Social justice is one of the defining challenges of our times. Rampant inequality erodes the fabric of societies everywhere, undermining trust in governments and institutions, fuelling violence and extremism, and corroding the foundations of democracy itself.
Growing inequality is a direct threat to the sustainability of cities, particularly when sustainability is understood in its three fundamental dimensions: social, economic, and environmental. Social sustainability remains the least explored of the three, and its absence from most urban planning and design curricula leaves an enormous gap. Cities are increasingly sites of displacement, exclusion, and unequal access to public goods, from housing and mobility to green space and political voice. Spatial planning is not a neutral technical practice: it distributes resources, shapes life chances, and can either entrench or dismantle injustice.
This is why we believe that cities must be planned and designed taking into account their particular social geographies, their histories of exclusion, and the aspirations of all who inhabit them. Cities need to be planned and designed by all who make them, through genuinely participatory processes. This Summer School unapologetically upholds democracy, the right to the city, and spatial justice as its core principles.
The Netherlands offers a particularly instructive context in which to examine these questions. Initially a territory built on swamps and marshes, shaped by centuries of collective water management, the Netherlands developed a distinctive societal model, the polder model, in which collective action, consensus-seeking, and faith in institutions play a central role. This tradition of governing shared resources through negotiation and co-operation has produced some of the most liveable cities in the world. Yet the Dutch tradition of spatial planning is not without its contradictions: its post-war housing programmes, its management of migration and urban diversity, and its contemporary struggles over land value, housing affordability, and the spatial consequences of austerity are precisely the kinds of tensions that a serious engagement with spatial justice must confront.
The Netherlands is also a laboratory for innovative approaches to urban governance, participatory planning, and the co-production of public space. Dutch municipalities have pioneered integrated spatial strategies that link land use, infrastructure, social policy, and environmental resilience. At the same time, growing pressure on urban land, accelerating gentrification in major cities, and deep inequalities between neighbourhoods reveal that good planning institutions are necessary but not sufficient. The question of for whom cities are planned, and by whose knowledge, remains urgently open.
It is this question that drives the Summer School. Through the analysis of a case study in the Netherlands, participants will develop a spatial strategy that integrates the tools of urban planning and design with a rigorous understanding of spatial justice: who gains access to what, through which instruments, decided by whom, and at whose cost. The goal is not a technically elegant plan. It is a politically accountable proposition.
TU Delft Planning and Design for the Just City 