Duty of Care
Conversations across disciplines and lived experience on how planning and design can make cities more distributively fair, procedurally democratic, and genuinely recognitional.
Planning for the just city.
Duty of Care brings together academics, practitioners, students, communities and public institutions to explore how planning and design can contribute to more just cities. The podcast examines the relationship between space, justice and democracy: how urban environments distribute opportunities and burdens, how decisions about them are made, and whose identities, experiences and ways of knowing are recognised.
Cities are not neutral settings. Their housing systems, infrastructures, public spaces, institutions and environmental conditions reflect political choices and unequal relations of power. These arrangements shape who can access essential resources, participate in collective decisions, live with dignity and exercise a meaningful right to the city. Planning can reproduce these inequalities, but it can also help communities and institutions confront and transform them.
The podcast approaches the just city through three interconnected dimensions of spatial justice:
- Distributive justice How resources, opportunities, public goods, environmental benefits and social burdens are distributed across places and populations.
- Procedural justice Who participates in decisions about the city, whose interests carry influence, and whether people have the power to shape the spaces and institutions that affect their lives.
- Recognitional justice Whose identities, needs, histories, knowledge and ways of inhabiting the city are respected, and whose are ignored, misrepresented or rendered invisible.
A just city is not a finished model or a single urban form. It is an ongoing democratic project, shaped through conflict, negotiation, solidarity and collective action. It requires us to connect questions of sustainability, housing, mobility, public space, resilience and urban development to the institutions and power relations through which cities are governed.
Through conversations across disciplines, professions and lived experiences, Duty of Care asks what responsibilities planners, designers, researchers and public institutions have towards the people and places affected by their decisions. Its purpose is to foster the knowledge, imagination and democratic capacity needed to make cities more distributively fair, procedurally democratic and genuinely recognitional.
Two voices, one conversation.
Roberto Rocco
Personal page ↗Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy, Department of Urbanism, TU Delft. His focus is the governance of just sustainability transitions, with special attention to spatial justice — how public, private and civic actors interact in planning, designing, governing and inhabiting the built environment, formally and informally. These basic but foundational ideas explain much of my actions as an educator and researcher.
Hugo Lopez
Faculty page ↗PhD researcher at the School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield, studying 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.
Six conversations worth your time.
Making Space for Care: Reflections from the BK Feminist Week
Irene Luque Martín, Emmelot Linssen, Megha Sahu, Jonne van Bunningen and Isabella Jaramillo reflect on organising the BK Feminist Week as an experiment in horizontal leadership, collective organising, and building care and safe spaces inside institutions not built for it.
Vanesa Castán Broto on the twin challenges of climate action and rapid urbanisation
The University of Sheffield scholar on the governance of global environmental change in the age of urbanisation.
Just City in Kenya: a conversation with Titus Kaloki
Smart city versus just city, transformative change-making, and the fight for a socially just public transport, with FES Kenya’s Just City programme lead.
Planning for solidarity in diversity, with Stijn Oosterlynck
The University of Antwerp sociologist on local social innovation, welfare-state restructuring, and new forms of solidarity in urban diversity.
Housing as a human right, with Leilani Farha
The former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, now director of The Shift, on restoring housing as home rather than commodity.
Race & space, with Suraj Yengde
The Harvard Kennedy School fellow and author of “Caste Matters” on race, caste and class in urban development.
Democracy and human rights in planning, with Efrat Cohen-Bar
BIMKOM — Planners for Planning Rights — on using Israeli law to confront planning practices that strip Palestinians of their rights.