Author(s): Cristina Dreifuss-Serrano
This paper examines the transformative potential of community-engaged architectural education through a longitudinal study conducted between 2012 and 2025 in Lima, Peru. As over 1.1 billion people worldwide live in informal settlements largely excluded from traditional architectural practice, the discipline faces urgent questions about its social responsibility and relevance. This research analyzes how co-production of spatial knowledge and sustained community partnerships can catalyze systemic changes in architectural pedagogy, professional practice, and institutional roles. Using a mixed qualitative methodology combining retrospective analysis and systematic documentation, the research examines three critical dimensions: student learning and professional transformation, community impact and perceptions, and institutional effects. Findings reveal that community-engaged studios foster reflective capacity, empathy, problem-solving under constraint, and collective agency among students. Participants demonstrated significant shifts toward community-driven practice orientations that persisted throughout their professional careers. The research confirms that authentic engagement with resource-constrained contexts cultivates situated knowledge and ethical competencies essential for contemporary practice. Students transition from individual authorship to collaborative co-creation, learning to design with communities rather than for them. Institutionally, sustained engagement transforms universities into cultural anchors and civic actors, breaking barriers between academia and society. The study demonstrates that low-tech, participatory solutions address housing inequality and climate challenges through bottom-up innovation. By legitimizing diverse knowledge systems and redistributing decision-making power, community-engaged pedagogy establishes architecture as a mediating practice capable of generating social value, resilience, and democratic transformation in response to twenty-first century crises.
Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. RodrÃguez-Suárez
ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4