An urban pedagogy or the implicit pedagogy of urban spaces

The city narrates and its architectural structures convey their functions, their wealth, their power and sacredness. They can also tell a tale of violence and fear, of the logic of power, of discrimina-tion and denial. They transmit information, implicit messages that shape and form, giving life to that “conditioning power” or “unconscious influence of the environment” which signifies pervasiveness and per-formativity or education. Cities, then, are potentially educational, but they can also be miseducational when they are at the service of anti-democratic and anti-educational logic. They can impoverish and transmit messages of hate, violence and discrimination by colo-nizing the minds and hindering reflective and creative thinking. Space, is then, a “pedagogical operator” which, in the wake of Foucauld-ian pedagogy, is able to influence the educational process, starting from the implicit pedagogy that insinuates itself into a structure, thus making it the daily spokesperson for ideologies.