13-10-25 // MONU #38 – INCLUSIVE URBANISM

It Is Not Just About Toilets – Interview with Clara Greed by Bernd Upmeyer; Wee the People: A Manifesto for the Bladder and Bowel by Jo-Anne Bichard and Gail Ramster; ‘Adjust Your Dress Before Leaving’: Dank and Dissonant Inclusive Urbanisms by Nick Rebstadt; A Holistic Approach to Inclusive Urbanismby Jone Belausteguigoitia and Lucía Olavarri; Civic Line – Participative Architecture Between Agonism and Nonsolution by Doina Petrescu; Out of Sight, Out of Place by Vincent van Spaendonk; Lisbon: Housing Inclusion or Urban Expulsion? by Luca Bonazzi and Ersilia Ramazza; The Illusion of “Inclusion”by Ann-Sofie Wens; The Power to Include and Exclude – Interview with Elke Krasny by Bernd Upmeyer; Small Steps: Reconsidering the Architect’s Responsibility to Design for Others by Kelly Olinger; The Unfinished Business of Doing the Inclusive City by Ines Lüder; Cities of Belonging: Potentiating Informality by Shreya Gupta; Journey to the Center by Cristina De Middel; Is Paris Still Burning?by Marco Addona; Queer Diasporic Urbanism by Simon Liao; Talk of the Town by Ayomi Olasoji; Prelude to Convergence by Tony Van Le; Beyond Human Inclusivity: Designing Cities for Multi-Species Coexistence by Rafael Luna; Spaces of Safe Uncertainty by Algirdas Ramonas; Inclusivity vs. Capitalism by EX FIGURA (Barbara Stallone and Francisco Silva)

When it comes to “Inclusive Urbanism” Clara Greed clarifies that “It Is Not Just About Toilets” in our interview with her. However, according to her, one of the fundamentals of creating inclusive cities is to provide more toilets, especially more accessible toilets. That is why we must never underestimate the importance of the level of toilet provision. Because the public toilet especially, where nature comes into direct contact with culture, is the petri dish for inclusive design, from space to product to service, as argued by Jo-Anne Bichard and Gail Ramster in their contribution “Wee the People: A Manifesto for the Bladder and Bowel”. If you as a designer can get this right, you can probably get anything right. That includes arranging urban spaces to solve the issues that affect people, such as: sufficient and adequate public transit; housing needs; provision of basic services; universal accessibility to public space, services, and safety, creating livable cities for everyone, in the full meaning of the term, as Jone Belausteguigoitia and Lucía Olavarri point out in their piece “A Holistic Approach to Inclusive Urbanism”. They emphasize yet another connotation of “Inclusive Urbanism”, whose approach focuses on participation in the planning or design process ensuring the participation of citizens in the design of the city. Key to understanding“Inclusive Urbanism” is to include all the diverse and intersectional groups in the process, allowing them to engage in and contribute to the urban plan or design, beyond a solely technical approach. But Doina Petrescu reminds us in “Civic Line – Participative Architecture Between Agonism and Nonsolution” that citizens themselves can manipulate participatory frameworks forming alliances to protect narrow interests, often distorting democratic intentions. Thus she claims that neither citizens nor inclusive practice should be romanticized, introducing a “nonsolution approach” into the discussion of“Inclusive Urbanism”, which can lead to results that remain affirmative forms but expose their inner contradictions. In such processes the people involved need to stay committed to agonism, take risks, make moves, and sustain tension while remaining attentive, responsive, and caring, and keep on helping each other and the others by using architecture as a platform for contestation and solidarity. Vincent van Spaendonk notices that such solidarity is lacking towards labour migrants in the Dutch city of Tilburg, where the white van has become part of the city’s urban iconography, shuttling workers from housing clusters to fulfillment centres in a closed loop of labour: work, sleep, repeat, as he illustrates in his article “Out of Sight, Out of Place”. Due to this situation they lack integration into existing neighbourhoods, rendering them invisible and absent from the cultural and civic imagination and the built environment of the city. As a radical alternative he offers the concept of the ethnopolis that would give migrant workers the right to appear in the city not as silent labourers, but as citizens: as people. For Elke Krasny, countering the effects of such invisibilization is crucial, as she argues in our second interview called “The Power to Include and Exclude”. Referring to the female domestic labour of care and maintenance and social reproduction, she thinks that this “exclusiveness” in the form of invisibilization has to do with neither being included nor being considered as something that matters and counts. What is important to her in creating more inclusive cities is that one does not feel belittled by architecture, but taken seriously at the scale of the bodies we have. Therefore, she believes that architecture can contribute most to an“Inclusive Urbanism” when it provides us with the feeling that our bodies are not out of place, but that one can actually belong and feel at home, both indoors and outdoors. How people nevertheless manage to find a sense of belonging in places that feel neither home nor wholly alien, but somewhere in between, is illustrated by Cristina De Middel, both surreally and poetically, by depicting their heroic“Journey to the Center“ from the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala, along Mexico’s northern border with Arizona and California. That belonging is crucial to creating truly inclusive urban spaces is supported also by Marco Addona in his article “Is Paris still Burning?”, showing that even top-down branding projects for urban inclusivity, like Chicago’s Boystown – the first officially designated ‘gay neighborhood’ in the United States – can still provide, on its margins, conditions for new forms of “oblique” belonging. Although his real role model for inclusivity is the ballroom that thrives on improvisation and negotiation, exceeding the conceived order, becoming a site of imagination and lived experience. Such spaces resist commodification and remain open to multiple, even conflicting, ways of inhabiting the city. To design them one needs to step back and create frameworks rather than prescriptions, enable rather than dictate, and design for coexistence rather than conformity. It means accepting that, in the end, the most powerful form of design may be not to fix, but to allow and to hold space for what is yet to come. Then, as Tony Van Le captures it declaratively with his photographs in “Prelude to Convergence”, cities are able to absorb difference and transform into vibrant spaces where bodies, performances, and affects reconfigure their surroundings within spaces that often were not designed for them. Therefore, to achieve a true“Inclusive Urbanism”, it is critical to adapt planning towards a more open-ended process rather than closed results and focus on giving agency to marginalised inhabitants, as Algirdas Ramonas concludes in “Spaces of Safe Uncertainty”. And since actions are what foster safe uncertainty and tolerance, design should be oriented towards temporal activity allowing for spontaneity, appropriation and experimentation. But inclusivity, in its truest form, demands systems that value people over profit, access over aesthetics and equity over exclusivity, EX FIGURA (Barbara Stallone and Francisco Silva) add in their piece “Inclusivity vs. Capitalism”. And when such systems are not prioritized, inclusivity within capitalism will remain more symbolic than truly substantive – a compelling narrative, yet a compromised reality. However, to make our cities more inclusive effectively, there needs to be more central government enforcement of the requirements and standards, as Greed points out. And to change the mentality and attitudes among politicians, so that they take issues of inclusiveness more seriously, you need to argue with a business case and about efficiency, functionality and ideally sustainability. But she provides hope by referring to these revolutionary moments, when you can gradually alter the city to make things better.

Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, October 2025

(Cover: Image is part of Tony Van Le’s contribution “Prelude to Convergence” on page 101. ©Tony Van Le, Music: Nirvana – Come as You Are, Video editing: Danae Zachariaki))

Find out more about this issue on MONU’s website.