The Why Factor(y) is based on the inaugural speech by Winy Maas at October 15, 2009 to mark the acceptance of the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology, the opening of the Why Factory by Dutch Minister of Education and Culture Ronald Plasterk and the symposium on “My Future City”, where a variety of students, inhabitants, architects, urbanists, thinkers, developers, politicians, technicians offer their future city…

“...Welcome to The Why Factory, a research platform and urbanistic think-tank that, through fundamental architectural research and argumentation, explores the possibilities for the development of our cities. We produce models and visualizations for the cities of the future. Our ultimate mission is to reveal through bigger projects the mechanism of thinking about, and ultimately producing a series of critical alternatives through images. I want to address this initiative today by describing the need for fundamental research and argumentation, the why factor, that requires us to keep asking questions until we reach the answer and thus, the next question. I will place this initiative in a new or renewed model for education and research: the why factory. I will show how it found its current place … on and in the tribune. And I will finish by revealing the why factory’s first agenda: the future cities program...”