The Self-Organization of Stuff

The common description of the configuration of stuff in a room, one of order (tidy) and chaos (messy), fails to explain the phenomenon that artifacts create structures around people and activities in a space, with both functional and cognitive properties. This form of organization, that is recognizable on various scale levels, emerges...

Christiania: The alternative neighbourhood: An urbanism project on the prospects of freetown Christiania through inter-scalar design interventions where culture is the catalyst for urban regeneration in the city of Copenhagen

This thesis project on Christiania in the context of Copenhagen is an account of the research being carried out during the graduation year of Urbanism, eventually resulting in a design oriented project within the ‘Design of the Urban Fabric’ Research Group.<br/><br/>The structure of this graduation project is divided into five chapters,...

Fostering Democracy: Through integration, self-organization and facilitation in public space.

This graduation project focuses on the opportunities within democracy to overcome inequality on social, economic and political aspects. The opportunities will be focused on changes within public space. The research will start with an investigation of the starting point of the project. Then, the methodology used to come to the research results...

Teamwork on the North Sea

The main focus of this thesis has been to gain an understanding on the key challenges for self-organization between the relevant stakeholders necessary for rolling out a North Sea Offshore Grid. The North Sea Offshore Grid (NSOG) is an important component in the realization of the renewable energy potential in different European countries. Up...

Guided self-organization for Vilnius

Exploring alternative urban planning models and policies. Designing a strategic model of self-organization for context specific neighborhoods and districts. The study case is Vilnius, capital of Lithuania and it’s district Newtown. Focal points of the project: political agenda behind spatial design implementation in Vilnius, financial streams of...

Can you design self-organization? Providing affordable housing in Houthaven through building groups

The main question is: how can affordable housing be provided by development through building groups? Though exact definitions are absent, A building group refers to a group of people, who often share lifestyle or ideology, pooling their resources to construct their houses. A pilot currently taking place in Houthaven has shown that building...

Pheromone networks - a computational approach to improve the social dynamics of the Almere central train station and it's urban network.

The amount of travelers from and to the Dutch city Almere will grow from 40.000 back in 2009 to 100.00 in 2030. This requires intensive infrastructural improvements to the current situation of Almere. One of the main improvements of the network will be the redesign of the central station of the city. The current station is situated around a...

Urban Vitality: Exploring the centrality conditions

The present research takes on qualitative issues such as urban vitality and quality of urban life from an angle of spatial centrality. The discussion is going around the two main concepts – the concept of urban vitality and the notion of spatial centrality and the footprint it leaves on the functional and structural organizations of cities.

Framework for Flexible Planning: An urban strategy to support slow network oriented self-organization

This graduation project offers an alternative to the tradition in top-down planning in the Netherlands. The test-case for this strategy is the transformation of former industry area ‘Schieoevers’ in Delft. Both a spatial framework and a policy framework are created to support bottom up development of this project location. The spatial framework...

Hierarchy in Meritocracy: Community Building and Code Production in The Apache Software Foundation

This research is about code production in top-level open source communities of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). We extensively analyzed Subversion repository logs from 70 top-level Apache open source projects in the ASF from 2004 to 2009. Based on interactions in code production during one-year periods we constructed networks of file co...

Suburban 2.0: Differentiated houses for the masses

Population growth and immigration increase the demand for mass housing developments all over the world. These developments are widely criticized for being mono-functional, mono-typological, and mono-cultural. This project is a design method for a new kind of mass housing. All design rules are reformulated as algorithms, that interact with each...

Evolving Biologically Inspired Classifiers

This thesis argues that natural complex systems can provide an inspiring example for creating software which incorporates emergent, self-organizing and adaptive properties. The advantages of complex sys- tems are their natural resilience, redundancy and adaptivity. A generalization of neural networks and boolean networks called computational...