Designing Just Spaces
This cluster explores how design shapes, mediates, and challenges social and environmental inequalities. Through co-design, collaborative research, and engagement with human and non-human communities, we generate knowledge that informs inclusive decision-making and promotes fairer spatial outcomes.
About our work
Designing Just Spaces brings together a research community examining how spatial inequality is produced and contested across diverse contexts. The cluster is defined by a shared concern with how power operates in the production of space, and how design can be reoriented towards more just and inclusive societal outcomes.
Design is approached as a political practice that shapes and negotiates unequal spatial conditions. Research engages with housing, infrastructure, and informal or contested environments, often through co-produced and community-led approaches.
A growing strand addresses ecological systems and more-than-human relations, examining how design engages human–environment relations through practices of ecological stewardship and repair.
Across this work, design is positioned as both implicated in spatial inequality and as a means of producing situated knowledge, with the aim of advancing more equitable and ecologically grounded spatial futures.
Our activities
Community-led design and spatial practice
We work with communities to co-produce knowledge and shape spatial interventions, focusing on long-term agency, governance and collective decision-making. This includes work on shared and commons-based spaces, as well as initiatives such as Sheffield DesignLAB, which supports interdisciplinary, practice-based collaboration with communities and public partners. Our work advances approaches to design that challenge top-down models of expertise, foregrounding situated knowledge and collective forms of spatial agency.
Spatial justice in everyday environments
We examine how inequalities are experienced in everyday spaces, including housing, public space, and care environments. Our research explores how spatial conditions affect wellbeing across the life course, including ageing, children’s environments, and mental health. By connecting lived experience to broader structural conditions, we develop knowledge that reframes how everyday environments are understood, valued and designed.
Just transitions and environmental change
We investigate how climate and environmental transitions affect different communities, and how design can support more equitable and ecologically grounded futures. This includes work on nature-based solutions, ecological stewardship, and more-than-human relations. Our research challenges universalised models of sustainability by foregrounding context-specific practices and diverse ways of relating to environments.
Practice-based research and methods
We develop and apply collaborative, design-led research methods that generate situated knowledge and inform design practice, policy, and public debate. These include spatial ethnography, participatory mapping, creative and visual approaches, often used in combination to connect lived experience with wider social and environmental processes. Methodology is treated as a site of inquiry in itself, through which alternative ways of knowing and practicing design are developed.