The Department of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, organises an annual Summer School under the theme “Planning and Design for the Just City”. The programme takes place each July in Delft, The Netherlands, and is open to graduate students and early-career professionals in spatial planning, urban design, architecture, and related disciplines.
For information on how to apply and participation fees, please consult the Summer School website. For questions, contact us at Summer School TU Delft.
About the Programme
The Summer School brings together spatial planning, urban design, and governance to address the challenge of producing cities that are both just and sustainable. Spatial justice is not treated here as one objective among many: it is the organising principle of the entire programme. Participants examine the structural conditions that produce spatial inequality, engage with communities and residents directly affected by planning decisions, and develop propositions that are simultaneously spatial and political in character.
Each edition uses a neighbourhood in the city of Delft as its primary case study site, raising concrete questions about displacement, uneven investment, and the governance of urban transitions. Working from diagnosis to proposition, students move through a structured pedagogical sequence: spatial proposals are not permitted until an evidential basis has been established through the diagnostic phase.
The programme is anchored in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, The New Urban Agenda (Quito, 2016), and the European Green Deal, and draws on international scholarship in spatial justice, social sustainability, and the politics of urban governance. It pays particular attention to the Dutch planning tradition — including its colonial histories and current institutional arrangements — as a lens through which broader questions of justice and sustainability can be examined critically.
Structure and Pedagogy
The programme combines lectures, seminars, mandatory site visits, and a studio-based design exercise. A field trip to Rotterdam addresses questions of displacement and neighbourhood transformation. A dedicated session examines colonial histories of Dutch spatial planning. Resident and community speakers contribute to the diagnostic phase, ensuring that analytical work is grounded in the knowledge of those who live and work in the area under study.
The central deliverable is the Spatial and Political Proposition: an integrated output comprising diagnostic map sets, a structured proposition statement, a spatial strategy, fine-grain design interventions held to evidentiary standards, and an accountability statement addressing costs, institutional resistances, and the limits of the team’s knowledge.
Location and Institution
The Summer School is hosted at the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (BK), TU Delft, in the city of Delft, The Netherlands. TU Delft is consistently ranked among the world’s leading universities for architecture and urbanism.
Further Information
Please visit the Summer School website for the full programme, schedule, and application details. For an example of how the programme is structured, the 2022 Summer School Report is available for download below.
For more information, please write to Summer School TU Delft and mention “Summer School Just City URBANISM”.
The Summer School contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals 4, 11, 13. SDG 11 is about Making Cities Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable. We believe that by addressing SDG 11, we can tackle all other SDGs.
