Autumn School for the Just City

In 2019, The European Union launched its “European Green Deal”, aiming to make Europe carbon neutral by 2050. We all know the transition to sustainability is urgent, but will it be fair? Past transitions have always produced winners and losers, with the losing groups facing unemployment and poverty, with dire consequences for social cohesion. Think of the deindustrialization in the north of England, for example. Therefore, 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 Urbanism, with funding from the Delft Design for Values Institute, will organise a free online Autumn School that addresses 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. This school actively contributes to the discussion of 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. In doing so, this Autumn School addresses the interactions between design and values (mitigation, embodiment, and generation) with an emphasis on operationalisation of societal values in inclusive vision making and using societal conflicts stemming from the transition as springboards to dialogue.

This Autumn School enables master students and young professionals to plan and design for the just transition with a robust understanding of the entanglement between spatial justice and successful sustainability transitions. The Autumn School builds upon a successful Summer School for Planning and Design with Water led by Bouwkunde. In pre-pandemic times, this school used to gather one hundred students from all over the world for a two-week total immersion experience in spatial planning for resilience and sustainability, in partnership with the City of The Hague, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, Rijkwaterstaat, DELTARES, ARCADIS and more.
The online version of this school aims to reboot this project post-pandemic, while gathering new expertise in urban sustainability and resilience for the just transition, promoting a closer collaboration between BK and TBM. In doing so, it hopes to reach young professionals and master students in areas connected to the built environment. This kind of multi-dimensional training that includes ethics and values is sorely missing in most places where a technocratic and excessively technical education is predominant. With this school, Urbanism hopes to raise the awareness among future planner and designers about the need to incorporate values in their design practices in a robust way, not only by considering these values as afterthoughts when making design decisions and designing policy, but by actively seeking stakeholder engagement and citizen participation in planning and design of the just city. 
 

Practical information

• Dates of the online sessions: 4, 11, 18, 25th of November en 2nd of December at 18:30 CET.
• Register here.