The Just City

On September 19, 2025, the exhibition The Just City will open at the Van Eesteren Museum. What is a just city? This is a city that residents can change themselves. Whether that involves installing the bench, maintaining a neighborhood garden, starting a housing cooperative, or taking over a neighborhood budget. By changing the city, residents themselves are also changing. Because they get to know their neighbours better, build a relationship with their place, because they run into bureaucratic or financial limits, have to use creativity and, above all, perseverance.

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Real meaningful change is not possible alone. It takes a lot of collective strength to actually change something. Do cities still offer enough space for this? That seems less and less the case. The way in which the government and the market have organized cities in recent decades has made the city less and less accessible to various groups in society.

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But if you search, you will find more and more examples where it does work. Residents take matters into their own hands and together create a meaningful living environment. In these examples render government and the market not only space for residents, but let they also have space. And it is the residents who, in turn, actively occupy and appropriate this space. That does not happen automatically and it does not always go well.

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But the exhibition The Just City that it is pot. It shows a wide range of promising examples of residents who, together, control the city. Seemingly simple examples such as a reading room, a neighborhood kitchen, a green street or a collective residential building. But it's the underlying organizational principles and how it came about that make it special.

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The Just City is the impetus and a plea for a city that is accessible to everyone and excludes no one. Above all, it is an invitation to shape that city yourself.