UULP Seminar 2026 - Locating the Designer: Position and Positionality in Spatial Practice

Name: UULP Seminar 2026 - Locating the Designer: Position and Positionality in Spatial Practice
Start: 2026-05-28T09:45:00+02:00
End: 2026-05-28T19:00:00+02:00
Location: Brasserie Atlas, Rue du Libre Examen 13, 1070 Anderlecht

Schedule

Thu May 28 2026 at 09:45 am to 07:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Brasserie Atlas, Rue du Libre Examen 13, 1070 Anderlecht | Anderlecht, BU

Locating the Designer: Position and Positionality in Spatial Practice. Urban Design, Urbanism, Landscape & Planning (UULP) section seminar of the Department of Architecture.
Organized by: Koenraad Danneels, Luce Beeckmans, Ward Verbakel
Research in urbanism and landscape architecture—whether research by design, theoretical, historical, or practice-based—has long centred on the position of the designer within processes of urbanisation. These fields show a persistent preoccupation with their own roles in planning negotiations, driven by the need for alignment between research and professional education; the rise of hybrid academic practice settings in which practitioners draw on their own projects; and societal debates that require researchers to articulate positions when engaging with diverse stakeholders, activists, and grassroots movements. Parallelly, researchers increasingly acknowledge that design is neither neutral nor universal. Architects, planners, and spatial practitioners operate within dense fields of power relations, knowledge, and responsibility, and critical interrogate their own positionality. The 2026 UULP seminar will facilitate a debate on both the confusion between, and possibility of, a joint reflection on position and positionality. Can a cross-fertilization of attention to positions and positionality strengthen design research?
Date: 28 May 2026
Location: Brasserie Atlas, Rue du Libre Examen 13, 1070 Anderlecht (entrance through the gate at the intersection of the Rue du Libre Examen and the Rue de l’Aiguille, at the first floor of the building).
Programme and registration: https://arch.kuleuven.be/nieuws-agenda/uulp-seminar-2026