Week 12 Round: Present your proposal

The last Round. Ten minutes for your place, and questions from people who have spent twelve weeks learning what to ask.

20 May 2027

Ten minutes, five of questions. No requirement to use slides, and the strongest presentations in previous years have been a floor plan and a person talking.

Name a real site. An address, a building, a piece of ground, a server. Not “a community space”. If you cannot point at where it is, you have not done the exercise.

Name the cost of entry, in money and in everything else — the skill, the fluency, the confidence to walk in the first time. Week 9 taught you that a door is not the only way to keep people out.

Name the thing people are actually there to do. The lecture’s closing argument is that belonging arrives as a by-product. If your answer to “why would anyone come” is “to belong”, expect that to be the first question.

Say who it excludes. Every place has a boundary and you have known this since week 3. A proposal that claims to keep nobody out is not a generous proposal, it is an unexamined one. The good answer names the boundary and argues that it is worth its cost.

Expect to be asked for evidence, and expect the questioner to have read the same twelve papers you did. Week 11 was practice for this.

The room has watched pubs, barbershops, laundromats, platforms and guild halls for a semester. Use them. The best proposals have always been the ones that sounded slightly unambitious and were clearly going to work.