Researching Educational Landscapes and Their Refigurational Spacing: Perspectives From Educational Science and Urban Planning

Abstract

In Germany, a much-cited concept in recent years has been that of lokale Bildungslandschaften [local educational landscapes]. In this article, we focus on socio-spatial educational landscapes in the arrangement of a campus, which links the actors of education and urban planning to a specific leitbild, meaning a guiding principle in physical form and programmatic action. Therefore, an educational space designated as a campus includes constitutive dimensions of educational practices and a spatial reorganization of educational conditions, which are still to be discovered and investigated. We center our analysis on the perspective of children and young people as the main target group of this leitbild, as well as the perspective of the professional actors. In the following article, we give a brief overview of the characteristics of socio-spatial educational landscapes. We focus on the appropriation and atmospheres of access points and transitions, as well as patterns of use and spatial perception. After analyzing the ongoing development processes of socio-spatial educational landscapes as a campus, we adopt an internationally comparative perspective to research them.