Cities of the Future: Towards Sustainable City Economies

It goes without saying that cities of tomorrow face numerous challenges that will change their appearance drastically. We only now begin to notice a gradual change towards climate-adaptive cities, inner-city renewable energy production, and more healthy urban environments by re-naturing our public realm and buildings as well as accommodating...

Cities of the Future: Control in Times of Acceleration

'The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he [sic] will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the Futurists and discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognized as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find...

Cities of the Future: On Nature and the Grammar of Design

In his book, 'The sense of style', the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker argues that the categories of grammar reflect the four building blocks of thought: time, space, causality, and matter. Coincidentally, these building blocks are the same ones that dictate the grammar of spatial design. In them being absolute categories, they describe well...

Cities of the Future: A Mobile and Sustainable Society

My research career started with a publication about externalities of mass motorization. Academic researchers are producing an endless stream of paper. Unfortunately, only a few of these publications have practical relevance. Even if they do, their recommendations are frequently butchered, mitigated or ignored in the political arena. Such...

Economics, cost and quality from a design perspective

The department of MBE was originally called Real Estate & Project Management (BMVB: ‘Bouwmanagement & Vastgoedbeheer’) covering the domains of construction management and real estate management. The “raison d’être” for this new department was based on the recognition that a fair amount of architecture graduates were more interested in...