In the inner areas of Basilicata -southern Italy, Mediterranean latitude-, demographic decline, infrastructural marginality, and ecological fragility intersect with long-standing forms of displacement and spatial abandonment. These conditions call for architectural practices that are not only representational or object- based, but embodied, durational, and grounded in everyday forms of care. Walking-based projects in Basilicata -Fruilent, the Vulture’s Sentiero del Borgo itinerary, and radio-guided explorations in Borgo La Martella (Matera)- constitute a corpus of situated experiments in which the sensing body becomes a primary medium of spatial knowledge production (Careri, 2002; Tversky, 2019). The contribution builds on three conceptual strands. First, conviviality is understood as a condition in which tools, institutions, and spaces foster shared everyday life, mutual care, and plural co-presence -drawing on Illich's notion of convivial tools and its elaboration in the Città-Convivio framework for Basilicata's inner areas (Illich, 1973). Second, walking functions as an aesthetic, pedagogical, and civic practice for the regeneration of marginal territories (Pileri, Moscarelli, 2021; Lazzarini,Marchionni, 2020). Third, body-based pedagogy and hodological approaches connect to debates on research-by-design, situated knowledge, and movement-sensitive cognition (Tversky, 2019). The main aim is to systematize seven years of action-research at the NatureCity Lab of the University of Basilicata into a coherent framework of convivial, body-based pedagogies. Specific objectives include: framing walking initiatives as continuous cultural infrastructures; investigating how somatic and media- mediated practices generate situated spatial knowledge; articulating a nomadic syllabus reconfiguring university-territory- community relationship; and exploring transferability through comparison with Strade Maestre, an Italian long-distance initiative using walking as school practice.
Convivial pedagogies. Body-based methodologies and action-research in Basilicata
Massaro S.
;Rizzi C.
2026-01-01
Abstract
In the inner areas of Basilicata -southern Italy, Mediterranean latitude-, demographic decline, infrastructural marginality, and ecological fragility intersect with long-standing forms of displacement and spatial abandonment. These conditions call for architectural practices that are not only representational or object- based, but embodied, durational, and grounded in everyday forms of care. Walking-based projects in Basilicata -Fruilent, the Vulture’s Sentiero del Borgo itinerary, and radio-guided explorations in Borgo La Martella (Matera)- constitute a corpus of situated experiments in which the sensing body becomes a primary medium of spatial knowledge production (Careri, 2002; Tversky, 2019). The contribution builds on three conceptual strands. First, conviviality is understood as a condition in which tools, institutions, and spaces foster shared everyday life, mutual care, and plural co-presence -drawing on Illich's notion of convivial tools and its elaboration in the Città-Convivio framework for Basilicata's inner areas (Illich, 1973). Second, walking functions as an aesthetic, pedagogical, and civic practice for the regeneration of marginal territories (Pileri, Moscarelli, 2021; Lazzarini,Marchionni, 2020). Third, body-based pedagogy and hodological approaches connect to debates on research-by-design, situated knowledge, and movement-sensitive cognition (Tversky, 2019). The main aim is to systematize seven years of action-research at the NatureCity Lab of the University of Basilicata into a coherent framework of convivial, body-based pedagogies. Specific objectives include: framing walking initiatives as continuous cultural infrastructures; investigating how somatic and media- mediated practices generate situated spatial knowledge; articulating a nomadic syllabus reconfiguring university-territory- community relationship; and exploring transferability through comparison with Strade Maestre, an Italian long-distance initiative using walking as school practice.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
