Reclaiming public space as educational space

Learning in public

This commentary calls for a crucial rhetorical shift: retooling social and physical infrastructure not just as the foundation of society, but as an active force for challenging and reshaping it; allowing learning to percolate throughout public space. In furthering the commentary with McFadden's (2025) argument on the ways schools are sites of social reproduction, I argue for public space to be reclaimed as learning space, both physically and intellectually. Engagement with Tanyildiz's (2025) call for connecting social reproduction and infrastructure reemphasizes my point of extending analysis to include spatial, cultural, and historical conditions. Building on this, Rodriguez (2025) deepens this argument by illuminating how public education in the United States reproduces structural inequities that privilege capital and whiteness. Meanwhile, Cohen's (2025) focus on financialization adds a critical layer to understanding the need for resistance in parallel. This perspective draws attention to the broader scalar implications and the influence of financial logics on the educational built environment.

These critiques, and McFadden's response, allow for a more complex and detailed understanding of social reproduction and infrastructure. Thus, I argue for public education to be viewed as a key node of learning ecosystems, not the center. Therefore, the need for investment in education infrastructure extends past the walls of a school and into the ways transformative investments build ecosystems and geographies of learning that disrupt the webs of domination over knowledge production.

Star and Ruhleder's (1996) seminal insight highlights that infrastructure is relational and largely invisible until it breaks down foregrounds its entanglement with people, practices, and technologies. Jurow et al. (2019) demonstrate that infrastructure simultaneously stabilizes and can be remediated to unsettle inequitable social orders. When embedded in broader community spaces, education becomes part of a larger project of collective memory and place-making rooted in justice, care, and reclamation.

As Irby (2015) argues, the built environment itself holds potential for imagining alternative futures. Spaces, particularly publicly accessible space, can serve as grounds for collective action and hope, even amid rising globalization, economic inequality, and environmental decline. Therefore, my argument starts from the premise that historical systems of domination – both of people and nature – are a result of unjust relations across our learning ecosystems that have escalated to unsustainable levels, as global elites continue to extract profit from the earth's ecosystems, pushing them to their limits. I make this connection through the historical practice of policing, controlling, and the process of limiting access to knowledge acquisition for Black, Indigenous, and Third World peoples because literacy is the voice of the people – whether spatial, digital, or environmental.

Just as vital, collective models can help people see space not simply as something to be dominated, enclosed, and commodified, but as a site of shared care, stewardship, and social justice. Individuals and communities reclaim space by occupying it with intention – modifying it, caring for it, marking it, and giving it meaning through words or images. This act of appropriation doesn’t just offer the physical means to meet daily needs; collective knowledge and social infrastructures support communities to see place as a site of intellectual and radical opportunity, rather than as sites of domination. Learning is a key driver in the appropriation of public space. As the centrifugal force within public space, learning allows for what we might conceive as metaphoric clay work: throwing, molding, and firing a sculpture for how a space can and should be to facilitate learning, resistance, and action. This appropriation of space meets more than everyday needs; place- and space-making can serve as a mode of individual and collective empowerment.

Reframing youth: From passive receivers to knowledge producers

Youth are too often positioned as passive receivers of socially reproduced sociospatial conditions rather than as agents with spatial knowledge and power. This framing obscures their capacity to disrupt and remake space. Drawing from my previous work, we can reconfigure our understanding of education not just as shaped by infrastructure but instead view learning opportunities as infrastructure itself – engaging learning as the tether between our embodiments of alternative futures and community potential – thereby bringing together spatial, social and knowledge infrastructures (see Germinaro, 2025).

Current discussions in geography on educational models tend to treat youth as individuals in isolated pursuits of success, reinforcing dominant ideologies and economic logics. Rather, I am pushing for us to view the ways youth access to learning can pertain to, and disrupt, the social, political, and historical dimensions of society; specifically the convergence between destruuction of public space and the eradication of youth learning spaces outside of school. Further, youth are seldom centered as producers of geographical theory, let alone space. However, by centering youth in collective and community-driven processes, we honor their spatial production process, namely as they use learning and knowledge construction as a powerful tool in resisting and reshaping landscapes and the built environment, turning public space into learning space and reclaiming age-old practices of learning in the wake (Sharpe, 2014).

With schools being invisible and routinely attacked infrastructures, public spaces can be understood as places for learning and education. As Rodriguez (2025) reminds us, schools are both critical and routinely under attack – being systematically devalued, stripped of resources, and politically targeted. Yet they remain central to public life. To reclaim schools as part of the public sphere, I urge us to not forget that they are also interconnected with other public learning and educational spaces. Further, Nguyen et al. (2017) describe how education serves a role in urban restructuring and productions of geographical theory. Schools, libraries, community organizations, and gathering spots must be woven together into visible and vital learning infrastructures, grounded in public investment and community participation.

Youth specifically engage the latter end of the spectrum regarding public space, most notably publicly available spaces, the in-between and liminal spaces that refract what youth produce in them. For example, Ma and Munter (2014) examine learning opportunities in two skateparks, finding that those opportunities were inseparable from other skateboarding activity; spaces of teaching, learning, and skating overlapped and mutually elaborated each other. I argue this is an ongoing intellectual and radical tradition by communities of color who have experienced oppression through the policing, erasure, and destruction of cultural knowledge spaces, hubs, and learning opportunities (see Vasudevan, 2022). Therefore, the process of engaging learning as a process of spatial production is a hyper-locally specific political issue regarding attacks on public spaces as learning spaces.

Education as sociospatial disruption

Education should not simply reproduce dominant spatial arrangements – instead, it should aim to challenge and disrupt them. When youth organize protests, resist ICE raids, or defend community spaces, they model what it means for education to be a practice of social disruption. These actions reimagine public schools not as insular institutions, but as part of larger ecosystems of care, resistance, and change. For example, Green (2018) found school leaders position the school as a social broker in the community through mechanisms, such as school culture connecting to community revitalization projects and instruction of the realities communities are facing. Learning then serves as a place to disrupt displacement and gentrification (Caldwell et al., 2019). This contributes to the ongoing conversation of how schools can be positioned to disrupt oppressive social reproductions of society.

Learning is key within urban ecologies, complicating the various layers and dimensions of learning as a spatial practice while also making a rhetorical shift in thinking through the ways youth learn to advocate and make changes to their built environment through the design process. For example, teachers resisting state mandates, reading banned books, or refusing to comply with oppressive policies show how education – when practiced in public – can reconfigure space, turning libraries, sidewalks, and even encampments into places of transformative learning. As hooks (1994, p 12) put it, “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” Metaphorically, the classroom is and can continue to be public and a publicly available space, providing increased engagement in socially reclaiming educational and learning infrastructure.

Toward a public learning ecosystem and commons

Despite egregious circumstances, marginalized communities have often demonstrated an ability to learn in community, collectively transforming the places in which they find themselves and, in the process, transforming themselves as individuals and as communities. In the best of cases, this activism affects heteronormative beliefs and practices in ways that lead to grassroots innovation or more just public policy. Radical imaginations, and the processes of learning emboldened by culturally grounded and socially situated place-based traditions of teaching and learning, promote an array of spatial interventions in which communities might engage learning opportunities that represent acts of resistance in the wake of social disruption work (Sharpe, 2014), sending ripples through institutionalized revitalization plans and/or public policy. We need to broaden our understanding of where learning takes place. The recent commodification of third spaces necessitates inquiry into venues for public education and learning that extend past school walls. Learning and educational environments include porches, parks, plazas, community centers, historical societies, and other shared and liminal spaces where knowledge is exchanged. Rather than centering only schools, we should think in terms of learning ecosystems – networks of spaces, people, and practices that collectively nurture growth and resistance. Examples include:

Intergenerational gardens or food co-ops

Schools are physical hubs within ecosystems – not its boundaries. Community-based education needs to be a strategy, not a supplement. Our organizing must be rooted in hyper-local knowledge and asymmetrical resistance. Centering learning in public space furthers our critique and analysis of ‘concrete socio-spatial histories and conditions, particularly those that obfuscate the constitutive relationship between the social reproductive capacities of schools and their built environment’ (McFadden, 2025). That means learning from historical mechanisms of resistance: studying under candlelight, organizing under threat, teaching while on the move. This fugitive model of learning is historically significant and remains foundational to Black, Indigenous, and migrant educational traditions.

Speculative and community-based projects offer models for reconnecting land, learning, and liberation. These efforts make space for community members to teach and learn in ways that align with their lived experiences and collective visions. Whether it is an artist unable to find teaching work, a retired grandparent with deep local knowledge, or a youth with lived experience of resistance, our communities are filled with people ready to teach and learn. Public education must become the space where all of this converges.

This is a call to move toward a public learning commons; reimagining schools and public spaces as part of a broader public learning commons – interconnected, community-rooted, and in resistance. It means rejecting privatization, recognizing the value of everyday knowledge, and insisting on the right to learn in public, with one another, across generations. Public education must belong to everyone. Not just children. Not just parents. Everyone. The challenge and invitation are to build the infrastructure and relationships that make that real.