechanisms of absurdism and the process of policy making, was catalysed by two questions:

a. In what ways could prevailing city planning and associated policy-making become a lens to explore absurdity?

b. Could absurdity, understood through it's theoretical framing, be useful as a lens to explore planning processes, policy making and urban practices?

Students were tasked with selecting an urban planning policy intervention in the City of Cape Town as material to explore absurdist theory. Their inquiries were guided by the following prompts:

• Can Urban Planning be understood as performance? And, given the legacy and intransigence of spatial injustice, is this performance rooted in the absurd?

• What emerged when policy and planning were routed through the mechanism/s of absurdity?

• What was the theoretical/conceptual construct of absurdity for their (individual) inquiry?

• What evidence emerged from processing planning/policy as theoretical declarations and/or as conceptual provocations?

• In what ways did prevailing urban planning policies resemble a board game?

• In what ways could absurdity become a speculative tool?

Students were encouraged to make evident their learning in the form of a conceptual artwork.

This research studio was run in person, over a six week period in April 2020, after a period of total physical isolation due to the global pandemic.