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.