Abstract
This article focuses on a particular form of educational experience, namely the pedagogical experience of the city and its representation in two oeuvres: Childhood in Berlin around 1900 by Walter Benjamin and Amarcord by Federico Fellini. First, I would like to show how certain experiences recounted by Benjamin or staged by Fellini refer to a philosophy of ‘’outside education’’, that is, a conception of the city as an educating otherness, as a formative entity. This idea resonates with what some philosophers of education call an urban pedagogy (Stephen Dobson) or a poor pedagogy (Jan Masschelein), some pedagogical forms within which takes place a space of attention and play, shocks and movements caused by our situation in an outside world, here the city. I then wish, through an analysis comparing the two, to highlight an additional dimension, another formative power of the city in the thought of Benjamin and the cinema of Fellini: I intend to present the city as a participant in a pedagogy of nostalgia, in other words like a system of memory which, beyond the immediate contact that we make with it during childhood and adolescence, continues to form us as subjects throughout our existence.