Contribution short abstract

In trouble conscious design studios in Munich and Utah, we explore how resonance, dialogical pedagogy, Deep Adaptation, and collective imagination can cultivate hope as a situated and collective practice and strengthen students’ capacity to act.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on six years of continuously taught urban design research studios, approached through a political ecology lens and shaped by crisis across two contexts: Munich during Covid 19 and the University of Utah during the Trump administration. In both settings, students encountered overlapping ecological, political, and affective disruptions that shaped how they learn and how they imagine futures. Our response draws on Hartmut Rosa’s resonance, Paulo Freire’s dialogical pedagogy, the Deep Adaptation Agenda, and Donna Haraway’s call to stay with the trouble, to cultivate hope as a situated and collective practice.

At TU Munich we created learning environments that foreground relationality, shared inquiry, and co-produced knowledge. Freire’s emphasis on dialogue informed our non-hierarchical studios, while Deep Adaptation operated as a wakeup call that made the multitude of systemic crises visible and opened space for new forms of agency. Through stakeholder engagement and student led spin offs, projects extended beyond the university into real world experimentation.

At the University of Utah students worked from lived experience and local attachments, developing situated projects that respond to political tension and ecological precarity. This echoes Haraway’s insistence that we cannot escape trouble but can learn to inhabit it with responsibility.

We argue that pedagogies of hope emerge when teaching practice engages crisis as structural and shared and enables collective capacity to act.

Ref: Freire 1970, Haraway 2016, Rosa 2019.