DESIGN AND MIGRATION SOCIETIES: CO-CREATING JUST FUTURES
Tuesday 3 November 2026 | TU Delft, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering
- Full panel and workshop information
- A detailed timetable with room assignments will be published closer to the date.
Panels (One Hour)
Co-Creating Migration Societies through Stories, Routes and Public Encounters
Organiser: Meghann Ormond (Wageningen University and Research)
Participants: Carol Pertuz (Utrecht University / De Voorkamer); Negar Rajabi (Migrantour Utrecht / Regiegroep Ongedocumenteerden Amsterdam); additional scholar from Leiden, Delft or Erasmus (to be confirmed).
This panel explores storytelling, intercultural walking routes and public encounters as forms of co-creation and participatory design in migration societies. It centres lived experience as expertise and examines how stories and spatial encounters can serve as tools for epistemic and spatial justice. Drawing on projects such as Migrantour Utrecht, the panel considers how co-created narratives and public encounters can challenge dominant migration framings and open space for alternative forms of knowledge and belonging.
How History Shapes Designers' Positionality: Lessons from the Bijlmer High-Rise
Organiser: Pamela Ijeoma (Amsterdam Institute for African Mobility Studies)
Participants: Johnathan Subendran (TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment).
How does history shape designers' positionality in migration societies? This 60-minute panel takes the Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam as a historical and spatial lens for examining how design assumptions are produced, inherited, and contested. Conceived in the 1960s through modernist ideas about progress, collective living, social order, and the future city, the Bijlmer later became home to highly diverse migrant communities. The distance between planning ideals and lived realities makes it a particularly productive case through which to examine who is imagined by design, whose knowledge is privileged, and how responsibility is distributed. The panel brings AIAMS's migration-research perspective into dialogue with a TU Delft urban design contributor perspective, treating positionality as historically and institutionally constituted rather than an individual attribute.
Producing Displacement: Violence, Migration Governance and Contested Return in the Levant
Organisers: Dr. Oroub El-Abed; Marh Echtai (TU Delft, Urbanism)
Participants: Dr. Hadeel Fawdleh (Birzeit University, confirmed); Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab (Lebanese American University, confirmed); Dr. Nahed Habiballah (Arab American University in Palestine, to be confirmed); Dr. Taher Labadi (Birzeit University, to be confirmed); Dr. Alex Kasir (American University of Beirut, to be confirmed); Dr. Sawsan Abdulrahim (American University of Beirut, to be confirmed); and others.
Forced migration scholarship often encounters displacement only after people cross borders, enter refugee regimes, or become subjects of humanitarian assistance, integration and return policy. This panel shifts attention to the territorial and spatial processes that precede, accompany and outlast displacement. It examines conflict, flight, refuge, recovery and return as connected, spatially uneven processes. Focusing on the Levant (Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq), the panel brings regional histories into critical comparison without reducing them to a single crisis. It asks how occupation, war, dispossession, infrastructural destruction, border regimes, planning practices and changing political authority make staying unsafe or impossible, reshape places of refuge and condition the possibility of return — and it interrogates who has the authority to declare a conflict over, a territory safe or return possible. Moving from the right to flee towards the linked rights to stay, migrate and return, the panel centres the material and political conditions under which these options become genuinely voluntary, safe and dignified.
Cultivating Responsible Research Relationships in an Era of Tech-Savvy Migration Research
Organisers: Dr. Zeynep Kasli and Dr. Nanneke Winters (International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Participants: Dr. Bernd Kasparek (Assistant Professor, Programmable Infrastructures, TU Delft, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management); Dr. Lieke van der Veer (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences / TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment).
This panel brings together perspectives on digital infrastructures in European integration, dilemmas in auditing diversity and anti-discrimination policies in the Netherlands, and the cultivation of responsible research relationships in a landscape of increasingly tech-driven migration research.
Dr. Bernd Kasparek examines risk, scale, and smartness in the digital and programmable infrastructures that underpin European integration, drawing on ethnographic regime analysis. Dr. Lieke van der Veer explores dilemmas in auditing diversity and anti-discrimination policies in the Netherlands, working at the intersection of borders and refuge, cultures of neoliberalism, state-citizen relations, and social movements. Dr. Zeynep Kasli brings a focus on state-society relations from a mobility perspective, including transnationalism, diaspora politics, and intergenerational approaches to im/mobility and place. Dr. Nanneke Winters contributes expertise on im/mobility, migrant trajectories and translocal livelihoods in the context of migration and development.
Launch of DIDI White Paper: Dilemmas of Diversity — Diversity Policy and Practice
Organiser: Prof. Marlou Schrover (Leiden University, History)
Panellists: Kay Mars (Erasmus University Rotterdam, Sociology); Suzan Abozyid (Leiden University, History); Lieke van der Veer (TU Delft); Thérese Nleng (NOOM — Netwerk van Organisaties van Oudere Migranten); Carla Delgado Swiatkowski (Landelijk Samenwerkingsverband Actieve bewoners); Raphaël Boon (Gemeente Leiden, Projectleider diversiteit, inclusie en gelijkwaardigheid); and others.
The white paper Dilemmas of Diversity — Diversity Policy and Practice contains eight dialogues between sixteen experts from academia, government and civil society organisations on current issues. The publication is intended for policymakers, administrators, professionals and anyone working to promote inclusive public services and social participation.
The panellists will present short pitches related to the white paper and the key theme of the conference. For designing future policies, we need an organisational infrastructure that goes beyond simply including a handful of co-designers. Policies are and have been design (including for housing) without taking stock of which "problems" they sought to solve. Municipal authorities have decades of experience building these infrastructures. Historians analyse how design on paper — regarding housing, regarding integration policies, regarding social cohesion — has worked out in practice and how knowledge infrastructures that have been built up over the years can fall apart within a short period. "Neutral" design labels turn into negative stereotypes overnight. Thinking about "just futures" also has to do with how authorities deal with low-level complaints (about badly designed public spaces and street lighting). Ambitious plans to design spaces that can include "everybody" fail to acknowledge how hard it is to change power structures that go back decades.
Workshops (Two Hours)
Designing the Future of Migration Studies in the Netherlands
Organisers: Ilse van Liempt (Utrecht University), Nadia Bouras (Leiden University) and Peter Scholten (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Participants: Monique Kremer (Adviesraad Migratie); Maite Vermeulen (De Correspondent); Nawal Mustapha (University of Amsterdam); Leo Lucassen (International Institute of Social History); Marlou Schrover (Leiden University); Rinus Penninx (University of Amsterdam); Han Entzinger (Erasmus University Rotterdam); Saskia Bonjour (University of Amsterdam); Halleh Gorashi (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); and others.
Fifty years of migration research in the Netherlands — what have we learned, and how do we design the future of the field? This workshop brings together a broad group of leading migration scholars from across the Netherlands to reflect on knowledge production, the politicisation of migration research, and the evolving relationship between science, policy and society. The session is linked to a collaborative book project.
The workshop explicitly explores what it means to design the future of migration research in a way that combines scientific excellence with societal impact. Participants will consider how migration research in the Netherlands has developed over five decades, how the field navigates an increasingly polarised public and political landscape, and what new directions are needed for the years ahead.
Design Your Future: Speculative Design with Youth in Delft West
Organisers: Leonie Sonneveld and Eveline Holla (ScienceHub TU Delft)
Participants: Edinho Schmidt (Can I Dream); Jamal Marengo (Can I Dream / Wijkuniversiteit TU Delft); Pieke Hoekstra (Wijkuniversiteit TU Delft); Lara Dona (TU Delft alumna); Canan Mesutoglu (Erasmus University Rotterdam, ESSB Educational Sciences); youth participants from Delft West.
How can young people with a migration background become active agents in shaping the futures of their communities? This workshop explores speculative design as a participatory approach for engaging young people in imagining more inclusive urban futures. ScienceHub TU Delft and youth organisation Can I Dream facilitate speculative design workshops with secondary school students in Delft West, a diverse urban area where many residents have a migration background. Through future scenarios, storytelling and prototyping, participants explore alternative futures for their neighbourhoods and identify actions that can be taken today.
In this interactive session, participants will work with future concepts developed by the students and collaboratively expand these ideas. Where possible, young people will participate as co-designers and present their own visions.
Designing a Displacement-Sensitive Climate Vulnerability Framework
Organisers: Carolien Jacobs (Leiden University, Van Vollenhoven Institute) and Sonja Fransen (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Participants: Interactive format with all participants.
An interactive workshop on climate vulnerability, displacement and humanitarian governance. Participants co-design assessment frameworks that account for the specific risks faced by refugees and internally displaced persons in the context of climate change and climate adaptation. The workshop brings together legal, social-scientific and design perspectives to explore how vulnerability frameworks can be made more sensitive to the realities of forced displacement.
Typologies of Migration: A Critical and Explorative Design Charrette
Organisers: Johnathan Subendran, Marh Echtai and Irene Luque Martin (TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture)
Design does not just respond to migration and diversity; it builds the conditions that allow or block them, in the exact shape of a doorway, a housing unit, a street section, or a piece of infrastructure. This charrette asks spatial practitioners to treat form-making itself as a site of politics rather than a neutral technical exercise. The session is built for designers who are skeptical or unconvinced that design has real purchase on questions of justice and inclusion.
Participants work at whatever scale they practise in (product, building, street, public space, or infrastructure) and use a method of creative destruction through an intersectional lens: they take an existing or proposed form apart, ask which values and users it assumes, and rebuild it to answer to a different, specified positionality.
Design and Migration: A Transdisciplinary Dialogue to Challenge Methodological Blindspots
Organisers: Alessandra Bernardi and Deger Ozkaramanli (TU Delft, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering), Moritz Jesse (Leiden University)
Matthijs van Dijk (Reframing Studio, co-organiser); Medha Gupta (GMD Alumni, Chair of Student board)
Migration is one of the major societal transformations of our time, involving multiple societal and public domains and often addressed through polarised, politicised frames. Design has expanded into policymaking, contributing exploratory and human-centred approaches to complex challenges; however, design methodologies are not neutral: they are shaped by positionalities, biases, values, and external limits such as the legal system.
This workshop argues that one way to reveal methodological blind-spots and move beyond assumptions of neutrality is by bringing design and transdisciplinary processes into conversation. Using a 3x3 futures matrix developed in a TU Delft IDE master's graduation project as a boundary object, participants will critically reflect on the narratives around migration it proposes and the positionalities, values, and biases underpinning methodological choices, aiming for an open inter- and transdisciplinary critique and further development.
Shapes of a Future-proof Labour Migration System in the Netherlands: A Policy Lab with the IND
Organiser: Michiel Swinkels and Diana Stefanescu (Immigration and Naturalisation Service, Strategy and Policy Unit)
Participants: Olaf van Vliet (Leiden University, confirmed); Tesseltje de Lange and Judith van Uden (Radboud University, Centre for Migration Research)
The Netherlands is entering a period in which demographic change, economic transformation, and geopolitical uncertainty are reshaping the future of work. Labour shortages are becoming more persistent across sectors, while the transition to a more sustainable, digital, and resilient economy is creating a demand for new skills and talent. One of the paths considered for creating and attracting such talent, is through labour migration from countries outside of the EU. Migration, however, remains a topic that requires careful consideration of economic needs, social cohesion, and workers’ rights. Within this context, an important question arises as to how a future-proof labour migration system may – practically - look like in The Netherlands. And subsequently, what is needed from different stakeholders shaping the labour migration system of the future?
The IND has a unique position in the current Dutch system as the authority which processes all applications for (combined) residence and work permits, working closely with other public service providers to assess whether an individual’s professional stay serves a substantial Dutch interest. As such, the IND wishes to be prepared for the future and is therefore exploring what a future-proof labour migration system might look like in light of the new Dutch talent strategy published in July 2026, and the current cabinet’s plans for a piloting a skilled worker scheme. With the help of conference participants we want to think about new procedures that contribute to IND’s mission. Throughout the session, participants will be presented with policy and implementation dilemma’s, identify opportunities and challenges, and discuss labour migration measures and implementation requirements that balance flexibility with predictability, and identify what is needed from different stakeholders to accommodate this.
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