This event is part of our Symbiotic Hospitality program

31 march 2026
20u - 22u

Timelab (Kogelstraat 34, 9000 Gent)

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Participation for Real

Flanders Architecture Institute (VAi) and Timelab organise the book launch of Participation for Real, focusing on the day to day reality of participatory processes in Flanders and Brussels today. 

During the event the book’s editor Hülya Ertas explains the framework of the content, and professor Elke Krasny (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) reflects on participation in
relation to care and hospitality.

The book Participation for Real outlines the challenges and joys of participatory processes in architecture and urbanism in the 2020s in Brussels and Flanders. It is a collective diary,
composed of confessions from the field. Built upon a series of workshops organised by Timelab and the Flanders Architecture Institute, the book explores many facets of
participatory practice. The authors reflect on the constraints of budgeting and timing, the effects of individualism in society at large, the position of architects and designers, and novel approaches to inclusion and diversity, among others.

Illustration by Sofie De Cleene

Care, Hospitality, and Participation 

Elke Krasny’s talk positions architecture as a political practice of relation, both shaping and shaped by labour, materials, and power.  Challenging the dialectics of top-down and bottom-up, host and guest, carer and cared-for, the lecture rethinks the right to the city and spatial justice through the lens of the right to care. 

Dr. Elke Krasny is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research and curatorial work interrogate the intersections of care, social reproduction, and social and ecological justice in architecture, urbanism, and spatial practices. Together with Angelika Fitz, Krasny introduced the concept of critical care to analyze the infrastructural, material, social, and ecological dimensions of architecture as a form of care. In recognition of her contributions to feminist research, she was awarded the Gabriele Possanner State Prize in 2023. Her major publications include Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (with Angelika Fitz, MIT Press, 2019), Living with an Infected Planet: Covid-19, Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript, 2023), and Feminist Infrastructural Critique (with Sophie Lingg and Claudia Lomoschitz, 2024). For further information, see FKW Journal.  credit: Cajetan Perwein, 2025