Justice by Design: Exploring the agency of radical spatial imagination for spatial justice, toward designer attitudes – otherwise

Design is never neutral. Every decision, every intervention, and every process carries an attitude—an implicit set of values, biases, and priorities that shapes whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is included, and whose lives are impacted. In the face of our planetary emergency, socio-political unrest, and systemic inequality, this winter school challenges design neutrality and counters mainstream design education, discourses, practices and methods. It hopes to spark debate, an uncomfortable conversation, and critical reflection into the field of spatial design.

Hosted by the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, the program critically examines how mainstream spatial design education, discourse, practice and methods rooted in Western ideals, assumptions of democratic stability and heroism fall short of addressing the troubling realities of today’s world. We are witnessing this now in the Netherlands with increasing anti-immigration policies, with more than half-century military occupation of the West Bank in occupied Palestine, and ongoing denial of ancestral indigenous people’s land in Canada. Designing under the assumption of a democratic context where everyone has the right to participate, speak, and think freely will render us increasingly irrelevant and isolated if we aim to make a meaningful impact in diverse contexts and conditions. This realisation calls for a fundamental shift to diversify our design practices, methods, education and discourses.

Spatial designers must confront their complicity in reproducing systems of oppression and actively cultivate new attitudes to foster justice for all.

Through five case-based studios and one integrative studio, participants will work on conditions of spatial injustice and explore how design can be used to confront, resist and hack unjust realities. By centering attitude as a core concept, this winter school encourages students to reflect on their positions as designers and to experiment with radical spatial imagination and justice-oriented methods that challenge normative practices.

This is not a passive academic exercise but a critical and transformative experience. By the end of the program, participants will have co-developed a constellation of attitudes and frameworks to navigate spatial injustice, rethinking what it means to design in and for a fractured and unequal world.

The question is not whether design has an attitude—it always does. The challenge is whether we are willing to confront and reimagine those attitudes in pursuit of spatial justice.