Panel 7.

Radical Pedagogies for territorial contestations

Hybrid_ Living Pedagogies in Kaimakli

Buyuk (big) Kaimakli, a Greek Cypriot neighborhood of the divided capital of

Cyprus is separated from the Turkish Cypriot Kuchuk (small) Kaimakli by the
Green Dividing Line. The remaining old population received flows of displaced
people from the island itself, mainly middle-class groups, and low-income
immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa. The conditions of the no-Man land
area also attracted creative and activists’ groups that added more layering on
the people’s amalgamation.

As Kaimakli residents, we were involved in various of its activities. As member of

the NGO Urban Gorillas, we enacted the Pame (lets go) Kaimakli festivals since
2013, a bottom-up approach with democratic participatory methods. We dealt
with various thematics, that aimed at social sustainability with creative mode to
bring together disparate groups of people as elder people and children,
immigrants, and artists etc. The festivals served as catalysts to trigger social
mechanism among the residents, facilitating their voice to be heard, their
presence to be seen, their rights to be pursued etc.

Besides the immaterial processes we introduced material infrastructures as

ephemeral entities to facilitate the diverse needs for social creative expression
such the modularized Agora with a vast variation of assembling, the inflatable
structures etc.

As faculty at the Architecture Department of the University of Nicosia, we

facilitated the participation of students in various activities including the above
ones. They mixed and collaborated with the residents of the neighborhood. In
addition, we invited the first year in the studio the Urban Glenti (feast) to work on
Kaimakli and develop a community project based on social and environmental
sustainability approach.

Being ‘there’ and ‘construct’ synergic, catalytic collaborations between students,

minorities, activists, and ‘normal’ residents in could serve as a model of radical
pedagogy tailored for Kaimakli, and not only?

Yiorgos Hadjichristou

Architecture Department, University of Nicosia