Tensions and opportunities at Shanghai’s waterfronts: Laboratories for Institutional Strategies toward Sustainable Urban Planning and Delta Design Transitions

How can the Global North oriented and welfare state rooted Sustainability Transitions theories be enriched with the Chinese and communist state rooted Ecological Civilization thinking that has been included in the Chinese constitution since 2007, to make it able to evaluate the making of the direct-controlled municipality Shanghai into an...

Liquid Territories: Configurations of geographic space in the cartographic projections of the Mekong River’s catchment areas

The role played by the Mekong River in the organization of land and people is inextricably linked with a particular spatial category. The concept of the hydrological catchment extends the space of the river far beyond the limits of the river’s perennial waterbodies, to encompass vast areas inhabited by millions of people speaking different...

Planning with self-organised initiatives: From fragmentation to resilience

The rapid urban growth of Brazilian cities in the second half of the twentieth century produced an extremely unequal urban fabric with spatial discontinuities and left-over spaces. Spatial fragmentation in Brazilian metropolises is not only related to spatial discontinuities, but also to socioeconomic inequalities. Walls in Brazil are physical...

Transit-Oriented Development in China: How can it be planned in complex urban systems?

In recent years most of the Chinese cities have shown a rapid decline in modal split of public transport as a consequence of rapid urbanization and motorization in the “socialist market economy”. It has been witnessed that cars flood into streets; road congestion, air pollution and traffic safety have become major problems in urban China. To...

Urban Vitality in Dutch and Chinese New Towns: A comparative study between Almere and Tongzhou

Building new towns seems to be a rational approach that releases pressure from overly burdened large cities. This strategy was developed in Western Europe in the middle of twentieth century. Since the 1990s, the European new town model has been widely implemented in China. However, the author questions the feasibility of the large-scale, hasty...

Mathematical explorations in urban and regional design

An urban geography of globalisation: New urban structures in the age of hyper-connectivity

How is Globalisation changing the form and spatial structure of cities today? Deceptively simple, this question presents us with a number of methodological challenges and unanswered theoretical problems. What is globalization? Can we define a series of distinctive new phenomena constituting a coherent and logical outline? Do these phenomena...

Physical safety in multiple use of space

As a consequence of an ever-growing population land is getting scarcer, especially in urban areas. In the last decade, the space available above transport infrastructure - such as roads and railway tracks - and existing buildings is being exploited more and more frequently in city centres. The safety issue in such projects should be considered...

Knowledge-based Design: Developing Urban & Regional Design into a Science

An implemented design of an urban area imposes long-term conditions on societal processes, such as the opportunities people have to organize their lives in temporospatial respects in a healthy and safe living environment, and the way social, cultural and economic institutions and organisations can function. In view of the fact that both people...

Interorganisational design; a new approach to team design in architecture and urban planning