Learning Urban Morphology and Urban Public Spaces: : a pedagogical approach through Grammatical Exercises

Abstract

This article presents a pedagogical strategy to provoke the understanding of the different scales of urban morphology and resulting landscape. The article intends to provoke a reflection on the challenges, obstacles and potentialities of learning urban morphology for those who intend to analyze, plan, design or intervene in cities. Learning is transformed, as well as culture, through the revisions and discoveries of society's values. The process of knowledge, studied mainly throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, resulted in different pedagogical lines. Each of these postulates different worldviews and comes from different cultures. The practices presented here are born from the performance in project studios taking as instruments, for the production of knowledge, experimentation, exchange and the formation of experienced repertoires. In this text, the principles adopted for the construction of knowledge are presented and the pedagogical practice called Grammatical Exercises is conceptualized. The article rescues the origins and authorships of this type of learning activity and presents three applications of this method at different scales. Understanding the pedagogical principles that guide the Grammatical Exercises, other applications can be developed by the reader.