School of Architecture & Planning: Utopias Project Group 9 Aurora

In 2018 at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), our first year design teaching team re-conceptualized the design teaching methods in response to the issue of a decolonizing curriculum that arose from the #FeesMustFall movement that began in October 2015. The Utopias Project was designed to revive a forgotten humanity with the capacity to create new worlds and new collective narratives as a way of shifting the prevailing objective pedagogic paradigms. The Utopias Project was a success for both pedagogic transformation as well as new and innovative ways of teaching beginning design. This context of the project enabled students to role play, practically build their designs, experience the space and scale of their different models, gain a technical understanding of materiality, and literally inhabit the worlds that they created, personally experiencing the success or failure of their design decisions. They formed their own social codes as groups and went on to develop practices embodying their values, designing not only physical structures, but also social and perhaps even spiritual ones that could guide them into a desired future.