Alexandrou Svolou Neighbourhood Initiative decided to engage with students groups in 2017 (see: Iliopoulos & Kaligas, 2017) by focusing on and appropriating an urban ‘void’ located in the neighbourhood of Alexandrou Svolou. 

What is particularly significant about this urban ‘void’ (431,65 m2) is its ownership regime. It consisted of a vacant piece of public land that had been left to become derelict . 70% (337,05 m2) of its total area belongs to the School Buildings Organisation SA, a state-owned public limited company based in Athens, with the other 30% (94,60 m2) belonging to the Municipality of Thessaloniki. 

In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), philosopher Jacques Rancière suggested that educators should consider equality – in terms of knowing and not knowing – as a starting point rather than a destination (ibid., p. 23). In the development of our new framework of enabling expressive spaces for ULL 2.0, we should not be interested in guiding identified, mapped users/stakeholders/inhabitants towards prescribed ends, but rather, inspired by Rancière's concept of the ‘ignorant educator,’ our goal was to trigger their exploration of associated events towards multiple directions, starting from the same ‘entry-point.’ 

A design process orientated around the performativity of the generated space requires that the users’ experience of the space, their perception of it and interaction with it, is explored at the conceptual stage of the process. These explorations relate to, amongst others, the formal articulation and physical capacities of the designated space. In practice, this asymmetry between these procedures that attempt to explore the potential of non-quantified factors before the materialization of any of the quantified parameters, without being capable of physically testing the impact of different design configurations on the performativity of the generated space, points to the necessity of the design process for methods and tools that engage multiple users in design steps of open-ended exploration.