The project aims to develop a co-creative approach to participatory urban planning and design for improved socio-spatial justice through co-creation. The project is situated within a broader context of ‘Them vs Us’ conflicts including rigid social hierarchies of coloniality, caste, class, and expertise that limit the extent to which and what types of communities are involved in urban development. More specifically, the project endeavoured to:

1. Reimagine the urbanist as a ‘language mediator’ whereby the urbanist experiments with ways to communicate with and between different stakeholders (inhabitants, migrants, institutions, etc). As such the urbanist becomes multilingual not just in a spoken or written sense, but also in visual and body languages, as well as silence. Together, engaged stakeholders, built trust, and an identifying of needs, wants and worries inform co-creation;

2. Recognize, access and value ‘unconventional’ knowledge and experiences to expand traditional realms of expertise. This aim focuses on the dismissal of ‘othered’ knowledge paradigms that could help in addressing pressing urban challenges;

3. Build inhabitant literacy to facilitate inhabitants not only ‘having a seat at the table’ but also an informed voice when they are there.

These aims intertwine to form the central research question, ‘how can an approach to participatory planning and design use language as a means to engage with different actors, access and value ‘unconventional’ knowledge while also building citizen literacy?’. The project takes place in Rotterdam’s western Bospolder-Tussendijken neighbourhood. In response to the research questions and its Rotterdam context, the research outputs are 4-fold, underpinned by the central theme of what it means to be seen. They consist of (1) a storybook; (2) reflections on co-creative participatory approaches; (3) the report; and (4) the bonus spatial implications of the research for urban design and planning. The outputs allow for the intersectional sharing of multiple stories, exposure to other types of knowledge and experiences, and the unpacking of existing systems and hierarchies that hinder the realisation of socio-spatial justice.

Collaboration between the Global South and Global North is inevitable. It can work. It can be emphatic, effective, and more equal. However, there is a deeply embedded history of colonialism involving power asymmetries that give rise to the dismissal of value systems, which pervert this type of collaboration from being truly realised. Hence, within an architectural education framework, this thesis aimed to examine how TU Delft’s Global Housing studio addresses or perpetuates colonialism and neo-colonialism while practicing in the Global South. The book, Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson helped illuminate the historical context as it concerned the relationship between architecture and race. Additionally, Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste: The Lies That Divide Us, provided a framework from which a stakeholder power dynamic analysis could be conducted. The thesis’ conclusions illuminate how the studio addresses colonialism and neo-colonialism in their communication of intent and some of their actions. Contrastingly, the studio sustains elements of colonialism and neo-colonialism. For example, their definition of success is one-sided in terms of who benefits, while despite their intentions to be collaborative their use of language and approaches continue to communicate a “them versus us” narrative. This thesis is, however, an introduction to the continued work that is needed to address colonialism and neo-colonialism in architectural education.