Conference Agenda

The Socio-spatial Design Agency (SSDA) is a service-learning course centred on community-engaged architectural design. Students from the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture develop spatial projects, installations, interventions, or tools that respond to socio-spatial issues raised by societal partners.

In 2025, the SSDA tutor and students began collaborating with FMDO (Federatie Mondiale en Democratische Organisaties), an NPO leveraging diversity to build bridges, counter polarization, and strengthen social participation. Through partnerships with socio-cultural associations and volunteers, FMDO creates spaces for dialogue and empowers people with a migration background.

Within this collaboration, the SSDA engages in FMDO’s Op zoek naar een deurbel project, a social-artistic initiative collecting housing stories from people with a migration background and exploring themes such as belonging, vacancy, housing quality, homelessness, and discrimination. These stories form the basis for a participative performance and a documentary.

As in most service-learning contexts, the SSDA course aims to foster students’ academic, professional, and personal (citizenship) development. Transition Design and Critical Spatial Practice serve as overarching course frameworks, while tools such as Iceberg Analysis and the Principles of Ethical and Effective Service support systemic thinking and reciprocal collaboration with community partners. Transition Design equips designers to contribute to sustainable and inclusive societal transitions, while Critical Spatial Practice is a self-reflective architectural and artistic approach that questions and seeks to transform the social conditions of the sites it engages.

Although competences for democratic culture and intercultural dialogue are part of the course, they are currently addressed only implicitly. In this reflection, the SSDA tutor and FMDO project coordinator explore how, in the Op zoek naar een deurbel project, storytelling and design intersect to produce democratic learning moments. And they formulate suggestions on how democratic education could take a more central place in the course, for example, by reformulating the content, learning goals, or evaluation framework. Students will also be involved in this reflection process; collective reflective writing will be tested as a method for making course development more participatory by involving both community partners and students in the course (re)design.

While grounded in a single course, this reflection aims to spark a wider dialogue on how the Faculty of Architecture can more explicitly integrate democratic competences into its curriculum and reconsider its definition of ‘professional excellence.’ Given that the SSDA tutor is also the faculty’s service‑learning coordinator, the outcomes of this work will serve to spark a faculty‑level debate on democratic education in architecture.