TU Delft Planning and Design for the Just City

IS THE SUMMER SCHOOL ABOUT ARCHITECTURE?

This school is not about architecture, though many of our students have an architectural background. The Summer School is run by the Department of Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft. Urbanism is a discipline concerned with the broader built environment: it blends urban planning, urban design, and spatial governance. We are located within the Faculty of Architecture, but our focus is on how cities are planned, governed, and made just, not on the design of individual buildings. Architects enjoy the school precisely because it asks them to think at the scale of the city and the neighbourhood, and to engage with the political and social dimensions of space that building design alone cannot address. Architects who want to understand urban planning and design in depth are encouraged to apply.

To understand what Urbanism means at TU Delft, it is useful to understand how we use design as a form of academic research.

IS THE SUMMER SCHOOL ABOUT ENGINEERING?

No. Engineering perspectives are welcome and relevant, but the emphasis is on spatial planning, urban design, and the governance of the built environment. Engineers generally find the school valuable because it shows them how planning and design decisions are made, and how technical expertise must operate within, and sometimes push back against, political and institutional frameworks. Many find it directly useful for their professional careers.

WHAT IS THE SUMMER SCHOOL ABOUT?

The Summer School is an intensive exercise in spatial plan-making and design within a multi-actor, multi-stakeholder environment. In short, it is about democratic, inclusive, and accountable strategic spatial planning with spatial justice as its organising principle rather than its afterthought.

The school reproduces the intellectual approach of the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft, which brings together the human sciences, the physical sciences, and design in a single practice. Its central objective is to produce what we call a Spatial and Political Proposition: a spatially grounded, evidentially supported argument for how an urban district can be made more just, through specific redistributions of resources, rights, or decision-making power, and through identifiable planning instruments.

Spatial justice, as we understand it, has three inseparable dimensions. Distributive justice concerns the fair allocation of the burdens and benefits of urban development. Procedural justice concerns who participates in planning decisions, under what conditions, and with what real influence. Recognitional justice concerns the acknowledgement and validation of the specific needs, identities, cultural heritage, and lived experiences of disadvantaged groups — groups whose knowledge is routinely excluded from formal planning processes. These three dimensions are not abstract ideals: they show up in zoning decisions, land policy, infrastructure investment, public space allocation, and the governance arrangements that determine who gets to shape a neighbourhood’s future.

You will be invited to contribute to the plan and proposition from your own professional and academic perspective. Spatial planning and urban design are irreducibly transdisciplinary activities, and the diversity of the cohort — in background, nationality, and experience — is a deliberate and essential feature of the school.

IS THE SUMMER SCHOOL SUITABLE FOR PhD CANDIDATES AND POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCHERS?

Yes. The Summer School combines lectures, field work, and practical planning and design exercises, underpinned throughout by research. Our conceptualisation of spatial justice — and the ways in which that concept creates productive tensions with planning practice — may be directly relevant to your research. We are glad to host PhD candidates and post-doctoral researchers who want to understand how these subjects are taught at TU Delft, or who feel they can contribute substantively to the school’s collective work. Bear in mind that approximately 80% of participants are Master’s students: the school is calibrated to that level, and senior participants should be prepared to engage generously across that difference. You do not need to contact us to confirm your eligibility — please address it directly in your motivation letter.