By ‘it’, I’m referring to ‘situated teaching and learning’. Live projects in the context of the architectural profession are work that sit between architectural education and the built environment practice. (Harriss and Widder, 2014). They typically include design/build work and community based design that can serve some purpose to an external partner, which can include commercial entities, communities, and policy makers. UAL carries out such projects across different disciplines through ‘Knowledge Exchange’. What makes ‘situated teaching and learning’ that I have structured different to Live Projects?

It is concerned primarily with enhancing students’ learning experience by making possible the regular encountering of a place and its communities supporting students to develop more contextual and socially responsive design projects.

With each encounter with a place, the students can become better informed about the social justice issue that they wish to address in the development of their projects. This approach opens up the opportunity for the students to take their investigation in any direction that most aligns with their concerns. They also have the freedom to set their projects beyond the present time to their imaginings of the future. The scope of the design projects is not limited by parameters inherent in a project brief focusing on a specific need of an external partner.

So where is the reciprocity for the external partner? Admittedly, achieving reciprocity has not worked very well on two key aspects for the ARP on Broadwater Farm Estate. Some students have volunteered their time in the community centre where we have been based, but not all. Also, our external partners are not entirely satisfied that what they have received in return for us to access a work base has been fairly balanced. As further work beyond the ARP submission, I would like to delve deeper into the ‘co-production’ enquiry of my research and one of the constitutive parts is the development of a collaborative framework working with external partners that is not centered on the exchange of design work.