A Cosmopolitan Architectural Education

This paper is the result of forty dialogues conducted during my PhD research, which took place between 2018 and 2020, among students and educators’ of the Nordic Baltic Academy of Architecture. These conversations were initiated by three questions: What skills should students have after studying architecture? How should these skills be taught? How can architectural education be of special importance to our society? The answers to these questions were analysed and interpreted by following the Grounded Theory approach. What emerged from these dialogues is the shared conviction to use architectural education as a complex project to advance the knowledge, traits, attitudes, values, and behaviours necessary to respond to global challenges whilst creating conditions for students and their educators to locally engage as active citizens. This combination of global awareness and local activism is at the base of formulating the Theory of Cosmopolitan Citizenship in Architectural Education whose purpose is to help students and educators cultivating a language, activating a pedagogy, and developing a scholarship capable of advancing new political agencies to codesign healthier, safer, and a fairer world in a changing social, ecological, and political environment.