About the show
This podcast discusses and exchanges ideas with academics, practitioners, and students of the built environment to plan and design for the just transition, with a robust understanding of the entanglement between spatial justice and sustainability.
The DUTY OF CARE podcast is produced by the centre for the Just City of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology. This podcast is sponsored by the Delft Design for Values Platform, the TU Delft platform discussing values for engineering and design.
In 2019, The European Union launched its “European Green Deal”, aiming to make Europe carbon neutral by 2050. We all know the transition to a carbon neutral economy is urgent, but will it be fair? Past transitions have always produced winners and losers, with the losing groups often facing unemployment and poverty, with dire consequences for social cohesion and social justice. In the case of climate change and the urgent transition to sustainability, not having a transition will make us all losers, but this does not mean we should not try to avoid or minimise the negative impacts of the transition on vulnerable groups. It is all about the fair distribution of the benefits, but also the burdens of our human association.
Meet
Our Hosts
Roberto Rocco
I am an Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at the Department of Urbanism of the Delft University of Technology. My focus is the governance of just sustainability transitions, which entails a special attention to spatial justice. I investigate how actors and institutions from the public sector, the private sector and civic society interact in planning, designing, governing and inhabiting the built environment, both formally and informally. These basic but foundational ideas explain much of my actions as an educator and researcher.
Hugo Lopez
I’m a research fellow at TU Delft’s Department of Urbanism, currently collaborating with the Spatial Planning & Strategy chair on the Horizon Europe Project UP2030. My current motivation is to expand the traditional focus of urban studies by looking at urbanisation beyond the limits of “the city”. In this realm, I’m developing a research proposal to study the relation between spatial justice and territorial planning in Brazil from the perspective of the Atlantic Forest biome and its many human and non-human actors.
Justice is one of planning’s definitive internal and necessary goods, allowing it to achieve its objectives. Without justice, planning cannot be publicly justified or sustained.
Listen to an explanation about the main objectives of the podcast and the origin of its name, read by Roberto Rocco
An essential dimension of the European Green Deal is the concept of “just transition”, that is, a transition to a carbon-neutral economy that is fair and inclusive to all, “leaving no one behind”. Sustainable, fair, and inclusive urbanisation plays a key role in this endeavour. With those ideas in mind, we organised a series of online events and courses that address planning and designing cities and communities for the just transition by bringing together expertise from spatial planning, urban sustainability and resilience, resilience engineering, ethics of resilience and multi-actor systems.
We want to discuss the values in socio-technical transitions and urbanisation, namely issues connected to distributive, procedural and restorative spatial justice, as well as citizen participation, democracy and sustainability, understood in its three essential dimensions: social, economic, and environmental sustainability. In doing so, we wish to address the interactions between design and values with an emphasis on operationalising spatial justice through inclusive vision making. And by using societal conflicts stemming from the transition as springboards to dialogue.