A Manifesto for the Just City: Volume 4

Roberto Rocco is an Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft. Roberto is trained as an architect and spatial planner with a master’s in planning by the University of São Paulo and a PhD by TU Delft. Roberto focuses on the governance of sustainability transitions, as well as issues of governance in regional planning and design. This includes special attention to Spatial Justice as a crucial dimension of sustainability transitions. Roberto has also published extensively about informal urbanisation in the Global South, and he does research on how informal institutions influence and shape planning at the local level. He is a consultant for the Union for the Mediterranean and has recently drafted the UfM Action Plan for Sustainable Urbanisation 2040. He is one of the lead investigators of UP 2030 Urban Planning and Design Ready for 2030, a Horizon Europe project gathering 42 partners seeking to speed up the sustainability transition in European cities. He co-directs the TU Delft Centre for the Just City, an initiative dedicated to advancing social justice in the built environment.

Caroline Newton - an architect, urban planner, and political scientist - focuses on the nexus of design, spatial justice, and social change. Her career unites scholarly inquiry with advocacy, demonstrating how architecture, planning, and policy can collectively address urgent urban challenges. Across her roles at universities throughout Europe, including KU Leuven and University College London’s Development Planning Unit, her work has consistently interrogated entrenched urban inequities and championed more inclusive planning practices.
In her current position at TU Delft, Caroline positions both pedagogy and research as catalysts for societal transformation. Her dedication to translating theory into action is exemplified in her co-founding of the Centre for the Just City with Roberto Rocco. As the Van Eesteren Fellow (2019–2024), she examined how spatial justice can be embedded in design practice at multiple scales - from neighbourhoods to regions. Most recently, she published a book on spatial justice and the role of design.

Juliana Gonçalves is an Assistant Professor in the section of Spatial Planning and Strategy of the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft. She is the founder and lead of the Citizen Voice Initiative, co-founder of the Citizens Collective and a member of the Centre for the Just City and the TU Delft Climate Action Program. With an interdisciplinary background, her research covers urban inequalities & spatial justice, climate adaptation & urban resilience, urban energy transition, public participation & citizen empowerment, and related planning and policy implications. She takes a socio-spatial intersectional perspective to these topics, drawing from feminist and decolonial scholarship and combining quantitative and qualitative research methods. Her most recent research aims to develop new critical research on the potential of collective action and prefigurative politics for transformative urban adaptation.