Studium General Delft, September 23, 2025, 17:00 – 19:00, TU Delft Library Central Hall
Irene Haslinger, Laurens Kolks, Tom Twigt, Ivana Ivkovic
In lecture halls you sit and listen, project rooms are there for group sessions, and when exam period hits, you fight for a spot in the Library to study. The campus seems to be a place with a clear purpose: work on your research, or work on your degree. But our campus is also increasingly political. Between the concrete, the glass and the grass, we’ve seen protests on the Library stairs, on the lawn in front of the Aula and around the offices of the executive board. Is the campus designed for this?
A library has always been a place to sharpen and shape (scientific) minds and opinions. But what do we think of this when banners about complicity in genocide suddenly appear on the balconies, and it starts raining protest leaflets while we’re studying?
Maybe we should ask ourselves what a campus is for in the first place. Is it a public space, and if so, is it a safe environment to shape your opinion on collective matters in society or in the university and student life? Should it be? And how do we design it so that everyone feels invited to make use of it?
Tonight we will take the Library and campus as a starting point to talk about public space as a stage for claiming space, and we will take matters into our own hands and start to design it.
Speakers:
Dr. Laurens Kolks (1976) is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering – Delft University of Technology. He received a bachelor’s degree in industrial design at Design Academy Eindhoven (1999), a master’s degree in sociology (2018, cum laude), and a doctorate in sociology (2024) – both at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Kolks examines how design can engender and support public engagement with collective concerns. His research and writing address subjects at the intersection of sociology and design. His design work focusses on spatial interventions that explore possibilities to reshape public spaces.
Tom Twigt (1996) is a graduate of TU Delft, with a degree in mechanical engineering. During his studies, he developed an interest in issues of inequality, which led him to join GroenLinks and eventually he became involved in activism. He has participated in various protests, including against Shell’s presence at the Delft Career Days, campus occupations for climate and Palestine, and actions with Extinction Rebellion. Currently, he is involved with a squat in Delft and with groups focused on alternative masculinity. These groups work to ‘reclaim’ public space and turn it into civic space.
Irene Haslinger is director of TU Delft Library. Earlier in her career she was a researcher in the area of theoretical linguistics. After that she worked at the KB, the national library of the Netherlands, in various roles with a special interest in policy development, innovation and international collaboration. Before joining TU Delft Library, she was director of operations at the TU Delft Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.
Ivana Ivković is a political philosopher born and raised in former Yugoslavia. She analyzes firsthand how political upheaval reshapes meanings and identities. Ivana teaches philosophy, addressing contemporary political issues such as citizenship, the transformation of public space, and populism through accessible yet rigorous philosophical frameworks. (introduction, moderation)
My introduction spoken at the event:
“Hello everyone, and welcome to the Central Hall of the University Library. We meet here today to talk about public space, but also to inhabit this space together. A library is usually where we come to concentrate, to read, to study. Tonight, it also becomes a stage on which we ask a simple but charged question: is the campus designed for protest? – as part of the series of Studium Generale programs about reclaiming public space.
Let me start with unpacking the notion of “public space.” We often point to a square, a street, a hall and say, “that is public.” But public space is not only a place; it’s a practice. It is the realm in which we appear to one another, as strangers and as co-citizens, and test our ideas in the presence of others. In Latin: the res publica—the “public thing”—involves matters we hold in common, and are responsible for together. Public space is the physical condition that allows the res publica to be discussed, challenged, and renewed.
The sociologist Richard Sennett is helpful here. In The Fall of Public Man and later work, he describes the public realm as the space of encounter with difference: speaking with people unlike ourselves, enduring friction without collapsing into hostility, and turning discomfort into curiosity. In short, this is where we learn the arts of civility. Crucially, Sennett reminds us that the design of space shapes the quality of those encounters. Benches that face each other invite dialogue; long corridors funnel us without choice; thresholds and sightlines subtly script how brave or how timid we feel. Design never settles the politics of a place, but it does set the stage.
So, we talk about public space, but in the current day debate we talk about public space that is under duress, that is pressured by diverse forces.
First, commercialization: more of our collective life is mediated by venues of consumption. When the square becomes a mall and the atrium a rentable event space, the right to be there starts to depend on the ability to pay or the willingness to behave like a customer.
Second, securitization and liability: universities and other organisations face real responsibilities for safety, yet safety cultures can drift into risk-avoidance by default. Barriers, badges, and booking systems protect access—and quietly narrow it.
Third, platformization: much public argument has migrated to digital platforms that amplify performance and speed while thinning accountability and context. When the loudest are most visible online, physical spaces can seem either too tame or, when they erupt, too shocking.
Finally, polarization: shared facts feel contested, and so do shared places. When banners about complicity in genocide appear on balconies, or when leaflets rain down on a quiet study floor, some experience this as a rupture. Others experience it as the moment the space truly becomes public—because collective matters are brought into view. How should a university, or, in particular, the library, deal with these opposing views? Are they mutually exclusive? Is it possible to host them both, and if so, how?
These and many other questions are up for debate in this programme. Why here? Why in the library?
A library is a (semi)public space: open, but with specific norms; welcoming, but curated. Moreover, its design—acoustics, furniture, sightlines, openness of the hall, the way the staircases frame visibility—does not merely decorate learning; it distributes power. Who can be seen? Who can be heard? How easy is it to gather, to pause, to display a sign, to sit together or to isolate? Designers call these “affordances”: what a space invites or discourages before anyone writes a rule.
On a campus, these affordances accumulate: the stairs that invite assembly, the lawns that invite lingering, the doors that invite entry—or don’t. We feel publicness not only because rules permit it, but because space makes it plausible. In that sense, the campus is always designed for something.
For what?
Perhaps the first answer that comes to mind is a simple one: the campus is designed for learning. Nonetheless we can, and I think we should, complicate this simple answer.
An education in a democracy is not only the transfer of knowledge; it is also an apprenticeship in citizenship. That apprenticeship requires places to try things out, to fail without being criminalized, to be visible without being humiliated, and to be challenged without being silenced. We need quiet to think, but we also need to test whether our thinking matters beyond ourselves. Maybe, therefore, disruption is as important part of university life, as is concentration.
So what does “reclaiming public space” mean in this context? It can mean occupying or interrupting. But it also can mean re-opening a path (an affordance) that has been quietly narrowed. It can mean designing for difference—so that protest does not have to be a breakdown of space, but an intensified use of it. It can mean acknowledging that dissent is not an external threat to the university’s mission but one of its internal methods; a way the res publica re-enters the room.
We will begin by hearing from two people who each hold a different piece of this puzzle. We will hear from Tom Twigt about activism as a way of reclaiming public space, and from Irene Haslinger about the library as an open yet regulated space. After their inputs, we’ll open the floor to your questions and ideas.
After that, we will introduce a third perspective into this conversation, as Laurens Kolks will tell us about design as a practice of public engagement.”
