Contesting Territories: The significance of the Plein to the power contests between the Dutch government and the people

The thesis is going to unravel, in a spatial sense, the relationship between public space and the power in the Netherlands through the case of the Plein since the 1980s till now. By the analysis on the previous discussions and disputes over the design and use of the Plein, it aims to indicate the priorities of the government and the public in...

The Politics of a Public Space: Taksim Square: An Exploration of How State Politics and Ideology Shape the Evolution of Urban Environments

The conservation of place-based memory is pivotal for both tangible and intangible heritage; however, the unyielding momentum of urban dynamics frequently propels cities into transformation, often overlooking the integration and assessment of personal and collective memories within urban preservation efforts. This investigation is propelled by...

Rake Praat: Designing for the political participation of mbo-students

Political participation of a group representative of society is essential for the legitimacy of a democratic system. But adolescents are not heard sufficiently and receive too little attention in contemporary democracy. Their political participation is very low and not representative for their age group, as politically engaged adolescents often...

DEMO: bridging public opinion for shared governance

The presence of a gap in the relationship between citizens and the political system is a phenomenon that knows no boundaries, which affects governments and political institutions at different scales.Citizens are dissatisfied about the current one-way political interaction held by an elite which is perceived as corrupt and distant. They would...

Seeking the just city

Starting from the acknowledgment of cities as the spontaneous and obvious theatre for civic and politics, aim of this research is to understand how and if is there a way to work, as policy makers towards a just city. Based on Fainstein definition, the term justice is the one “encompassing equity, democracy, and diversity”. Said that, is it...

Towards a Digitised Era

We have entered a new époque, transforming our societies from the mechanical to the digital. This unlocks a lot of new opportunities and abilities, but also results into big societal and behavioural changes, which need to be addressed in our built environment. Architecture seems to have disappeared on the background, while technological...

Framing Protest

The section of the street, being a constitutive unit of every city, as a design task requires constant reworking and adjustments according to changing socio-political conditions. The society of the 21st century looks different than it used to, the authorities changed along with social stratification models, technological solutions evolved and,...

Politags: Breaking the filter bubble by using information extraction techniques to enable diverse personalization

This research is aimed at breaking online political filter bubbles. We present a system that uses artificial intelligence and human computation to automatically collect article metadata on political content and thereby enables diverse personalization on content-serving platforms. This way, exploring alternative viewpoints could become as simple...

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...

Good Hope (Memorial) Park: A future for dissonant heritage, a design for hope and democracy

This thesis and design explores the dissonance of the 17th century heritage object of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. The research explains the theme of dissonant heritage together with an excerpt of the South African national history in part one. Part two explains the changes of the Castle over time, as military landscape, as object in a...

The democratic learning landscape

Main themes of the project are primary education, shrinkage and democracy. The relation between primary education and democracy can be found on two different scales. The first one is the regional scale, which is about how educational buildings are organized in a region in relation to each other. The second one is the building scale, and is about...

Street of Refuge - Public space for urban refugees

This project focuses on urban refugees who flee to cities to find a safe shelter. Urban refugees often live a hidden life in the city because of political conflicts in which aid an money plays an important role. The aim of this project is to improve the living conditions of urban refugees through changing their political representation....

Post-War Optimism in Colombo, Sri Lanka

After twenty-six years of civil conflict, Sri Lankan government has geared towards rapid urban beautification after the bloody victory over the Tamil Tigers. Since 2009, Colombo changed beyond recognition: the high walls around public institutions have come down, the military checkpoints disappeared, streets are clearer and inhabitants enjoy the...

Citizens urban regenerating cities - Urban regeneration of a desolate site with the power of the people

The aim for this graduation project is to increase the involvement of the people in design projects, by giving them more democratic power in the design process. To achieve this, an urban regeneration project will be done for a case study area in Delft, where the involvement of the citizens takes a central role.