First Week of Design for the Just City and New Community

By Kaetlyn Patnaude

After my first week of Design for the Just City summer school at TU Delft, I feel like I’ve joined a new community. This course brings together around 100 people from 32 countries, making it a very international environment. We’ve bonded not only over being international students in the Netherlands, but also from shared values of equitable city design. I’ve never felt the universality of humanity in this way before, meeting new people from different countries every single day and sharing similar hopes and aspirations. Although we still have one more week of class, last Friday a fellow student said something that has stayed with me. All of us hear scary things on the news, but it is very hopeful and powerful to have this experience where so many people from different backgrounds come together to learn, work towards common goals, and laugh. 

Abhijeet Chandel, PhD Candidate at Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft speaks to us about spatial commons 

Our class days generally include a mix of lectures and workshops. We’ve had a range of speakers, like the Delft city architect, municipalities, corporations, and professors. Their talks have covered topics from construction projects like the Wonderwoods, to the concept of radical imagination in urban planning. For the second half of the day, we split into groups for interactive workshops. For example, we examined a “planning icon,” a site in our home cities that was intentionally designed with certain characteristics in mind such as ecological resilience or transportation efficiency. 

Tilly speaking at Moe-stuin

One of the most memorable experiences so far is when we did our site visit to a neighborhood in Delft called Voorhof. There, one of the students met a resident named Tilly who warmly invited us to see the community garden she had created for her apartment complex. Tilly, originally from Dutch New Guinea, lives in a social housing complex that is home to many refugees. With residents coming from different cultures and backgrounds, it was difficult to foster a sense of place within the community. Tilly thought back to the garden her own mother had in Dutch New Guinea and spent two years convincing the municipality in Voorhof to give her space to create a community garden. She named it Moe’stuin which means Our Mother’s Garden or Vegetable Garden in Dutch, depending on where the apostrophe is placed. Today, the garden has been successful for over 20 years and still serves as a gathering place and “open university” for residents of the community. Tilly is also a member of the nonprofit called “Unity in Diversity” where she continues to share her story and promotes community building initiatives. While at the garden, I also spoke with another member of the nonprofit, Milena, who is originally from Mesopotamia. She focuses on working with youth and creating safe third spaces for them to spend time outside of school and home. 

In my future career I’d love to collaborate with community leaders like Tilly and Milena to help shape urban spaces that promote social cohesion and grassroots empowerment. These conversations are vital as I continue to develop my Global Scholars Capstone project and as our class begins working on our vision proposal for Voorhof.

TU Delft, Design for the Just City Summer School class of 2025