Setting new starting points

The project, financed by the Central Teaching Fund, examines colonial continuities in the construction industry by designing a foundation seminar. Through the topics of aesthetics and form, resources, materiality and working conditions, critical reflection and the interweaving of spatial planning with colonial systems are conveyed through the analysis of post- and decolonial theories and practices. In construction studies in Germany, postcolonial perspectives, migrant spaces of experience and colonial conditions in the planning and construction world have so far only been marginally addressed. We see the need to develop courses that convey concepts and contexts in order to introduce decolonial perspectives into spatial studies. We understand decoloniality as a practice of relearning and critical examination of an extractivist, growth- and profit-oriented construction industry. A moment to set new starting points that should enable socially and environmentally compatible planning. The teaching project is based on Paulo Freire's concept of educação popular and promotes critical thinking and the ability to act through experience-based and collective learning. This course builds on a tradition of critical pedagogy at the university and translates these methods into spatial teaching. Teachers become learners and students become teachers and produce knowledge together. The starting point is the socio-political reality of the students; this situated knowledge is linked to today's structural colonial processes in the construction industry.