Changing Minds: Towards Water-Based Architecture and Public Space for the Future Urban Archipelago

This blog contribution supports the Urban Archipelago expo at Nieuwe Instituut (NI) in Rotterdam, designed to consist of four elements: a map, a view, a model, and a series of films that depicted a future of living with water, as well as a booklet that documented student work. The expo has been part of the Water Cities Rotterdam, which opened...

Design Framework for Social Interaction with Location-based Games

Location-based games invite players to have new forms of meaningful social interactions with others and provide opportunities for players to engage with their own neighbourhood’s public space. Earlier research on user requirements for such games have identified seven different activity types that have proven to initiate social interaction and...

2020: A Year without Public Space

After working from home for more than five hundred days, our daily lives and rituals have been severely changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, social distancing and other measures have affected everyone’s access to public space and exposed a range of impacts on different levels. Researchers from more than twenty universities explore those...

Location-Based Games For Social Interaction In Public Space

This thesis broadens current understanding of how location-based games can promote meaningful social interaction in citizens' own neighbourhoods. It investigates social cohesion and the role of social interaction to its promotion, delves into which requirements users have for playing in their neighbourhood and with its citizens, and takes a...

How Co-design Processes Improve Public Space Resilience:: Lessons From Two Urban Parks in the Atacama Desert

With the social, ecological and sanitary pressures on urban settlements<br/>and the public sector being unable to successfully provide such answers<br/>alone, co-design can play a crucial role towards urban transformations<br/>and resilient public spaces. We understand co-design as a process in<br/>which institutional networks of public, private...

In the Minds of People: Port-City Perspectives, The Case of Rotterdam

Following the geographical ‘Any-Port Model’, urban design has stipulated and enforced the disunion of port and city over the recent decades. In conjunction with other disciplines, the emphasis has laid at dislocation of production activities in favor of logistic-productive dynamics. At the same time, professional focus was on the urban areas...

The Port-City Portrayed in its Public Spaces: Introducing Micro Biographies of Places

This article aims to extent the notion of port-cities and counter the mainstream narrative that port and city, in cases like Rotterdam, have become disunited by reviewing its public spaces in their unique port-city characteristics. These characteristics can be found by systematic approaching and describing public spaces as biographies of place,...

Culture and Context in Public Space Design: Symbolic ornamentation, local craftsmanship and public participation as a way to enable meaning and affordance

Rapid urbanization and increasing globalization of urban development strategies are resulting in a lack of connection between people and places, and places and their context. Nevertheless, cultural embedding and sense of place have a direct impact on the quality of public space. The purpose of this research is to explore culture and context...