City Design in Conversation – MINORPLANNING

Join us online for a second series of City Design in Conversation. Hosted by Dubravka Sekulić, Head of Programme for City Design MA, the series will explore MINORPLANNING; practices of designing the city that support liberation and empowerment of those who live and struggle in the cities.

Refusing abstraction of masterplanning through spreadsheets, we will talk with those whose work shows us a way forward, who work within and outside the system to empower those who already live and work to be in better control of their future, which is always at danger by being erased from large scale urban development and other processes of dispossession.

Against the backdrop of destruction both by war and reconstruction, climate collapse, and intersecting and compound injustices that add further pressure on the existing built environment, it is urgent to rethink how we design cities and what are new forms of spatial practice and spatial practitioners.

At the City Design MA we are committed to holding space to both bold and quiet proposals that challenge disciplinary status quo and can bring the discipline into the future.

Understanding that how we live, individually and collectively, is framed through what we can do in physical space, this urgency is not only professional but societal. Exploring how night life policy planning, repair as liberation, transformation of vacant and underused buildings into lifehouses, moratorium on new construction, civic assemblies and forums design cities otherwise, we will virtually cross different geographies to study.

Together, we are going to explore ways of building more just, equitable cities, which work as a support system for all its inhabitants, both humans and non-humans, to not only survive, but thrive.

In City Design in Conversation Vol. 2 MINORPLANNING will welcome Iva Čukić, Olympia Kazi, Khaldun Bshara, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Adam Greenfield, Vyjayanthi V. Rao (TBC), and UNIT 38. .

Programme of sessions

• 2 December, 1pm GMT – On Public Spatial Literacy with Iva Čukić / Ministry of Space
• 11 December, 1pm – On Policy and Advocacy as Design Interventions with Olympia Kazi
• 18 December, 1pm GMT – On Repair as Liberation with Khaldun Bshara
• 15 January, 1pm GMT – On Moratorium on New Construction as the City Design Intervention with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
• 29 January, 1pm GMT – On Lifehouse on every block! with Adam Greenfield
• 12 February, 1pm GMT – On A People’s Design Service with David McEwen / Unit 38

Further sessions and speakers will be announced in due course

Session details

2 December, 1pm GMT – On Public Spatial Literacy with Iva Čukić / Ministry of Space

• How to fight for the city when successive public administrations have been running it for decades with only one goal: to maximise the private interest and make planning processes as undemocratic and opaque as possible? In cities run by private interests, everyday life for most of their inhabitants gets harder by the day as the privatisation of services, endless construction, and the reorganisation of traffic make life more expensive and even more exhausting. Lack of effective ways to seize the knowledge and engage in the processes of planning to make a meaningful difference adds to exhaustion and disillusionment. What does it mean to practice in such a context and put public spatial knowledge at the core of the practice? What is city design when design is envisioned as a process of political emancipation? What are the new collective processes that can bring the new imaginaries that empower people to take back their cities? Why does every city need a Ministry of Space?
• ​​Iva Čukić graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, where she earned her PhD in Urban Planning.In 2010, she co-founded the collective Ministry of Space (Ministarstvo prostora), which strives to contribute to the democratic and equitable development of cities. Her research focuses on urban commons and urban transformation, which she approaches through the intersection of academic inquiry and practice-based engagement. She actively works with communities, supporting local initiatives in their efforts to address spatial issues and promote socio-political change guided by the principles of social justice.

11 December, 1pm – On Policy and Advocacy as Design Interventions with Olympia Kazi

• Olympia Kazi is an architecture critic and an urban activist with over twenty years of experience in advocacy, research, curating and administration of cultural and urban design organizations in Europe and the United States. Olympia most recently led successful City, State and Federal legislative and budgetary advocacy campaigns with two organisations she co-founded, NYC Artist Coalition and Music Workers Alliance. In recognition of her work, she served as vice chair on the first-ever NYC Nightlife Advisory Board. She also served on Manhattan’s Community Board 3 on Land Use and Zoning and Arts & Cultural Affairs.

18 December, 1pm GMT – On Repair as Liberation with Khaldun Bshara

• Khaldun Bshara is an architect, restorer, and socio-cultural anthropologist. He serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Quarterly Journal. From 1994 to 2024, Bshara was actively involved with the Riwaq Centre in Ramallah, where he served as director from 2010 to 2020. His work at Riwaq focused on documenting, protecting, and restoring Palestinian built heritage.

15 January, 1pm GMT – On Moratorium on New Construction as the City Design Intervention with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

• Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and assistant professor at EPFL, where she leads the RIOT design and research laboratory. As an assistant professor of urban design at Harvard University from 2020, Malterre-Barthes started A Global Moratorium on New Construction, an initiative that interrogates current development protocols and provocatively argues for the suspension of all new building activity. A Moratorium on New Construction' was published with Sternberg Press/MIT Press in 2025. Malterre-Barthes’ interests relate to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanisation, material extraction, climate emergency and social justice. She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich on the political economy of food systems and its influence on architecture and urban design, and is a founding member of two activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture.

29 January, 1pm GMT – On Lifehouse on every block! with Adam Greenfield

• Adam Greenfield has spent the past quarter-century thinking and working at the intersection of technology, design and politics with everyday life. Selected in 2013 as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics, he previously taught in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Urban Design program of the Bartlett, University College London. His books include Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Urban Computing and Its Discontents, and the bestsellers Against the Smart City and Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life.

12 February, 1pm GMT – An A People’s Design Service with David McEwen / Unit 38

• David McEwen is a founding member of UNIT 38. Unit 38 is a workers’ cooperative focused on community-led developments operating at the intersection of low-carbon architecture, democratic ownership, economic policy and political action. They have worked on a range of community planning projects across the UK which emphasise retrofitting, cooperative ownership and community wealth building. They offer design services to working class communities who are typically excluded from processes of urban change. While they don’t think architecture alone can address wider issues of societal inequality, it can demostrate viable alternative futures, which in turn can enable new political, economic and ecological possibilities.

How to join

This event will take place virtually on Zoom. The event is free to attend, but you will need to register through Eventbrite to guarantee your spot and receive the Zoom link.

To avoid any technical issues on the day, we recommend you download the latest version of Zoom in advance.

When it’s time, come back to this Eventbrite page to join the event - you’ll get an email reminder on the day too.

Joining from a country where Zoom doesn't work?Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Ukraine (Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk regions) have restricted Zoom for regulatory reasons. Please reach out to [email protected] if this affects you.

About the host

Dr Dubravka Sekulić – Programme Lead, City Design MA

Dr Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. Her research explores transformations of contemporary cities, at the nexus between the production of space, laws, and economy. She holds a PhD from gta the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich (CH) on the relationship between the Yugoslav construction industry and the Non-aligned Movement. She is a researcher for the project Curatorial Design: A place between and as a co-editor of the relational digital publication Total Reconstruction. She is the author of several books including Glotzt Nicht So Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), and most recently she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman on Don't Trace, Draw! (2020), a film that explored spatial legacy of the Yugoslav pedagogical reform.

Other events at the RCA

We are continually adding to our diverse programme of events: conversations on key topics such as funding advice and portfolio development, symposia, exhibitions, open days and more. Many are free and open to the public.