TU Delft: The Why Factory and Design as Politics
9 - 18 November 2012

Final Presentation: Design as Politics


Final Presentation: The Why Factory

Under the leadership of Felix Madrazo (The Why Factory) and Marta Relats (Design as Politics), students from the TU Delft developed two 'tools' to assist spatial planning at regional scale. With Berlin-Brandenburg as case study, they proposed: a participation tool for generating and responding to a range of diverse development agendas; and a stress test tool for demonstrating the resilience of the built environment in the context of demographic, economic and climatic factors played out to their extremes. The public presentation of these 'tools' on Saturday 17th at ANCB fueled a lively debate between Matthias Böttger (raumtaktik- office from a better future; German Architecture Centre) and Tobias Schmidt (researcher IRS Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Programmes) on the value and potential of these tools.

This project is realised in the context of the DutchDFA programme; in the framework of the Initiative of Architecture and Baukultur through the German Federal Ministry for Transport, Building and Spatial Development; and with the support of the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin, and the Netherlands Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment. Participants include architecture, urban design and planning students from the TU Delft and TU Berlin.

The proposed  'tools' were presented during the 9th and final Design and Politics debate: Resilient and Democratic Futures: The Power of Design at ANCB on 18 January 2013. 

Download result booklet: Shrinking Regions Growing Democracy, Design as Politics (PDF, 7,9 MB)
Download result booklet: Resilience. Testing Regions Under Stress, The Why Factory (PDF, 64 MB)