Objectives and Teaching Approach
The Summer School introduces participants to spatial justice as both an analytical framework and a practical imperative for spatial planning and urban design. Working on a real district in the Netherlands, students develop what we call a Political Proposition: a spatially grounded, evidentially supported argument for the redistribution of resources, rights, or decision-making power, and an identification of the planning instrument through which that redistribution would be achieved. The goal is not a technically elegant plan. It is a politically accountable one.
The teaching approach follows the tradition of the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft, where research and design are inseparable. Students are expected to participate actively in workshops and field exercises, engage critically with theoretical frameworks, and reflect on the limits of their own positionality as planners and designers working in communities that are not their own. We strive to make the exercise relevant by partnering with real stakeholders, including local residents, community organisations, the municipality, and other actors with direct interests in the area. Cooperation, not competition, is the expected register.
Description of Teaching Steps
Pre-arrival
Before the Summer School begins, students are invited to carry out a preparatory analysis of a case in their own country, addressing: the social, economic, and environmental conditions of the district; its position within the wider urban and metropolitan context; its history of planning interventions and their distributional consequences; and the key actors, institutional and community-based, with stakes in its future.
Week 1 — Diagnosing Injustice (Days 1–5)
The first week is devoted entirely to diagnosis. No proposition, vision, or strategy is developed until students have completed a rigorous analysis of the case study area from multiple perspectives. Teaching steps proceed as follows:
Days 1–2 introduce the conceptual framework — spatial justice, the right to the city, public goods, participatory planning — through lectures, a structured encounter with community knowledge, and an extended site visit on foot. Students begin to identify the spatial mechanisms through which injustice operates in the area: who has access to what, who has been displaced, whose knowledge is absent from official planning documents.
Day 3 deepens the analysis through archival and cartographic work. Groups produce a Critical Map, a historical and spatial reconstruction of how the area has been built and governed, and present their findings to peers and tutors.
Day 4 shifts to legal, political, and institutional frameworks: what rights exist on paper, how they have been enforced or ignored, and what community organising strategies have been deployed in response.
Day 5 introduces spatial design attitudes oriented towards justice , care ethics, decolonial design, infrastructure justice, and closes with a structured debate on the relationship between design agency and planning accountability. By the end of Week 1, each group submits a Diagnostic Brief: a concise statement of the injustice they have identified, its mechanism, and the actors involved.
Week 2 — From Diagnosis to Political and Spatial Proposition (Days 6–10)
The second week moves from understanding to proposing, but the form of the proposition is constrained by the diagnostic work of Week 1.
Day 6 is a field excursion to Rotterdam, focused not on celebrated architectural objects but on sites of displacement, community resistance, and climate vulnerability. Students document three justice gaps visible in the urban form and bring their observations back to their propositions.
Days 7–9 are devoted to developing, peer-reviewing, and revising the Political and Spatial Proposition. Each group’s proposition must specify: the injustice being addressed and its mechanism; the redistribution being proposed (of land, infrastructure access, environmental amenity, or decision-making power); the planning instrument through which it would operate; the actors who would benefit and those who would bear the cost; and the institutional resistances the proposition would encounter. Tutor desk-crits, peer exchange, and a deep critique session with invited external reviewers are built into this sequence.
Day 10 is given to final presentations and certificates. Each group presents their Political Proposition to a panel of tutors and external jurors, with assessment criteria weighted towards political clarity, evidentiary rigour, spatial specificity, and ethical accountability. The closing session includes a structured reflection on what participants have learned about the limits and possibilities of planning as a justice instrument.
Final delivery
Participants are asked to finalise their materials according to a provided template and submit a concise report documenting the key steps of their process , diagnostic analysis, proposition development, and critical revision. Results are published online as a collective record of the cohort’s work.
TU Delft Planning and Design for the Just City 