TU Delft Planning and Design for the Just City

At the end of the Summer School, you will be able to:

• IDENTIFY the mechanisms through which spatial injustice is produced and reproduced in urban environments, including displacement, unequal access to public goods, exclusion from planning processes, and the racialised and classed distribution of environmental burdens and benefits.
• ANALYSE a real urban district using multiple sources of spatial knowledge: quantitative data, cartographic and archival evidence, resident testimony, and community organising histories.
• EXPLAIN the relationship between spatial planning, governance, and democracy, including the structural limits of participation, the distributional consequences of planning instruments, and the conditions under which planning serves or undermines social justice.
• ELABORATE a Spatial and Political Proposition: a spatially grounded, evidentially supported argument for the redistribution of resources, rights, or decision-making power in a specific territory, identifying the planning instrument through which that redistribution would operate.
• DISCUSS the possible roles of planning and design professionals in delivering socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable urban environments, and the ethical responsibilities that come with proposing change in communities that are not their own.
• CONNECT issues of governance, participation, and democracy to concrete spatial planning and design decisions, demonstrating awareness of who holds power in planning processes and how that power can be contested or redistributed.
• REFLECT critically on your own positionality as planners and designers — including the limits of their knowledge, the assumptions embedded in their methods, and the interests their proposals serve.

---

Desirably, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• What specific injustice does your Political Proposition address, and through what spatial mechanism does that injustice operate?
• Who gains and who bears the cost under your proposal, and how do you justify that distribution?
• Which planning instrument does your proposition rely on, and what are the institutional conditions required for it to work?
• How does your strategy engage the three principal groups of actors in any governance arrangement, civic society, the public sector, and the private sector, and what role does each play?
• How does your strategy address the three dimensions of sustainability (social, economic, and environmental), and where do those dimensions come into tension with one another?
• What values underlie your proposition, and where did those values come from?
• How does your proposition serve the needs of the groups most likely to be excluded from planning processes — including people with disabilities, older residents, children, minorities, and those without secure housing tenure?
• How does your proposition use the specific tools of spatial planning — zoning, land policy, public investment, participatory mechanisms — rather than relying on design gesture alone?