"With a large part of the built environment privately owned in many European cities, citizen engagement is crucial for the success of sustainability initiatives in urban areas. The use of digital platforms and tools can support this process, given their potential to enable remote participation, reach a large number of citizens, and enhance governance transparency. However, many digital platforms for citizen engagement in sustainability action remain underutilised.

This study adopts a user-centric perspective to analyse the interface design of over ten digital platforms and identify design elements that hinder or foster engagement. Our analysis highlights four main interface issues: disconnection between scientific data and personal experience, complex navigation, information overload, and limited opportunities for action.

To overcome these limitations, we developed a set of design guidelines addressing four themes: Awareness and framing, Individual and collective action, Effective use of data, and Navigation and visuals. We implemented these guidelines in two prototypes, focusing on heat waves and biodiversity loss in urban areas. The prototypes were tested in workshop settings with positive feedback from participants, corroborating the importance of citizen-centric interface design in ensuring effective citizen engagement."@en

Governments often use price-based policies such as tax-subsidies and rebates to encourage households to shift to renewable energy sources like rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV). These policies, however, have primarily benefited high-income homeowners, leaving others behind. This paper proposes leveraging social networks’ influence on attitudes and perceptions to design more equitable solar PV adoption programs. Using data from Albany county (New York State, USA) we develop an Agent-based model, integrating a novel implementation of circles of influence into the theory of planned behavior. We test two policy categories (generic and targeted) under two network scenarios (integrated and segregated). Resulting solar PV adoption rates are evaluated using egalitarian, utilitarian and cost metrics to analyze policy impact on different income groups. Our findings indicate that network structure significantly influences adoption rates within income groups. Low-income groups in segregated networks can experience higher adoption driven by positive attitudes towards solar PV, while high-income groups in segregated networks may face poor policy performance despite higher affordability. Seeding policies and information dissemination through influential network members may not necessarily improve adoption rates, as trust can a more important role. The study underscores the importance of trusted information sources in influencing adoption decisions. The insights gained from this research can guide policy design for tailored interventions to improve access to renewable energy for all income groups.@en

The ongoing debates surrounding sustainability transitions in cities and regions highlight the urgent need to make these transitions fairer, more democratic, and inclusive. Currently, there is increasing recognition that sustainability transitions must be more just to avoid the risk of failure and the deepening of discontent with climate action, particularly in disadvantaged urban areas and among marginalised communities. Similarly, in the field of urban planning, there is a rapidly expanding body of literature on spatial justice, emphasising the need for more equitable planning in terms of the spatial distribution of benefits and burdens, fairness in procedures, and recognition of the diverse needs and interests of different social groups. However, planning practice has yet to keep pace with this trend, and there is a significant knowledge gap regarding how to measure and evaluate spatial justice in the planning process. This paper seeks to address this gap by proposing a spatial justice assessment tool for planning documents. We outline the conceptual model that underpins the tool and demonstrate its application across four European cities.

The assessment is conducted in two phases. The first phase involves using the Values, Strategies, Objectives, and Actions (VSOA) approach to distil essential part of their agenda from the documents prepared by the cities. This approach provides a framework for analysing key components and understanding how values are articulated and translated into actionable measures. It helps to identify the overall vision, the strategies designed to achieve it, the specific objectives set, and the tangible actions proposed. In the second phase, we employ spatial justice as a lens for a qualitative evaluation of how cities address the dimensions of distributive, procedural, and recognition justice within city-wide planning documents. This includes ensuring the fair distribution of burdens and benefits, focusing on processes that do not exacerbate inequalities, and being attentive to needs and aspirations of marginalised and vulnerable groups and identities affected by these transitions.

The paper applies the evaluation tool in four diverse urban contexts: Belfast, Rotterdam, Granollers, and Budapest. These cities vary in size, are located in different parts of Europe, and represent different planning cultures. The plans assessed also cover a range of climate action documents, from overarching sustainability transition plans to more specific energy transition or climate resilience plans. We present and critically evaluate the scores produced by the evaluation of the four planning documents, discussing these findings in relation to the existing literature and considering their implications for planning and policy practice in the context of delivering more just urban sustainability transitions. By deploying the tool in these varied settings, we demonstrate its versatility and broad applicability as a spatial justice assessment framework for urban planning practice. Additionally, we illustrate its potential as a critical discourse analytical tool, revealing the extent to which sustainability transition discourses in urban planning adhere to the principles of spatial justice.@en

Rechtvaardigheid wordt over de hele wereld gezien als fundament voor menselijke waardigheid en billijkheid. De filosoof John Rawls begint zijn klassieker A theory of justice met de woorden "Rechtvaardigheid is de voornaamste deugd van sociale instituties, zoals de waarheid dat is voor denksystemen. Maar een theorie, hoe elegant en praktisch ook, moet verworpen of herzien worden als deze onwaar blijkt. Net zoals wetten en instituties, hoe efficiënt en doordacht ze ook zijn, hervormd of afgeschaft moeten worden als deze onrechtvaardig blijken". [...]@en

The TU Delft Strategic Planning Cycle is a comprehensive strategic planning model designed to enhance urban sustainability and inclusivity by incorporating a range of participatory tools and methodologies that facilitate broad stakeholder engagement through a detailed step-by-step planning cycle.

The TU Delft Strategic Planning Cycle is rooted in the Dutch tradition of democratic visioning and strategic planning, which emphasises the integration of policy and design alongside a strong participatory ethos. This tradition is central to the planning education offered at TU Delft, where students and professionals are trained to approach urban planning with a integrative perspective that combines technical expertise with a deep commitment to democratic processes and sustainable outcomes.@en

In a time defined by high urbanisation rates and looming or existing crises, it is critical to understand how cities can turn into places of resilience and strength, rather than become centres of vulnerabilities. Cities face several challenges today, starting from the unpredictability of climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how the magnitude and duration of disruptions are difficult to predict, challenging traditional risk-based management approaches to cope with crises. In this respect, resilience science has been taken up as it highlights the intricate, complex, and interdependent nature of urban systems. While a strict universal definition of resilience is lacking, it generally refers to the capacity to anticipate, withstand, adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses, such as natural disasters, economic downturns, public health crises, and social turmoil.

Very often, novel crises and emergencies tend to highlight and reveal long-existing, underlying problems. To increase resilience in an all-encompassing way, cities should focus on the deep-seated structural issues that hinder their capacity to adapt and thrive, such as inequality. In many urban areas, socioeconomic disparities are ingrained, with marginalised communities suffering most from crises. This policy brief is aimed at urban/local policymakers and stresses the need to consider inclusiveness in urban resilience. It discusses two (of the many) urban challenges that are periodically highlighted and exacerbated by new crises, such as energy poverty and service accessibility. The brief also offers some practical suggestions to develop an inclusive approach to a wider array of challenges derived from the programme Inclusive Climate Action Rotterdam.@en

This paper explores the perspectives of different urban actors regarding public participation in the context of the increasing incorporation of digital technologies and urban platforms. The study is based on three workshops with local governance actors, six semi-structured interviews with academics in the fields of public participation and digital technologies and a citizen survey with 260 respondents. The results provide multi-perspective insights into the challenges of participatory processes and are synthesized into three contributions: (i) guidelines for effective public participation, including factors that encourage or discourage citizen engagement; (ii) guidelines for designing participatory platforms, highlighting specific features that promote digital engagement (i.e. social media, gamification and user-friendly interfaces), and (iii) a typology of digital participation platforms to connect the diverse needs of actor groups with the various possibilities provided by new technologies. The guidelines provide concrete recommendations to support both urban practitioners and interface designers in designing participatory strategies and platforms, respectively. Recognizing that there is no-one-size-fits-all platform, the typology provides a framework for the assessment and further development of digital platforms for public participation.@en

With developments in computational infrastructures, data science and AI have advanced, and in part replaced, several processes of engineering, design, and development in urban spaces. Former students and researchers from technical universities worldwide now work in all sectors of society and hold influential positions related to data science and AI. Yet, our education and research apparatus doesn’t fully intersect with the reality of the world where data and digitisation is not only a means to a better future but can also be wielded to maintain structures of inequality, oppression and harm. In curriculums that are focussed around data analytics and machine learning, education material is dominated by western perspectives and largely developed by able-bodied cis-gendered men, centring singular thinking in how we collect, clean, map, model, interpret and evaluate data, and share or cite evidence. Those who are represented get to shape futures for themselves (educated, urban, young adults), while the rest of the identities and issues are shifted to the margins of society. When colonial forms of education at scale are combined with nationally funded Artificial Intelligence programs of research, it legitimises data extraction and unequal forms of participation in decision, labour, and society, further perpetuating damages to vulnerable communities. To make space for alternate social realities, lived experiences, datasets, methodologies, map-building practices, and frameworks, we have developed a decolonising process for data science education. Our approach combines inserting non-western geographical knowledge with transdisciplinary, community participation, and intersectional and reflexive thinking to deliver an open, interactive, and co-created textbook for geographic data science education at engineering universities. We envision this process and exemplary textbook to provide entry points for local initiatives and needs to start thinking about their decolonising practices with respect to data and AI based education and research.@en

Debates about social justice in the city are not recent. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, social and political movements of unprecedented strength exploded worldwide: civil rights mobilisations and the anti-war (student) protests in the United States, anticolonial liberation struggles in the Global South, the Prague Spring, and the uprisings of the “mass worker” in the Fordist factory. Urban scholars were then propelled to include a moral dimension in studies about the urban environment and the urban living condition. This was the beginning of critical urban theory. [...]@en

Identifying the diverse and often competing values of citizens, and resolving the consequent public value conflicts, are of significant importance for inclusive and integrated urban development. Scholars have highlighted that relational, value-laden urban space gives rise to many diverse conflicts that vary both spatially and temporally. Although notions of public value conflicts have been conceived in theory, there are few empirical studies that identify such values and their conflicts in urban space. Building on public value theory and using a case-study mixed-methods approach, this paper proposes a new approach to empirically investigate public value conflicts in urban space. Using unstructured participatory data of 4528 citizen contributions from a Public Participation Geographic Information Systems in Hamburg, Germany, natural language processing and spatial clustering techniques are used to identify areas of potential value conflicts. Four expert interviews assess and interpret these quantitative findings. By integrating quantitative assessments with the qualitative findings of the interviews, we identify 19 general public values and nine archetypical conflicts. On the basis of these results, this paper proposes a new conceptual model of ‘Public Value Spheres’ that extends the understanding of public value conflicts and helps to further account for the value-laden nature of urban space.@en

This project started within the Junior Council (JC) of the TPM AI Lab. The TPM AI Lab was established in 2021 at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) of TU Delft to consolidate research on AI within and outside TU Delft.

At the TPM AI Lab, we believe the noise around AI can be overwhelming. It is for us, and we believe it is for others too. Recent developments in cutting-edge technology have fueled a new wave of interest in AI research and application, spanning multiple sectors and disciplines. Countless AI techniques, approaches, and tools are being employed or developed for various purposes. Everybody wants to see what AI has to offer. It is difficult to keep track of everything happening in the AI world. At the same time, the enthusiasm for AI is met with scepticism and scrutiny by critical scholars and experts. @en

The undisputable human influences on the Earth’s system demand an urgent change of ways and transitions in human systems to sustain a healthy society in the future. Addressing the urgent climatic transformations in deltaic areas, this paper is an attempt of the Delta Urbanism research group at TU Delft to set the line for new (integrated) research inquiries by design and investigate fundamental, experimental, and strategic & operational responses to the existing prospects for action as a way to create collaboration between various sectors. These prospects for action are targeted at four critical fronts (climate, urban, governance, cultural) based on trends and challenges that deltaic areas are facing and to which coherent spatial strategies are needed. These fronts together need a research response to enable the making of the delta of the future through the power of interdisciplinary design. This perspective or prospect is established through six lines of inquiry that are elaborated in the paper. The central question is “how can the research field of delta urbanism provide a transformative ‘prospect for action’ to establish strategic pathways toward a resilient Delta future, where assertion and proof are synergized”? The discussion of the six lines of inquiry, which effectively address the four critical fronts, explores how they are poised to deliver fundamental, experimental, and operational outputs for further research and action.@en

Based on the understanding of the built environment as result of competing claims on space that must be resolved via recognition, fair distribution of burdens and benefits of our human association, respect and care for the planet and just procedures to decide on those claims, Spatial Planning and Strategy is a chair in the Department of Urbanism within the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, committed to helping create sustainability, resilience and spatial justice through the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, the Paris Climate Agreement and the European New Deal, among other frameworks. This commitment is reflected in activities, events, and courses. We are concerned with knowledge about the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of strategic and urban planning tools – visions, strategies, plans and programmes.@en

With technological advances and decreasing prices, solar energy is a key technology in the urban energy transition. However, the focus on increasing the overall installed capacity has overshadowed energy justice considerations, leading to inequalities in solar energy adoption. This paper adopts an equity perspective to analyse the transition to solar (photovoltaic) energy in the city of The Hague, The Netherlands. Access to solar energy is at the core of the research, encapsulating factors that influence the ability of a household to adopt solar energy. Through a socio-spatial analysis at the postcode level, we identify four distinct groups with varying levels of access to solar energy. Our results show that these groups are not only strongly segregated across the city but also overlap with existing socio-spatial inequalities. The four levels of access to solar energy are then compared to current solar adoption rates and technical rooftop energy potential in the city. Results show that decreasing levels of access to solar energy align with decreasing adoption rates, revealing that current policies fail to provide equitable access to solar energy leading to inequalities in adoption rates. Furthermore, we show that most of the technical potential available in The Hague is in areas where access to solar energy is limited, representing opportunities to exploit a significant amount of untapped technical potential while addressing existing socio-spatial inequalities. Here, we also identify two groups of interest and related leverage points for future policy interventions to address equity in the transition to solar energy in The Hague.

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Energy poverty is a pressing issue in the Netherlands, with the number of households struggling to cover their energy bills doubling to nearly one million in recent years. Current policies and subsidies have failed to address the needs of underprivileged social groups, leaving them vulnerable and unable to access support for dwelling renovations. This policy brief emphasises the importance of adopting a socio-spatial approach to tackle energy poverty and incorporate justice into renovation policies. By understanding the underlying factors that contribute to vulnerability and pinpointing their spatial distribution, targeted policies can be developed to meet the unique needs of vulnerable groups. The brief highlights the systemic challenges in Amsterdam Zuidoost, where low incomes, lack of trust, and financial constraints hinder renovation efforts. It stresses the urgency of adopting a spatial perspective, recognising the socio-spatial dimensions of vulnerability, and engaging local communities. Through inclusive and participatory processes, the brief aims to promote social equity, spatial justice, and sustainable solutions to combat energy poverty in Amsterdam Zuidoost.@en

Recent growth in residential solar PV systems in cities has largely contributed to decarbonizing our energy systems. However, the costs and benefits of this transition are not always equitably distributed. Socioeconomic variability has left disadvantaged social groups unable to access the benefits provided by solar PV systems and the stimulative policy measures associated to these systems. To enhance an equitable distribution of future solar PV resources, solar energy policy will need to be more considerate of its distributional impact. This research applies a socio-spatial perspective to understand and evaluate the differences in accessibility to solar PV systems for various social groups in the urban environment.@en