Taking a stance

How far can we take responsibility for our actions, financially, socially, bureaucratically within the reality of a market-driven system?

That was the central question on the table on June 26, when we reconvened for It’s 2025, Take a Stance. This time in collaboration with Rotterdam Architecture Month and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture. Building on a previous panel discussion held in February, we invited participants not just to listen, but to sit at the table, take a position, and share their lived realities as spatial professionals. Among us: members, designers, technocrats, mediators, stewards, activists, and thinkers. What connected us? A shared struggle to hold our ground in a field shaped by precarity, pressure, and paradoxes.

Together, we represented a broad section of our field: designers at KCAP, activists from ACAN, directors from One Architecture & IABR, researchers from TU Delft, freelance architects such as Studio Space Station, and collective builders.

Rethinking Our Roles Within and Beyond the System

We explored the tensions between personal and professional value systems, and between individual action and collective responsibility. In a market-oriented system where productivity is often mistaken for purpose, how can we reclaim our agency as designers?
Some key insights that emerged:

Design as Disclosure: Spatial design has the power to expose socio-environmental injustices but only if we move beyond disciplinary silos. There was a strong call to universalise spatial knowledge and bring it into dialogue with non-spatial fields like data science, politics, and economics.

Breaking the Educational Mold: Participants criticised rigid educational frameworks either too academic or too stuck in professional logic and called for more pluralistic learning environments that prepare spatial thinkers for real-world complexity.

Precarity as Perspective: While precarious workers face daily instability, they also operate across multiple informal systems, gaining unique, real-time insight. This adaptability should be seen not as a weakness, but as a knowledge resource for the field.

From Endless Talk to Tangible Action

The discussion consistently circled back to one thing: the necessity of collective action. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical strategy. The current conditions, unstable work, financial pressure, bureaucratic constraints make it nearly impossible for individuals to drive change alone. Collective efforts are needed to reshape power structures and unlock new forms of financing, policy influence, and societal impact.

Some suggestions raised:

• Build coalitions across disciplines to speak with a unified voice.
• Use social media, personal outreach, and new formats to engage beyond the usual suspects.
• Create participatory systems where spatial workers not just developers or policymakers shape decisions.
• Learn from grassroots histories, like housing activism, that turned into industry-wide change.

What’s Next?

There was strong consensus: we’ve had enough theoretical frameworks. The time has come to translate ideas into action, to form alliances, and to amplify the voices and knowledge gained at the margins of our field.

This conversation is just the beginning. If we want real impact from equitable housing to climate resilience, we must move together. Unionising, organising, experimenting with new engagement methods: these aren’t side projects. They are the spatial work of our time!

Feeling inspired?

Are you ready to join us at the table?
This conversation isn’t finished and we want you to take a stance!

The miniposter marked the begining of this project.

Download here

Featuring

Lesia Topolnyk
Winner of the Prix de Rome 2022, Lesia is an architect, artist, researcher, and founder of StudioSpaceStation. Combining speculative design, architecture, and storytelling, Lesia explores the socio-political complexities of space. Her work challenges conventional thinking and bridges design, art, and activism, reimagining the role of spatial thinkers.

Nikos Katsikis
Urbanist and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, Nikos focuses on the intersections of urbanization, territorial governance, and environmental transformation. His research combines theory and practice, addressing sustainability, circularity, and equitable urban development.

Setareh Noorani
Architect, researcher and curator at Nieuwe Instituut. Noorani’s spatial and architectural designs emphasise her ongoing research into (institutional) spaces for collective inhabitation and appropriation, centering undernarrated voices. The designed spaces challenge contemporary value systems connected to art/architectural production. Setareh Noorani’s (curatorial) research at the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, NL) focuses on the role of feminism, decolonial practices, non-institutional forms of representation and more-than-human perspectives in the way we build, remember and change cities. Setareh argues for alternative future scenarios that do justice to underexposed voices and forms of collectivity.