Conference Program

This paper examines school architecture as a constitutive yet often neglected dimension of democratic education. Drawing on intersectional and decolonial approaches, it explores how the spatial and material conditions of school buildings shape everyday educational practices and contribute to the reproduction or reduction of social, environmental, and epistemic inequalities. While debates on democratic schooling frequently emphasize curricula, participation, and governance, the built environments in which education takes place remain under-theorized, despite their profound impact on embodied experience, well-being, and educational access (Soja, 2010).

The paper is grounded in empirical field research conducted primarily in public schools in Austria. It shows that many recently constructed school buildings—widely celebrated as innovative—are already struggling with the effects of climate change. Students, teachers, and school staff report insufficient shading, inadequate natural ventilation, limited passive cooling strategies, and severe overheating during summer months. These conditions restrict pedagogical practices and disproportionately affect those who spend long hours in educational spaces, raising questions of environmental injustice and unequal exposure (Young, 1990).

From a decolonial perspective, the paper argues that dominant Central European school architecture relies on technocratic, energy-intensive design paradigms that privilege abstract efficiency over lived experience and situated climatic knowledge. Such paradigms reflect colonial continuities in architectural thought, positioning Eurocentric traditions as universal while marginalizing other ways of knowing and building (Mignolo, 2011). Black decolonial scholarship emphasizes that space is a key site through which colonial power operates: Fanon (1963) analyzes colonial spatial ordering, while Mbembe (2001) shows how built environments discipline bodies and structure educational life.

The paper foregrounds African-based architectural knowledge as theory rather than a field of application. Architects and scholars such as Francis Kéré, whose school buildings in Burkina Faso exemplify climate-adaptive, community-based design (Kéré, 2017), and AbdouMaliq Simone, whose work highlights everyday spatial practices and collective life in African cities (Simone, 2004), demonstrate how architecture emerges from local material ecologies, social relations, and pedagogical needs. Clay construction, widely used in African schools, enables passive thermal regulation, minimizes mechanical cooling, and draws on intergenerational knowledge systems. As Nnamdi Elleh (1997) argues, African architecture must be understood through its cultural, climatic, and social specificities rather than Eurocentric evaluative frameworks.

The marginalization of such knowledge in Central European school construction is not merely technical but epistemic. Dominant approaches to materiality and environment remain entangled with racialized histories of knowledge production (Yusoff, 2018; Wynter, 2003). Re-centering African architectural practices is thus both a matter of epistemic justice and environmental sustainability.

Methodologically, the study combines qualitative case studies of schools built with sustainable materials in African contexts with interviews with students, teachers, school staff, and local architects. Drawing on dialogical pedagogical traditions (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994), it rejects extractive comparison, framing transnational learning as reciprocal and situated.

In line with the Scuola Democratica conference, the paper argues that climate-resilient and socially just school architecture is a prerequisite for democratic education. It concludes that centering African-based architectural knowledge is essential for reimagining educational spaces that foster participation, inclusion, and equality in a warming world.