SArPe Summer Schools 2023–2025
he SArPe Summer Schools 2023–2025 form an itinerant trilogy that investigates how architectural education can be rooted in social contexts and constructed with communities rather than for them. Across three editions – “+2 Space + Common Good” in Pavia–Brescia (2023), “Architectural Slow Cooking, Imagining Commons Beyond Popular Politics” in Istanbul (2024) and “Urban Repair, Designing With/For More-than-Human Life” in Málaga (2025) – learners and educators engage with different forms of urban commons, experimenting with light spatial devices, practices of care and advocacy tools.
Each summer school combines introductory online sessions, dedicated to key readings on commons, care and critical pedagogy, with an intensive in-person phase of site visits, mapping exercises, co-design and small-scale construction. In Pavia and Brescia, the work focuses on shared spaces between the university campus and Casa San Vincenzo, where “gentle objects” are designed and built to make courtyards more habitable and welcoming.
In Istanbul, the Kuştepe neighbourhood becomes a laboratory for rethinking urban transformation from the perspective of residents, while in Málaga attention shifts to the Bosque Urbano de Málaga, a citizen-led process for the making of an urban forest. Taken together, the three experiences translate SArPe’s ambition to treat the city as a commons and the design studio as a horizontal space of shared learning.