D.11. Schools as Democratic Territories: Spatial Justice, Participation and Co-Governance Across the Whole School-Building Process

School buildings are not merely infrastructures; they are public democratic spaces in which power relations, participation opportunities and everyday forms of living together become visible and negotiable. This panel explores how Spatial Justice (Soja, 2010), Democratic Co-Governance (Mouffe, 2013; Biesta, 2022) and participatory school development can be meaningfully integrated across the entire school-building process, from early visioning and needs assessment through design negotiations, implementation and post-occupancy evaluation.

The central question is: How can learning environments be shaped so that they do not merely reflect democratic culture, but actively enable it? International research demonstrates that belonging, agency, social safety and spatial usability do not emerge as side effects of architecture. Instead, they result from intentional socio-spatial decisions. Studies from Scandinavian and British contexts (Woolner 2015; Sigurðardóttir 2020; Dovey and Fisher 2014) show that democratic spaces arise when spatial design and social practices are negotiated together at an early stage, and when learners, teachers and educational teams are recognised as legitimate co-designers of their environments.

The panel welcomes contributions that analyse co-governance models in school-building processes; provide empirical evidence of how students and staff act as democratic agents in shaping educational spaces; formulate spatial-justice criteria for learning environments; or conceptualise pedagogical interior architecture as a democratic practice that fosters equity, participation and collective responsibility.

The aim is to initiate a European dialogue on how schools can become democratic territories—places in which spatial justice and lived democracy converge in everyday educational life.