Social justice is one of the defining challenges of our times. Growing inequality undermines social cohesion, weakens trust in institutions, fuels political polarisation, and threatens the sustainability of cities around the world. While sustainability is often understood through its environmental and economic dimensions, its social dimension remains comparatively neglected. Yet cities are increasingly shaped by displacement, exclusion, unequal access to public goods, and limited opportunities for meaningful participation in decisions that affect everyday life.
Spatial planning plays a central role in these processes. Planning is not a neutral technical activity. It determines how land is used, where infrastructure is built, who gains access to housing, mobility, public space, and services, and whose interests are prioritised in urban development. In doing so, planning shapes opportunities, life chances, and the distribution of benefits and burdens across society.
Questions of spatial justice are therefore inseparable from questions about the provision and governance of public goods. Access to housing, transport, education, public space, environmental quality, safety, and social infrastructure is not distributed evenly within cities. These inequalities are often produced and reproduced through planning decisions, investment priorities, regulatory frameworks, and institutional arrangements. Understanding and addressing these patterns is one of the central responsibilities of planners and urban designers.
For this reason, we believe that cities must be planned and designed with a deep understanding of their particular geographies, histories, cultures, and social realities. Urban development should be guided not only by technical expertise but also by meaningful participation from those affected by planning decisions. This Summer School unapologetically upholds democracy, the right to the city, and spatial justice as its core principles.
The Netherlands offers a particularly rich context for exploring these questions. Much of the country has been shaped through centuries of collective management of land and water, giving rise to institutions and planning traditions founded on negotiation, co-operation, and long-term thinking. These traditions have contributed to the creation of highly liveable cities and some of the world’s most sophisticated planning systems.
At the same time, Dutch cities face many of the same challenges confronting urban regions elsewhere. Housing shortages, rising land values, socio-spatial segregation, climate adaptation, migration, demographic change, and growing inequalities between neighbourhoods reveal that effective planning institutions alone cannot guarantee just outcomes. The crucial questions remain: for whom are cities planned, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits from urban development?
It is these questions that drive the Summer School.
Through lectures, workshops, fieldwork, discussions with practitioners, and the analysis of a real case study in the Netherlands, participants will develop a spatial strategy that integrates planning and design with a rigorous understanding of spatial justice. They will investigate who gains access to what resources, through which planning instruments, decided by whom, and at whose cost. They will examine how public authorities, civil society, communities, and private actors shape urban outcomes, and how planning can contribute to more inclusive, democratic, and sustainable cities.
The goal is not simply a technically elegant plan. It is a politically accountable proposition that uses the tools of spatial planning and design to address concrete forms of injustice and to advance a more sustainable and fair urban future.
