Spatial Planning for Urban Resilience in the Face of the Flood Risk: Institutional Actions, Opportunities and Challenges

The research was inspired by the increasing impact of extreme weather events and changing climate patterns on flood-prone regions and cities, and the consequent human and economic costs. Despite global efforts for flood resilience and climate adaptation involving climate analysts, economists, social scientists, politicians, hydrological...

Visibility, democratic public space and socially inclusive cities: The presence and changes of Turkish amenities in Amsterdam

This research introduces the concept of visibility as a useful tool to assess the democratic features of public spaces. It understands democratic public spaces as open spaces, which are accessible to all and allow different cultural expressions for individuals and groups. The concept of visibility refers to the visual perception of the...

Territories-in-between: A Cross-case Comparison of Dispersed Urban Development in Europe

An increasing body of literature suggests that the conventional idea of a gradual transition in spatial structure from urban to rural does not reflect contemporary patterns of urban development and their potential for sustainable development. The research introduces the concept of territories-in-between (TiB) to address the issues surrounding...

Regional Design: Discretionary Approaches to Planning in the Netherlands

This thesis elaborates on the role and position of regional design in spatial planning. Building upon the argument that design in this realm aims to improve planning guidance by judging its implications for particular situations, the thesis develops an analytical framework for an enhanced understanding of how design both influences, and is...

Complex Adaptive Systems & Urban Morphogenesis: Analyzing and designing urban fabric informed by CAS dynamics

This dissertation builds upon research that considers how cities operate as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It focuses on how certain characteristics of urban form can support an urban environment's capacity to self-organize, enabling emergent features to appear that, while unplanned, remain highly functional. The main thrust of the work is to...

Cities for or against citizens? Socio-spatial restructuring of low-income neighborhoods and the paradox of citizen participation.

Urban renewal has evolved into an ambitious and sophisticated urban strategy, recognised as urban revitalisation in America and urban regeneration in Western Europe. This new urban strategy, which tends to be area-based and state-sponsored, claims for the most part to coordinate a wide range of resources, partners and public agencies to bring...

Urban Modality: Modelling and evaluating the sustainable mobility of urban areas in the city-region

This thesis proposes a framework for evaluating the mobility potential and performance of urban areas in the city region, as an instrument to support urban development that contributes positively to regional sustainable mobility objectives. The research takes a quantitative approach, modelling and measuring the characteristics of a city-region...

Evaluation of plan implementation; Peri-urban development and the Shanghai Master Plan 1999-2020

Shanghai, like the other big cities along China’s coastline, has witnessed extraordinary growth in its economy and population with industrial development and rural-to-urban migration generating extensive urban expansion. Shanghai’s GDP growth rate has been over 10 per cent for more than 15 years. Its population in 2013 was estimated at 23.47...

Understanding culture in territorial management and its implications for spatial planning: The case of floodplain management in urbanised delta regions in the Netherlands and Thailand

Previous experiences have shown that the implementation of planning policy does not always lead to the originally intended territorial management outcomes. This issue is particularly crucial when policy ideas, institutions, models and programmes are transferred into places with different cultural settings without adaptations (Knieling and...

Spatial planning and urban resilience in the context of flood risk: A comparative study of Kaohsiung, Tainan and Rotterdam

Spatial planning is increasingly being considered as an important mechanism in coping with flood risk due to climate change. One of the reasons for this is that engineering approaches are increasingly expensive and cannot provide complete certainty of protection against climate-related floods. The thesis examines whether and how spatial planning...

Spatial Planning and High-tech Development: A comparative study of Eindhoven city-region, the Netherlands and Hsinchu City-region, Taiwan

High-tech development—which lies at the very heart of the processes of economic growth—has been recognised by many developed and developing countries as a strategic instrument to enhance and sustain their competitiveness in the global economic network. Although the concept of high-tech development differs between countries, many share the...

Timespace matters - Exploring the gap between knowing about activity patterns of people and knowing how to design and plan urban areas and regions

It is important to know about peoples’ temporospatial activity patterns when making urban and regional designs and plans. Despite wide acknowledgment of this idea, knowledge about people’s activity patterns does not get full attention in day-to-day practice of urban and regional design and planning. This book makes the case that, with activity...