Architecture in the Netherlands is under pressure. Construction is highly industrialised, projects grow ever more complex, and buildings are increasingly treated as financial assets, all of which narrows what we can design and build. Architects find themselves fighting to keep their decision-making power and to protect the principles and qualities of their work. This event will bring together spatial practitioners and researchers from Brazil and the Netherlands to discuss going radical as the way to regain our collective autonomy as designers, builders, and inhabitants of the city. What does it mean to do justice to architecture as a collective project? How can we practice in ways that confront the roots of our current crises, rather than just their symptoms? Across two geographies, in open dialogue, we will discover what architecture is still capable of when we radically rethink the economy, politics, hierarchies, and types of knowledge that shape our projects.
Speakers
Carina Guedes and Mariana Borel are Brazilian architects and urban planners who lead Arquitetura na Periferia (Architecture in the Peripheries), an initiative that works with women in peripheral communities in Brazil. Their practice connects architecture, gender and self-management, creating participatory processes through which women develop the knowledge and autonomy to transform their own homes and territories. By bringing together technical knowledge and local experience, their work explores architecture as a tool for women’s autonomy, collective action and the right to the city.
Mira Nekova is an architect and partner at Time to Access, which she founded in 2021 together with Andrea Verdecchia. Time to Access is an Amsterdam-based practice dedicated to the development of radical architecture. Their projects include the De Nieuwe Meent housing cooperative and the CPO Bakstayn. Nekova obtained her Master’s degree in Architecture from Delft University of Technology and worked as an architect and project manager before founding Time to Access. In 2021, she was nominated for the ARC21 Young Talent Award and, in 2023, she was included by Financieel Dagblad in its list of fifty entrepreneurial talents under the age of 35.
Alina Paias is a 2025-26 recipient of the Talent Development Grant by the Creative Industries Fund NL and is currently a researcher at the Delft University of Technology. Her work centers around the production of the built environment, including what types of work, technology and knowledge are involved in it. She has been involved with exhibitions and research projects in the Americas and in Europe for multiple arts and architecture institutions. She was one of the curators for the 2024 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR), the solo curator for Taking More Than What’s There to Give at VI PER Gallery, in Prague, and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in 2025, and a member of the 2025 cohort of the Bauhaus Lab programme in Global Modernism Studies at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
Moderator
Catherine Koekoek is a researcher, curator and facilitator in the fields of architecture, feminism, and philosophy. She works as postdoctoral researcher at the Knowledge, Transformation & Society (KiTeS) section at the University of Twente. Her work focuses on the infrastructures needed for civic, cultural and activist practices to link up with institutional democracy and transformation. As an engaged and practice-based researcher, she enjoys moving between academia and practice. She was co-curator of the 2024 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, and co-produces feminist architecture podcast Respons.
