Conference Program

School buildings function as public spaces in which participation, access and everyday forms of democratic practice are materially shaped. From a spatial justice perspective, educational environments can be understood as democratic territories in which freedoms are unevenly distributed and continuously renegotiated (Soja, 2010). While research on learning environments has often focused on architectural typologies or degrees of openness, this paper shifts attention to small-scale spatial interventions that structure everyday use, interaction and decision-making, drawing on understandings of educational space as a socio-spatial assemblage rather than a fixed architectural form (Dovey & Fisher, 2014).
The paper draws on two qualitative case studies from different educational contexts: a primary school participating in the German Startchancen programme and an adult education centre (Volkshochschule) located in a listed historic building in Hamburg. Although differing in age groups, institutional logics and architectural conditions, both cases reveal how spatial micro-infrastructures shape democratic practices in everyday educational life. The analysis is informed by approaches from pedagogical interior architecture and is based on qualitative documentation of spatial transformations, user feedback and observed patterns of spatial appropriation.

In the primary school case, four previously underused rooms were transformed into differentiated learning environments, including a storytelling space, an experimental research room, a construction and movement space, and a flexible makerspace. These spatial changes resulted in a redistribution of everyday freedoms, conceptualised by the school as a freedom matrix that differentiates where, how and with whom learning can take place. Rather than prescribing behaviour, the spaces enabled pupils and teachers to negotiate learning situations, responsibilities and supervision in practice. Democratic action emerged through everyday decisions about use, access and movement within the school.
The adult education case in Hamburg focuses on spatial micro-infrastructures such as accessible drinking-water points, informal meeting niches and reprogrammed circulation areas. In a context characterised by voluntary participation and diverse user groups, these elements function as low-threshold spaces of encounter and self-organisation. They support informal interaction, collective responsibility and negotiated use without requiring formal participation structures. The democratic quality of these spaces lies in their capacity to invite appropriation and shared use across institutional roles.

Across both cases, the findings suggest that democracy in educational spaces is not primarily produced through architectural openness or formal participation formats, but through spatially distributed micro-infrastructures that enable everyday negotiation. These elements create conditions for agency, accessibility and shared responsibility by embedding democratic possibilities into routine practices. Educational spaces thus become democratic territories not through symbolic design gestures, but through spatial arrangements that make everyday decision-making, encounter and co-presence possible. By foregrounding spatial micro-infrastructures as democratic enablers, the paper contributes to debates on spatial justice and co-governance in school-building processes and argues for a shift from large-scale architectural concepts to the socio-spatial effects of small, distributed intervention.