In this article we explore the dynamic between the pedagogical and the urban, attending to 'agentive urban learning'. By this we mean processes by which young people build agency in the urban context, in using the resources of the city to develop their own agency and of developing agency to act within the city. By agency, we refer to the capacity to imagine and act to create individual and collective futures. Our interest is how young people develop such agentive urban learning themselves and how it might be enhanced pedagogically at school and university. Three case studies explore different facets-the first on how young people themselves develop this agency in situated settings and the tools that they use to reflect upon the future; the second how digital tools might be used to enhance students' understanding of the city as a site of change, in this instance, climate change; the third how such agency might be developed collectively in partnership with other city dwellers. We conclude that a diversity of students' engagement in urban contexts of learning offers ways from which to further investigate how identity, setting and stakeholder relationships matter as part of potentially sustainable agentive learning futures.

In this article we argue that, for educators in design, urbanism and sustainability, the responsibility of connecting emergent design practice and changing societal needs into pedagogical activities demands that attention be given to ecologies of learning that explore the interplay between what is and what might be. As such, this futuring imperative brings into play a mix of modes of situated learning experience, communication and tools from design and learning to query the planned and built environment as a given, while offering alternate future visions and critiques. In this article, we argue for agile pedagogy that enables students to co-create as citizens in public spaces, through agentive multimodal construction of their identities and modes of transformative representation. Our core research problematic is how to develop, enact and critique design-based pedagogies that may allow designer-educator-researchers and students alike to co-create learning ecologies as dynamic engagement in re-making the city. This we take up within the wider context of climate change and pressing societal and environmental needs within which design and urbanism education increasingly needs to be oriented. Our inquiry is located within a shared practice of design pedagogy across two continents, and climatic and disciplinary domains between the western cape in South Africa and the far north of Norway. The main finding of this research is that pedagogies that are enabling of and attentive to the interplay of an assemblage of relational context-sensitive modalities can be conducive to sustainable and futuring design-based urban engagements.

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