Spatial design today is struggling to respond to the world we are in. Around us, exclusionary politics are growing, often promoting nationalism, segregation, and control of space in ways that divide rather than connect. Climate collapse is no longer something of the future: fires, floods, droughts, and rising seas are shaping daily life across the world. At the same time, growing inequality makes many people feel abandoned by the very systems that should care for them. In this context, architecture and urbanism—disciplines that could help us imagine and build more just and sustainable futures—remain largely disconnected.

This disconnection comes from how both academic and professional design continue to operate. In many schools of architecture and urbanism, the focus is still on aesthetics, form, and technical innovation, while questions of justice, politics, and care are treated as secondary. Students are trained to reproduce models and canons that were developed under very different historical conditions, rather than to question whether those models are still adequate for the crises of today. The curriculum privileges certain histories—European modernism, elite architectural movements—while marginalizing Indigenous knowledge, feminist design, or community-led practices. As a result, graduates are equipped with tools that reproduce the dominant paradigm but leave them unprepared to deal with the realities of authoritarian urban policies, ecological collapse, or deep social inequality.

Professional practice is no better. Architects and urban designers often work within systems dominated by real estate and state contracts. Their capacity to act is limited by market logics and political agendas that reward efficiency, spectacle, and profitability rather than justice or care. These logics derivate in a shrinking imaginative capacity as solutions get more universalized and standarized. In many cases, design firms become service providers for capital, producing masterplans for speculative development, luxury housing, or mega-events, while everyday needs—affordable housing, safe public space, resilient infrastructures—are neglected. Sometimes, even worsening situation, practice praise themselves using words of social and environmental sustainability, inclusion, or resilience as buzzwords, removing all the significance of the word. The profession, in short, has tied its survival to the very systems that deepen the crises it should help us navigate.

Part of the problem lies in how spatial design practice and education is structured. Architecture and urbanism, as they are largely taught and practiced today, remain deeply shaped by colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal legacies. The colonial side is visible in how models developed in Europe and North America—modernist housing estates, zoning schemes, “international style” aesthetics, extractivist practices of international cooperation—have been exported as if they were neutral or universal. From Latin America to Africa to Asia, local building traditions and Indigenous land relations have been displaced under the label of progress, generating the “standard” or the “good” design and pushing away vernacular approaches. The capitalist is the market-driven side which is evident in how urban design follows the logic of real estate and speculation, privileging profitability over care. Mega-projects, privatized waterfronts, and tourist districts reshape cities for capital rather than residents. It is a smart, technocratic driven approach, intelligent to use buzzwords as inclusivity, resilience and/or sustainability, but emptying their meaning in their action. And the patriarchal side is inscribed in both built form and professional culture: housing organized around invisible domestic labor, cities designed for the male worker’s commute, public spaces where women, queer, disabled, and elderly people feel unsafe or excluded. Pathriarcal values dominate our designs and our methods/approaches to design. Our practice and education is dominated by systematic exclusion of women’s contribution and feminist values.

Behind these patterns stands the dominance of discourse in architecture and urban design. Discourses frame not only what is designed, but how design is approached. A discourse in this sense is more than a trend or a style: it is a philosophy, a set of values, a way of seeing and doing that becomes embedded in the DNA of designers.

This situation cannot be simply adjusted or reformed at the margins; it must be disrupted. The dominant discourse in both academia and practice is unable to connect with the political, ecological, and social realities we face. To keep reproducing it is to design for a world that no longer exists. Disruption is necessary to pluralize the center: to expose that there are already many practices—Indigenous stewardship, feminist spatial practices, ecological urbanisms, community insurgencies—that hold knowledge for surviving and thriving in the present. The task is not to invent something entirely new but to find these practices, bring them together, and to explore what is their collective role in pluralizing the single dominant discourse approach we had for the past decades in our spatial design practice and education.

While discourses are by nature plural, there is a tendency to centralize some over others, creating mainstream discourses that dominate, while alternatives are pushed to the margins. It is not about saying one discourse is good and another is bad. Rather, what history shows is that discourses shift when societies enter into crisis and when demands for justice, survival, and new possibilities force the dominant frameworks to change. Every time this happens, alongside the dominant discourse, there have always been alternatives developing quietly or insistently in parallel.

Pluralizing the center means exposing these alternatives not as side notes or curiosities, but as essentials in the needed disruption. It means refusing the idea that there is one single “neutral” way of designing and instead allowing many ways of knowing, making, and caring for space to coexist at the heart of the discipline. Centering is crucial here: it is not just about acknowledging alternatives, but about making them visible, resourced, and powerful enough to shift the mainstream. Centering Designing Otherwise (CDO) project, then, is not about inventing brand-new methods from scratch but about finding, recovering, and centering practices that already exist—Indigenous stewardship, feminist design practices, insurgent planning, participatory building, ecological traditions—that have been pushed aside.

Yet discourses never shift through ideas alone; they become powerful when they are carried by mediums—formats that make them visible, teachable, and reproducible. The Bauhaus is a clear example. At the beginning of the twentieth century, European architecture was still caught between academic historicism and the first waves of industrialization. Society was demanding answers to the alienation and fragmentation brought by industrial production and to the political turbulence of post-war Europe. The Bauhaus disrupted this situation by refusing the split between art, craft, and technology. It proposed that design could serve social transformation by educating a new kind of designer: one able to work across disciplines, to merge tradition with industry, and to experiment with form and material in relation to modern life. But what made Bauhaus a discursive shift was not only its philosophy; it was the medium of the school itself. The workshops became laboratories of experimentation where students and teachers worked side by side. The curriculum, the exhibitions, the manifestos, and the pedagogy all functioned as formats that carried Bauhaus ideas far beyond Weimar and Dessau, influencing generations of architects and designers across the world. Despite their meangingdul impact on mediums and shifting discourses, they also did perpetuate colonial and pathriarcal conditions on our field, whether part of the history and the time they got born with, they were also critized in their perpetuation of extractivist and promoting a priviledge creative development exclusionary of other creatives. The school could also become an exclusionary mediumd, but as such, is worth to study and visit.

CIAM, the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, played a similar role in another moment of societal demand. In the interwar years, cities across Europe were facing housing shortages, rapid industrial expansion, and pressing questions of health and infrastructure. The demand was for efficiency, clarity, and a model of planning that could rebuild cities and societies shaken by war and economic crisis. CIAM disrupted the fragmented urban practices of the time by promoting functionalist planning: the city organized into zones of dwelling, work, recreation, and circulation. But again, it was not just the idea that mattered (which also set the principles of a modernist movement that made things going against social and environmental justice dimensions); it was the mediums that made it dominant. CIAM organized international congresses that brought together leading architects. It produced collective charters like the Athens Charter, which condensed its philosophy into rules that could be taught and applied. It used exhibitions, drawings, and networks of publications to spread its influence globally. Through these mediums and as Bauhaus with their exclusionary and privileged based conditions, CIAM was able to dominate discourse and shape both policy and education for decades.

These examples show that shifts in design discourse do not happen in isolation; they happen when ideas and demands meet the mediums that can make them real. Schools, charters, exhibitions, and studios are not just platforms for communication—they could be engines of disruption and pluralization.

This is why the role of the university is crucial. Universities are not neutral; they are institutions that reproduce dominant discourses through their curricula, canons, and pedagogies. But they can also be places of disruption, where radical imagination is practiced collectively. As Max Haiven reminds us in The Radical Imagination (2014), institutions can be sites of transformation, not just resistance. TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment carries both the weight of reproducing dominant discourses and the responsibility of shifting them. As one of the leading faculties of architecture in Europe, it has the capacity and the accountability to pluralize the center of spatial design.

This is the task of Centering Designing Otherwise (CDO). The urgency is clear: climate collapse, growing inequality, and the persistence of colonial, market-driven, and patriarchal practices show the limits of the dominant paradigm. History shows that design discourses shift when society demands it, and that shifts are made real through the mediums that carry them. Today, the demand is once again loud: spatial design must become more just, plural, and accountable. By CDO, TU Delft can be a site where this shift is nurtured—where alternatives are not pushed aside but made central, where pedagogy and practice are reconfigured to keep the discipline alive and relevant.

Centering Designing Otherwise (CDO) is a three-year seed project that seeks to pluralize the dominant discourse in spatial design by disrupting its colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal foundations and centering practices that are usually marginalized. It examines how design discourses have historically shifted through mediums such as schools, ateliers, manifestos, and congresses, while exposing the mechanisms of othering that have excluded Indigenous, feminist, ecological, and community-led design practices. At its heart, the project introduces the Atelier of Designing Otherwise as an experimentation medium: a space dedicated to resourcing and amplifying voices and practices that are rarely mainstreamed, and to bringing them into direct confrontation with prevailing academic and professional discourses. Through this process, CDO not only critiques the limitations of current education and practice but also seeds infrastructures of imagination, care, and justice for transforming the discipline.

CDO aspires to pluralize the center of spatial design discourse by making visible and central those practices, epistemologies, and voices that have long been excluded. In doing so, the project seeks to interrupt the dominance of universalized, market-driven models of design and to foreground justice, care, and relationality as core to design practice. Pluralization here is not a matter of adding a few diverse references to the curriculum or hosting occasional alternative events; it is about reconfiguring the discipline so that multiple ways of knowing and designing coexist and contest the mainstream. Traditionally this could be anchor in the idea of discourse disruption, however, in this case it is not about shifting the discourse, or decenter the dominant, but to add more discourses in that center that fundamentally focus on other values related to justice and care. Pluralization is the process to open space for others, to create space for confrotnation and for alternatives, and to create a more transparent decision making on discourse selection for spatial designers.

Expose the conditions of dominance.
To concretely visualize and make explicit how a single dominant discourse in spatial design is reproduced, and why its disruption is urgently needed in the face of ecological, social, and political crises.

Pluralize the dominant discourse.
To bring forward and amplify multiple alternatives that challenge the monopoly of the mainstream, creating a more diverse, just, and inclusive foundation for spatial design.

Center designing otherwise.
To place marginalized practices and epistemologies—Indigenous, feminist, ecological, community-led—at the core of design discourse rather than at its margins.

Interrogate the possibility of mainstreaming otherness.
To explore whether, and under what conditions, alternative ways of knowing, doing, and being can be sustained within or alongside institutionalized education and practice.

Resource and connect othered practitioners.
To create networks of support, visibility, and funding that allow practitioners designing otherwise to confront, challenge, and reconfigure the mainstream discourse.

Experiment with mediums of disruption.
To use the Atelier of Designing Otherwise as a living laboratory where non-mainstreamed practices can be resourced, shared, and confronted with dominant academic and professional traditions.

Define conditions of pluralization.
To identify the institutional, cultural, and material parameters necessary for pluralization to occur and to become durable within the discipline.

Cultivate infrastructures of imagination.
To foster pedagogical, professional, and community-based infrastructures that sustain imagination as a resource for designing just and plural futures.

Challenge the politics of knowledge production.
To reveal how curricula, canons, and institutional practices reproduce hierarchies of knowledge, and to experiment with alternatives that democratize and diversify who gets to define design knowledge.

Seed future pathways.
To generate follow-up projects, collaborations, and initiatives beyond the three years of the seed project, ensuring that designing otherwise continues as a sustained constellation of practices rather than a one-time intervention.

The central research question of CDO is: How can the center of spatial design discourse be pluralized by foregrounding practices of designing otherwise, and through which mediums can this shift be made durable? This question acknowledges both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the project. On the one hand, it requires an exploration of how discourses have historically shifted, how othering operates, and what pluralization means in the context of a discipline entangled with colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal logics. On the other hand, it insists on practice and medium: if discourse shifts require infrastructures—schools, ateliers, manifestos, exhibitions—then the task is also to invent, adapt, or reconfigure these infrastructures for the present.

Sub-questions deepen this inquiry. For example:

• What can we learn from past shifts in architectural discourse, and how do their conditions resonate or differ today?
• How does “othering” operate in spatial design, and what practices of resistance and creativity have emerged despite it?
• Which mediums are most effective in carrying pluralized discourses in the current landscape of academia, practice, and global crisis?
• How can universities like TU Delft transform from reproducing dominant discourses into incubators of pluralization?

By framing the project around a guiding research question and sub-questions, CDO anchors itself in both critical reflection and transformative experimentation.

To respond to the main question and potential subquestions, the project is structured around three interconnected lines of research:

1. Disrupting discourses: mediums & values. This line investigates the infrastructures through which architectural discourses have historically been consolidated and disseminated. From Bauhaus workshops to CIAM charters, the project examines how schools, congresses, manifestos, and exhibitions have operated not only as spaces of innovation but also as mechanisms of exclusion. The line asks: what would it mean to re-appropriate these mediums—or invent new ones—for pluralization rather than centralization?

2. Othering and Alternative Practices. Building from the many researchers and practitioners mapping alternative approaches/people/practices, this line aims to explore what does it mean designing otherwise. By studying Indigenous stewardship, feminist urbanisms, insurgent planning, and ecological traditions, the project aims to map a repertoire of “designing otherwise” across temporal and geographical horizons. This is both an archival and a generative task: recovering suppressed histories while making space for living practices to be centered.

3. Conditions of Pluralization. This line reflects on the present and future: what are the conditions under which pluralization can occur in a discipline still dominated by a single center? It asks what resources, infrastructures, and alliances are required to move from acknowledging alternatives to actually centering them. This includes starting understanding the current dominant discourse collapse and potentials for the pluralization, but it also centers around analyzing institutional logics within academia, professional structures, and funding models, and experimenting with how these can be reshaped to support pluralization.

Together, these three lines create a structure where history, critique, and experimentation reinforce each other. They ensure that the project is not only descriptive but also propositional, offering pathways for transformation.

CDO is envisioned as a seed project—an initial intervention meant to germinate a larger, sustained constellation of practices, alliances, and initiatives. The metaphor of a seed is deliberate: it suggests both fragility and potential, a small beginning with the capacity to grow into something expansive and transformative. Unlike large-scale institutional projects that often aim for closure, a seed project recognizes its role in initiating, provoking, and nurturing conditions for further development. CDO acknowledges that the dominant discourse in spatial design has been cultivated over decades of colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist logics, and that disrupting it will not happen in one gesture. Instead, CDO positions itself as a catalytic entry point, where small but deliberate actions create the possibility for alternative practices to take root, be resourced, and eventually reshape the discipline’s center.

The seed approach also reflects a methodological choice: to work experimentally, iteratively, and collectively. Rather than imposing a single framework, CDO creates conditions for dialogue, encounter, and pluralization. This means supporting and making visible practices that already exist but are marginalized—Indigenous stewardship, feminist urbanisms, community insurgencies, ecological traditions—while also reflecting critically on how institutions like TU Delft can transform their own structures of knowledge production. The seed project is therefore less about offering a definitive model and more about enabling infrastructures of imagination, resourcing, and encounter.

CDO is organized into three interconnected phases defined by a distinct methodological orientation, yet they are interdependent and build upon one another to sustain the project’s trajectory.

The first phase, Exploring disruption (Months 1–18), is grounded in methods of desk research, discourse analysis, and interviews. This stage examines how the dominant discourse in spatial design has been produced and maintained, while identifying the cracks and resistances that already exist within it. Archival work and literature analysis revisit historical shifts in design discourse—from Bauhaus to CIAM, from feminist collectives to insurgent planning movements—to understand both their transformative potential and their exclusionary limitations. Alongside this historical exploration, the project engages in critical discourse analysis of curricula, canons, and professional practices to expose the mechanisms of othering that continue to shape design education and practice today. The research focuses on the mediums, and to do so a series od semi-structured interviews with educators, practitioners, and marginalized voices complement this desk-based research, offering insight into how dominance and resistance are experienced in contemporary contexts. Critical mapping of actors, networks, and practices further situates these findings, producing a layered understanding of the conditions of dominance and surfacing the plurality of “designing otherwise” approaches that remain overlooked or marginalized.

The second phase, Embodying Otherwise (Months 18–20), marks a methodological shift from critical analysis to experimentation. At its center is the Atelier of Designing Otherwise, a two-week gathering at TU Delft that functions as an experimentation medium. The Atelier is conceived not as a conventional academic event but as a living laboratory where marginalized practices are resourced, amplified, and brought into direct confrontation with mainstream educational and professional discourses. Ethnographic methods guide this stage, including participant observation, narrative interviews, and co-documentation with students, practitioners, and communities involved in the Atelier. At the same time, embodied and performative methods—such as workshops, collective rehearsals, design games, and artistic interventions—are employed to allow participants to experience and enact alternative epistemologies. Through these encounters, the Atelier becomes a testing ground for medium experimentation, where new forms of manifestos, exhibitions, pedagogical prototypes, and resource-sharing infrastructures can be developed and circulated as vehicles for pluralization. This phase is deliberately experimental since it aims to become a transformative journey, privileging doing and sensing as legitimate forms of knowledge production, and offering a collective rehearsal of what it means to pluralize the center of spatial design.

The third phase, Seeding CDO futures (Months 20–36), consolidates and deepens the insights generated in the first two stages, ensuring that the project’s outcomes are not ephemeral but embedded into durable infrastructures. This involves reflecting, operationalizing and revisiting all encountered to that moment. It also requires a process of contrasting and reflection, placing the experimental results of Phase 2 against the findings of Phase 1 in order to identify tensions, conditions, and parameters for pluralization. Beyond analysis, this phase emphasizes speculative design and scenario-building as a method to imagine possible futures for spatial design, developing pathways that extend well beyond the formal timeline of the project. Finally, this stage engages in institutional embedding by translating insights into curricular materials, toolkits, publications, and collaborations that sustain continuity both within TU Delft and across wider networks of practitioners and educators. This phase has a strong focus also on engaging with potential co-funders, finding ways to make sustainable financially and conceptually the atelier, and transform it in a stable process that carve the space for pluralization.

Centering Designing Otherwise was initiated by Irene Luque Martin.

Irene is a spatial designer, educator, and researcher committed to radical spatial imagination and the “otherwise” of spatial design. With over a decade of professional experience in spatial design across rapidly transitioning territories, she now focuses on research and education as catalysts for systemic change. At TU Delft, she is the initiator of a growing body of work on designing by feminist values, using intersectional, collaborative, and justice-driven approaches to reimagine how we teach, learn, and practice spatial design. Her work challenges dominant norms and positions the university as a site of transformative and imaginative action.