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‘Urban regeneration’ has been an important concept for many post industrial urban areas. There might be uncountable reasons why the places need to be regenerated with the urban complexity. Some places are simply too old and some of them are too small for the new urban demands. Sometimes the urban places are forced to be regenerated by war or terror attack. However, we can find the common motivation from all the regeneration cases, it can be summed up in ‘losing or challenging the original function’. The ultimate goal of every single urban regeneration process is ‘making better place’, and the process will be done by replacing, modifying or strengthening the original function. In this project, the urban regeneration process is started by the lost function as a city airport. The key element is ‘Emptiness’. Regeneration by emptiness is not special cases in this post modern era, for example, many industrial sites and factories moved away from urban area and the empty places have been filled with diverse new functions. However, this project has its very special aspect from its extreme size. ‘380ha space of inner-city’ was emptied in a day. Moreover, the nature of airport is giving a very different perspective to the project – it is all _at, hardly connected surrounding urban fabric, controlled by one single building, unusual topography by the runways, and etc. In short, the main concern of the project is about how the huge emptiness can be filled with new urban functions for the metropolis Berlin and the neighborhoods, at the same time, it will be considered which part of the space can be preserved for the future of Berlin.

My design of ‘The Hamer’ is aimed at the improvement of the qualities that can be made in the transformation of an industrial area into a mixed working living area. The different actors are: the owners of the land and its properties, the municipality and its responsibility for the public space, the current inhabitants, and of course the possible new inhabitants. In this transformation, I tried to attribute the Hamerstraat area a prominent place on the map of Amsterdam and to provide it with abundant values for the area and its close surroundings by taking a multidisciplinary perspective, integrating insights from architecture and urbanism. In my project, I started out with a pilot study on the location in order to arrive at a well-articulated problem definition. This resulted in the idea to regenerate the old industrial area of the Hamerstraat into a work living community. As a next step, I conducted a problem analysis to define basic principles which would enable me to translate the optimal transformation of the Hamerstraat area into a proposal for urban design and another one for architectural design. By continuously formulating and testing hypotheses, I tried to come up with the design of the region that would give the most suitable answer to the analysis. The design of the Hamer is directed in the first place to improve the accessibility of the whole area. In my plan for urban design, the East- West connections string together the different neighborhoods and the park whereas the North-South connections make the waterfront accessible. The strip can be seen as a place where public programs can be implemented while taking into account the historical morphological structures and monumental buildings and give them new meaning. In this way it integrates the existing industries with possible new developments on the waterfront. My plan for architectural design resulted in the construction of a ROC Plaza with opportunities for student housing and public facilities while focusing on the transformation of urban morphology and changes in building typology.

Connecting, among university campuses & between campuses and the city of Shanghai.

The graduation project titled ‘renaissance of cultural identity-historical districts regeneration of Beijing inner city’ aims at researching the question about the role of cultural identity in the historical cities, specifically it is about testing and investigating proper ways to regenerate the historic districts in inner city of Beijing, in order to make it match the contemporary urban development. The research started from giving the definition of cultural identity in Beijing inner city and investigate current situtaion for these constituent elements.I have stated that those elements are under threats under market oriented development, both of the spatial and social quality are declined. Cultural identity has been evicting from historic city core under modernization and marketization. Then my analysis focus on finding out the conflict between preserve historic identity in city center and modernization under influence of market. Strategy goal was to activating cultural identity and strengthen urban vitality. Meanwhile, social mix and vitality will be rehabilitated.Economic sustained urban regeneration is also a key point in Beijing inner city regeneration, it is inversgated in the graduation project as well. As most of the house property in Beijing inner city are belonging to government, it gives the advantage for me to propose a new strategy for government to regenerate historic districts. The whole process of regeneration can be seen as a process of urban management. Instead of giving all the redevelopment to market, new housing institution can be set up to do the management under government supervision.

The industrial development after the destruction of the Second World War in Silesia region was not only an enormous achievement in reconstruction; it also caused massive environmental damage. Moreover, as a result of the political upheaval in central and Eastern Europe, the region’s heavy industry was no longer competitive. Between 1998 and 2001 alone about 300,000 jobs in heavy industry were lost. Job reduction results in a gradual loss in population. The older industrial areas and their affiliated housing estates are viewed today as the complicated regional heritage. The main objective of my project was to improve the economic, social, and environmental conditions in the chosen area in regards to the industrial heritage and contemporary strengths and weaknesses of the region.

In this project the answer was searched on the research question how the perceived safety in Dutch underprivileged housing areas can be improved through the enlargement of the social cohesion by means of the design of the public space. In most underprivileged housing areas the socio-spatial problem is that the inhabitants do not feel connected with the neighbourhood and with each other. Furthermore, they are unhappy with their living environment, and in particular the public space. Visitors of the neighbourhood find the public space bad as well, and in some cases do not even dare to go to the housing areas. Currently the method used by municipalities and housing corporations to tackle the socio-spatial problems of underprivileged housing areas, is to demolish (part of) the housing area, and build new housing blocks. This forces inhabitants to move, and in a lot of cases they will not be able to return to the newly build houses, because they are more expensive. This method has been proven ineffective because it only moves the problem from one area to another. The main problem, inhabitants being unhappy with their living environment, and passers-by sometimes even afraid to go in the housing area, is not addressed with the current inhabitants in mind. To answer the research question two sub research questions on the use of public space were relevant. The first sub research question on which different roles in terms of social cohesion can different types of public spaces have produced the following answers. In underprivileged housing areas a large part of the leisure time is spent outside, on the street. It is therefore important that the inhabitants have places in the public space where they can meet. Secondly, to increase social safety, it is important for passers-by to understand what kind of neighbourhood they are in, who is living in the neighbourhood. This can be done by providing space in the public realm where indirect contact between passers-by and inhabitants can be established. But, more importantly, in order to enhance the social cohesion it is important that the inhabitants can actively claim the public space. Laying a claim on the public space can be achieved through having a front garden, or facade garden, but also in communal outdoor areas. This claim can be strengthened by handing over the management of (parts of) the public space to the inhabitants. In some streets, handing over the management is not advisable, because they are also used by other groups than the inhabitants, for shopping, school, or going from one important location to another. In these kinds of streets the management cannot be totally transferred to inhabitants, but letting inhabitants have a say in the design of the public space is already beneficial for the social cohesion. This means that in the neighbourhood the publicness of a street has to be defined according to the presence of public facilities and are therefor of public interest, or whether it is a street in which only inhabitants need to be. This results in a division of four levels of publicness. The second sub research question, how can public space be made easily adaptable to the users, but without great costs for the municipalities, was inspired by that fact that due to the current economic crisis municipalities and housing corporations have less funds to spend on revitalising urban living areas. In order to achieve the two goals, adapting the public space to the wishes of the inhabitants and without great costs for municipalities, cooperation with the inhabitants can be used. This cooperation can be in the form of letting inhabitants have a say in the design, which creates better support for the design. Another possibility is to let the inhabitants contribute in the execution of the public space. This can be done in the form of funds, but also, and perhaps more important in underprivileged housing areas where the inhabitants have little money, in the form of labour. When inhabitants have invested in the public space, this creates a bond between inhabitants and the space, and they will take better care of their public space. Therefor not only money in the short-term is saved, but also in the long-term. This also benefits the social cohesion between the inhabitants themselves and between the inhabitants and their living area. The location and the function of the street, the level of publicness, defines how much the inhabitants can be involved in the management of the public space. To test the found answers to the research question, the underprivileged housing area of the Schilderswijk and Stationsbuurt has been used. This is a housing area which was from the start build for the working-class. In first instance the building quality was deplorable, and from the eighties onwards many parts have been demolished and rebuild, but without one general plan. This created a living area with many different architectural styles. At the moment the quality of the buildings is adequate, but here as well people are not happy with their living environment. The neighbourhood has been analysed and the public space defined on its level of publicness, according to its function. For each level of publicness a design was made to show how the public space will look if designed in a manner that improves the social cohesion and the perceived safety. The combined designs create a network in which streets are legible and support the intended function, thereby increasing the perceived safety of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood and the passers-by.

‘The future of city-making is human-centric’, state-driven and market-driven urbanism have reflected their downsides. Human-driven city-making is oriented on an actual user and therefore should produce little vacancy and unnecessary space. Spaces will be directly equipped to suit the need and desires that the context provides. User will be more willing to invest if the result is more direct what will lead to bondage between the user and the location. For centuries people have had more influence on the development of their living environment than we do now. You could say that the last few decades of state-driven urbanism are the anomaly and not the human-centric approach towards urbanism. This thesis is an attempt to operationalize various visions on self organization into practical design principles.

Kowloon city of Hong Kong is an area that used to be one of the “black hole” area of the city and famous for a special food street there. It is now part of the large-scale urban regeneration project that focuses on the "good business climate".The chanllenge is to balance the demand of development for the area and keeping its special identity from swallowed by the commercial interventions nearby.

The aim of this research is twofold. The aim is (1) to find common location characteristics increasing the risk of the occurrence of structural office vacancy, and (2) to design an urban strategy for an office district with high office vacancy in Utrecht.

Large-scale urban regeneration projects become highly complex as they involve multiple actors with different expectations. In general, the implementation of such projects entails building governance regimes at the city or regional level, but this often means forging partnerships between public and private actors to serve as policy instruments. Each city government formulates its own strategy for coping with the complexities of various levels of policy-making, thereby establishing multi-level governance regimes. And each city has its own particular experience with the implementation trajectory: long or short, successful or unsuccessful. This paper focuses on how the complexities of multi-actor governance influence the implementation of these projects. The purpose is to show how the macro-level institutional context affects the project’s success and to analyse the challenges posed by multi-actor governance. Comparative analysis of two old port regeneration projects, namely Rotterdam’s Kop van Zuid in the Netherlands, and Het Eilandje in Antwerp, Belgium, reveals how similar challenges were dealt with in different institutional contexts.

When it comes to user-friendliness and the relations to the city centre, a lot of station areas need improvement. The aim of this graduation project was to transform the station area of Zwolle into an inviting, user-friendly and well-connected part of the city. The result is a design (based on research) that shows the potential for the inviting, user-friendly and well-connected station area that Zwolle could have.

The site Dashilan is the most sever UHI area of Beijing currently. Located in the center of Old Beijing, it is consist of historical courtyards with flourish old brand commercial and many cultural heritages. High density (15m2/house), almost fully covered by concrete without enough green space, make this area really have a bad living quality and climate quality. The historical courtyards were used as much as possible, shared by as many as possible families that make these heritage decaying. In this report above complex urban problems will be researched in 2 axis: the climate adaptive urban design and sustainable urban regeneration. A summary of urban geometry and microclimate theory will be provided firstly to clarify what aspects in urban form could we control to improve microclimate. After that several topics will be explained clear during design. • Density, • Context-respecting housing type and infrastructure, • Climate strategy in district, courtyard, and building element aspects; • Community identity and public space quality. A master plan will be given for this 130 hectare area. And finally a 300*300 area will be elaborate designed to show how the planning guild lines in 1km scale being used and adjusted.

This master thesis is the result of a graduation project for the MSc program in Urbanism at the faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. It aims at making a strategy to use the Olympic Games as a catalyst for urban regeneration in Rotterdam. Although the Games in itself are a short-term event, the impact on the host city and surrounding region can be of great extent in the long run. Increasingly, mega-events like the Olympic Games are considered a tool for urban regeneration with the intention to bring about longterm development for the city and its region. This phenomenon is called the mega-event strategy.

This thesis explores the links between the concepts of Transit Oriented Development and urban regeneration, studying the design variables for the creation of high quality urban environments in station areas and the spin off effects of station area developments on the existing urban context. Two lines of works are defined in this research, a theoretical line and a practical line. The theoretical line builds a framework of design variables of station areas, which is tested in the design case of the practical line. The design case is a station area in the context of the Stedenbaan project in the South Wing of the Randstad: the new station of Spangen in Rotterdam. Conclusions and recommendations are extracted from the design case, as a set of key spatial strategies to design successful station areas.

With the construction of high-speed railway in 2007, and the establishment of five direct controlled municipalities along the west coast of Taiwan in 2010, theses changes offer opportunities to redirect and redefine the role of Tainan and its spatial strategy. The project first discuss the possible morphology for south region. With serious analysis to tackle on the possible relationship between Tainan and Kaohsiung thus to re-identify the role of Tainan city. The analysis and the references made me to decide to use culture-led urban regeneration as the strategy to revitalize Tainan’s potentiality, solve city’s social and economic problems. At the same time to strengthen the complimentary relationship between Tainan and Kaohsiung. First, Tainan city scale strategy will be presented together with serious infrastructure planning. By achieving multimodal transport city to prepare a better condition for the following intervention. When step into the design parameter, tackle on neighborhood scale and discuss the issue of what kind of regeneration can revitalize local culture resources and attract the clustering of creative cluster.

Because of its polycentric organization the system of the urban network of Randstad Holland is very much dependant on the connecting infrastructure lines between the sub agglomerations and urban centres. The use and efficiency of the infrastructure network has been the subject for debate for the last years, resulting in programs that consider strategies related to the American theory of Transit-Oriented Development, which refers to a regional network of higher density, mixed-use, living environments centred around public transport stops, to be one of the possible answers to the rising mobility and urbanisation problems, which are considered a major threat to the international competitive position of the Randstad. The Stedenbaan project in the southern part of Randstad Holland (Zuidvleugel) that deals with this issue, is about the improvement of the regional public transport system by 'regionalizing' existing national railway corridors with spatial developments along the network, which would have to add to the realisation of a single cohesive metropolitan area with a heightened level of interaction between functions. (Atelier Zuidvleugel 2006) Because of the fact that in many cases these lines run through existing built environments, the main focus of the developments will be in the framework of restructuring and transformation, which can be seen as the motive for this study. In this context, local neighbourhoods in the vicinity of railway infrastructure are going to be confronted with the regional scale if a new station will be realised together with a Transit-Oriented Development related strategy. In addition, the perspective of the large infrastructure within the city, often considered as physical and psychological barriers between city districts and exceptional elements in the urban tissue, will change. The main research questions of this thesis are: Can a regional programme as Stedenbaan, based on the principles of Transit-Oriented Development, be deployed for local urban regeneration? - How should we treat infrastructure barriers within this context? The study consists of two main parts: A Body of Knowledge, which consists of a theoretical framework and a documentation of the location-specific context (Atlas) and an implementation of its outcomes in a design case. The theoretical framework consists of a reflection on the existing theories and on Transit-Oriented Development and Stedenbaan and their backgrounds. The design case is about the Oude Lijn (Old Line) railway through the Leiden region, which will be used to host the Stedenbaan system, and the potential new station area of Leiden De Mors, of which it is mentioned to be realised in the period after 2020. Its location on a crossing of roads, waterways and railroads already provide enough complexity for a single design case. The Stedenbaan conditions will only add more complexity to this.