Abstract
Expansive learning is a teaching–learning method adopted by the Department of Architecture of Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico, to introduce architectural students to the field of landscape sensitizing. This approach has been especially valuable considering the particular cultural and natural values of the Mexican landscapes. In it, architectural students are introduced to co-configuration strategies along with co-working methods with the participation of specialists and local stakeholders and community on the “barefoot” bottom-up basis. The community of Tochimilco, Puebla, was selected as a case study through which students can learn how vulnerable rural landscapes and their natural environments can be protected, constructed, and developed. Therefore, studying natural landscape and environmental conditions of Tochimilco through data collection, fieldwork and student workshops was carried out to reinforce the understanding of landscape features, values, semiotics, and meanings in a Socio-Ecological System of landscape (SES) framework. In this context, the expansive learning processes revealed the potentiality of architectural students to become environmental facilitators for future design and planning projects to trigger sensitizing and comprehensive approaches. In these terms, architectural education prepares students to recognize and be aware of natural values, landscape narratives and the “barefoot” relationship between the landscape and the human being occupying and cultivating it.
Highlights
Volcanos, mountains, blue sky, enormous clouds, vernacular architecture, cornfields, and agaves are tangible and intangible landscape elements in Mexican collective imaginary.Those components have been represented in pre-Hispanic codex, Mexican cinema, muralism, and literature as immortal and permanent elements giving landscape framework for the everyday life
Lewis writes: “ [w]e rarely think of landscape that way, and so the cultural record we have ‘written’ in the landscape is liable to be more truthful than most autobiographies because we are less self-conscious about how we describe ourselves” (p. 1)
In order to change the profession into a unitary-long-term vision with good-space quality, at Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), we introduce landscape planning, reading and valorization to our design workshops to develop more congruent and holistic local projects
Summary
Mountains, blue sky, enormous clouds, vernacular architecture, cornfields, and agaves are tangible and intangible landscape elements in Mexican collective imaginary. Those components have been represented in pre-Hispanic codex, Mexican cinema, muralism, and literature as immortal and permanent elements giving landscape framework for the everyday life (see Figure 1). The recent urban development and socioeconomic activities though, have made the tangible and intangible heritage vulnerable when facing new land use strategies, pollution, agro-industry, and mining concessions threatening their very nature. The contemporary Mexican rural landscape evidences the clash between the traditional vernacular environmental practices and public policy and planning informed by economic and real estate interests. External influences have brought new practices to rural communities and traditional, environmentally healthy ones have been abandoned: mechanized agriculture and monoculture is superseding traditional agricultural production methods.
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