Pedagogical anarchitectures: critical practices and territorial contestations in the Spatial Academy of Santiago de Chile

This paper learns from the Spatial Academy at Universidad de Las Américas in Santiago de Chile, reflecting on it as a model of radical pedagogy that challenges traditional architectural training within contexts of neoliberal inequality. Through the use of interviews with teaching staff and documentary analysis, it identifies its practice as a pedagogical anarchitecture, going back to Gordon Matta-Clark’s nomenclature, an approach that dismantles individual authorship, technical solutionism, and disciplinary authority. Its core is the design-build project, wherein students and communities co-design ephemeral interventions that prioritize relational processes over physical products, thereby activating collective memory and territorial conflicts. This pedagogy operates through four shifts: (i) from individual authorship to collective production; (ii) from the object to the process; (iii) from technical solutions to conflict as a driving force; and (iv) from rigid curricula to critical action. This experience offers a replicable framework for the Global South by training architects as socio-spatial mediators capable of contesting urban injustices through situated and collaborative practices.