In this episode I speak with Josefine Fokdal, a Danish Architect, scholar, editor and facilitator based in Berlin, Germany. She works at the intersection of housing, urban development, and transformative design. She has worked extensively in academic contexts, including leadership roles, teaching and interdisciplinary collaboration, and as a consultant for international institutions. Topics she has covered include affordable housing, participatory planning, informality, and socio-spatial inequality. Her work has spanned Europe, Asia and Africa. Her current focus lies on housing sufficiency, interior spatial optimization, and new models of sustainable living—most recently through the founding of BLEIB in Berlin. There she seeks forms for implementing right-sizing to contribute to a more sustainable future.
Throughout the episode, we touch on a variety of interrelated topics. We begin with her current focus on right-sizing, which is all about asking questions about when enough is enough, when we need more square-meters (or anything else) and when not. She mentions connections between different scales of intervention, from global issues to the local household unit. Josefine brings in questions of inequality and who can afford to move or who needs to optimize or wants to optimize their use of space, thus trying to also make right-sizing interesting for people who could afford more square meters to choose not to choose that solution. She challenges us as listeners to stop and reflect whether the way housing has “always been done thus far” among humans is the one and only way, and how we might really think differently about housing. We then also link this to multi-species planning and architecture, as something that goes beyond nature serving humans but questioning the structure of that relationship between humans and nature more profoundly. We briefly discuss the importance of interdisciplinarity for this thinking, which circles back a little to the episode with Olivia Bina and to the Intrepid project. We discuss how the complexity of such themes require the different perspectives of different disciplines, they call for new ways of generating knowledge, of recognizing diverse ways of knowing, and facilitating transformative learning experiences. Finally, we touch on research Josefine has done on rituals of burial in Hong Kong, and how such informal practices that transcend the human at a different level, which questions what happens beyond the “here and now” and the deep meaning held in that which is not formalised.
Take-aways for planners, by Josefine Fokdal
* Asking what is enough, how human spaces and resource use can be “right-sized”
* What kind of futures to we want to and should train the next generation of planners and architects to envision and to shape
* Revise underlying values and move from a people-centred to a more multi species approach - how can we create co-habitation in our future cities?
* Government involvement on issues like: do we need to build at all, and if or when we do, how we prioritize who we build for - ask “who do we serve?”
* Apply transdisciplinary and transformative learning processes with students at universities
* Join or make a movement with others working on such themes across various disciplines and focus points
References
Josefine’s website: https://www.josefinefokdal.de/
BLEIB Urban Living Initiative: www.bleib-urbanliving.de
The INTREPID Project: https://urbantransitionshub.org/2019/10/14/intrepid-knowledge-interdisciplinary-transdisciplinary-research-and-collaboration/
Fokdal, J., Bina, O., Chiles, P., Ojamäe, L., & Paadam, K. (Eds). (2021). Enabling the city: Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary encounters in research and practice.Routledge. Open access
Fokdal, J. (2008). Power and space: Appropriation of space in social housing in Copenhagen. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Fokdal, J. (2019). Juggling Legitimacies: Informal Places for Burials and Worship in Hong Kong. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(3), 582–588.
Haunstrup, T. (2025). NOK Fra overflod til trivsel. Forlaget Satis. (in Danish)
Hopkins, R. (2025). How to Fall in Love with the Future. A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World. Chelsea Green Publishing UK.
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