Abstract

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. © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. All rights reserved.