Manifesto for the Just City — Participation guide
How to write a good manifesto for the Just City
A manifesto is not an essay. It is a statement of values written to inspire people to act. This guide walks you through the form, step by step, with real examples and tools to check your draft before you submit it.
§ Why write a manifesto
2,500+
Participants since 2020
100+
Universities worldwide
A manifesto moves you from critique to proposition.
It is easy to describe what is wrong with a city. A manifesto asks for more: a position, a vision, a call to act. Writing one is a way of rehearsing the kind of public voice democratic life depends on — making an argument, defending it with others, and putting it into writing where it can be read, contested and used.
Manifestos do not need to produce immediate change to be worth writing. Even when they stay tentative or incomplete, the act of writing one collectively cultivates the capacities that democratic life runs on: imagination, hope, solidarity, and the willingness to say something in public and stand behind it.
This is also why the exercise is collective. A manifesto written by one person is a personal statement. A manifesto negotiated by a team of three to six people, often from different disciplines, forces the kind of disagreement, translation and compromise that any real political claim has to survive.
Theoretical foundations: Freire (2018) on critical consciousness and dialogical practice; Miraftab (2022) on hope as political practice; Fraser (2000, 2010) and Soja (2010) on distributive, recognitional and procedural justice; Colomina (2014) and Puchner (2006) on the manifesto as a form of urgent, declarative thinking. Rocco, R., & Newton, C. (2026). Conceptual framework of the Manifesto for the Just City activity. Centre for the Just City, TU Delft.
§ The pedagogy behind the exercise
Why the nine steps are built the way they are.
The nine steps are not a writing formula picked for convenience. They sit on top of a pedagogical architecture, mapped in the diagram above, that starts from Freire’s conscientização: participants move from professionals-in-training absorbing a discipline to situated political actors with a public voice (Freire 2018). It is the writing itself, done collectively and in the open, that does this work — the argument, the drafting, and the defence of a position other people can read and contest.
That movement is aimed at three specific failures the framework names as crises. A crisis of imagination, where neoliberal rationality narrows what participants can picture as possible. A crisis of recognition, where marginalised voices are coded out of the address before the writing even begins. And a crisis of hope, the erosion of belief that transformative change remains available at all (Miraftab 2022). Against each of these, every manifesto is asked to hold three dimensions of justice in view: distributive justice, over resources such as housing, transit and environmental quality; recognitional justice, over plurality of voice, identity and memory; and procedural justice, over who gets standing and access in decision-making (Fraser 2000, 2010; Soja 2010).
The manifesto form carries this weight because it is declarative rather than descriptive: it states values with clarity, without claiming finality (Colomina 2014). Drafting one in a team of three to six, then defending it in public, works as a rehearsal of democratic argument and an exercise in collective authorship negotiated across disciplinary difference (Rocco et al. 2021–2024). The scaffolding behind it is a four-week lecture series, small-group drafting, open-access publication and a deliberate refusal to rank submissions against one another — running since 2020 across more than 100 universities and 2,500 participants, oriented throughout toward what the framework calls the Just City as normative horizon: a counter-hegemonic horizon of equality, inclusion, democracy and care.
Further theoretical grounding, from the framework: Harvey (2008) and Dikeç (2001) on spatial justice; Friedmann (1987), Sandercock (2003) and Giroux (2011) on critical and insurgent planning pedagogy; Bloch (1986) and Solnit (2016) on hope as a resource for political practice.
§ The guide
Nine steps to a manifesto that manifests.
Click each step to open it. These are adapted from the Centre’s own participation guidelines, used every year by teams writing their manifesto for the Just City.
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A manifesto is a statement of a group’s values and objectives, but its main function is to inspire people to promote positive change. Language that only describes will not do this work — it needs to move the reader.
Try this testRead your opening sentence aloud. If it sounds like the first line of a report, rewrite it. If it sounds like something worth repeating, keep it. -
Use clear language and avoid long, complicated sentences. Many strong manifestos lean on bullet points and short declarative statements — they carry more weight than a paragraph that hedges.
Try this testIf a sentence needs three commas to get through it, it is probably two sentences. Split it. -
Set out briefly what the main challenges are. Give it a sense of urgency — the problems that motivate your manifesto are serious, and the manifesto should read as if they must be met now, not eventually.
Worked example“The Green Party Manifesto (2019) opens: ‘We know these are dark days… At this time of crisis, we cannot go on as we are.’ Notice how little space it needs to establish stakes.” -
Set out your vision for a new, innovative, desirable and feasible future. What needs to happen, and who needs to act? Condemning today’s injustices is important, but it is not enough — a manifesto has to lay out a path toward something better.
Try this testFor every sentence that names a problem, write one that names what you want instead. If your manifesto is all diagnosis, it is a critique, not yet a manifesto. -
What are the values that move you and your group? Are they shared by others? Values are what let a reader evaluate alternatives and choose a path for action — make yours explicit rather than assumed.
Try this testAsk each member of your team to name one value the manifesto must defend. If you cannot agree, that disagreement belongs in the drafting conversation, not hidden underneath vague language. -
A manifesto is also a call for action. What should people do? And who, specifically, should do it — residents, planners, city councils, universities, all of the above?
Try this testFind every sentence that starts with “we need” or “we must”. Now rewrite it naming who “we” is and what the action actually looks like on the ground. -
Finish with a strong statement. This is the moment to leave a mark: one sentence that a reader could quote back to you and that summarises what your manifesto stands for.
Try this testCover the rest of your manifesto and read only the last line. Does it stand on its own? If not, it is not your ending yet. -
Manifestos are often visual documents, illustrated with strong images that show the future you are calling for. Only use images produced by your own group, or images you have written permission to use — this is taken seriously in review.
Copyright ruleNo image without permission. Collages count too: use free-licence sources such as Wikimedia Commons or Unsplash if you are not producing your own imagery. -
Manifestos must be publicised. What is the best format for your ideas to be understood quickly by a large number of people? A manifesto that only works as a PDF nobody opens has not done its job.
Historical exampleIn 1995, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg wrote ten numbered rules for filmmaking — the Dogme 95 “Vow of Chastity” — short enough to fit on one page, and it changed Danish cinema.
§ Check your draft
Are you within the limit?
Manifestos are capped at 1,000 words and two A4 spreads. The cover page, image captions and references are extra and don’t count toward the limit. Paste your draft below to check it — nothing you type here is saved or sent anywhere.
0
of 1,000 words
Plenty of room — start writing.
This counts words only. It does not check A4 spreads, formatting, or your cover page — check those against the submission checklist below.
§ Before you submit
Submission checklist.
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On certificates, and on what counts as a manifesto
Only groups that deliver a completed manifesto have the right to a certificate of participation from TU Delft. Attending the online workshop sessions on their own does not warrant a certificate — the certificate is earned by submitting a manifesto.
We will not publish academic papers disguised as manifestos. A submission that argues like a literature review, hedges like a discussion section, without taking a position will be returned rather than published. Using references and quoting others is highly desirable, but you must take a position.
§ Real examples
Manifestos worth studying.
The Manifesto Manifesto
By design studio Kumquat — a manifesto about writing manifestos. A useful, self-aware example of the form turned on itself. Read it →
UK party manifestos, 1979–1987
Three general elections in eight years produced sharply different visions of Britain — Conservative, Labour and SNP — from the same political moment. LGA general election hub →
2019 — Foreword (PDF)
“If not now, then when?”
A short foreword built on urgency and repetition (“we are the only party you can trust to…”) that carries the whole document’s argument in under 300 words. Read the foreword →
Manifesto as graphic form
Typography and layout do real argumentative work — scale, weight and repetition can carry as much force as the sentences themselves. More graphic design manifestos →
Dogme 95, “Vow of Chastity”
Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s 1995 manifesto for filmmaking — ten numbered rules, kept short enough to fit on one page, that changed the look and method of Danish cinema. Read the manifesto →
Gay Liberation Front Manifesto
London, 1971 — a foundational document of queer liberation politics, still read today for the clarity of its demands. Read the manifesto →
- 1933Charter of Athens — CIAM’s foundational manifesto for Modernist urbanism, later revised as the New Charter of Athens (2003) with a focus on sustainable spatial planning.
- 1971Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, London — a foundational document of queer liberation politics, still read for its clarity of demand.
- 1995Dogme 95 “Vow of Chastity”, Lars von Trier & Thomas Vinterberg — ten numbered filmmaking rules, a model of brevity as manifesto strategy.
- 2007Leipzig Charter — the EU’s manifesto for sustainable and fair urbanisation, built around participation, democracy and shared vision-building.
- 2014Guldi, J. & Armitage, D., The History Manifesto. Cambridge University Press — an argument for long-term thinking as a political act, not just a scholarly one.
- 2020The Care Manifesto, The Care Collective. Verso — puts care, rather than growth, at the centre of a political programme.
§ Voices from past volumes
What contributors have written.
“A commitment to justice also requires us to open up dialogue with other parts of the world as equals.”
Romola Sanyal, London School of Economics — Manifesto for the Just City, Vol. 2
“Like hope, care needs to be examined beyond individuals’ self-care, as community projects of insurgency, as insurgent practices towards human urbanism.”
Faranak Miraftab, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — Manifesto for the Just City, Vol. 2
Now go write one.
Register for the next edition →Questions about eligibility or your submission? Write to r.c.rocco@tudelft.nl