Timespace matters - Exploring the gap between knowing about activity patterns of people and knowing how to design and plan urban areas and regions

It is important to know about peoples’ temporospatial activity patterns when making urban and regional designs and plans. Despite wide acknowledgment of this idea, knowledge about people’s activity patterns does not get full attention in day-to-day practice of urban and regional design and planning. This book makes the case that, with activity...

Designing the Urban Microclimate: A framework for a design-decision tool for the dissemination of knowledge on the urban microclimate to the urban design process

The urban microclimate has a significant impact on people’s physical health. Effects range from discomfort, for example sleep disturbance, to life- threatening conditions, such as heat stroke, skin and lung cancer. It is therefore vital that the urban microclimate is given considerable attention in the urban design process. The PhD research...

Mathematical explorations in urban and regional design

De stad als architectonische constructie: Het architectonisch discours van de stad (Duitsland 1871-1914)

The city as an architectural construction: The architectural discours on the city At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century a paradigm shift took place within German architectural thinking that can be identified as a turn to the city. Whereas throughout the 19th century architectural knowledge was primarily directed to questions of style of...

The tradition of making: Polder cities

Climate change brings larger and more frequent rainstorms and Dutch cities are confronted with water nuisance. The urban water systems are unable to deal with this change in the hydrological cycle in spite of the fact that the Dutch are dealing with this condition for centuries. The question is: What is the tradition of building in wet and soft...

A cognitive framework for an urban environment design tool

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...

Chinese Notions of Public Space: Transculturation in Urban Design and Architecture after the ‘Reform and Opening-up’ in 1978

This doctoral research investigates the understanding and implementation of public space in the reformed Chinese context, particularly from the perspectives of urban design and architecture, by referring to the complex process and result of transculturation (transculturación). It delineates how public space as a Greco-Roman originated concept...

Negotiation and Design for the Self-Organizing City. Gaming as a method for Urban Design: Gaming as a method for Urban Design

An understanding of cities as open systems whose agents act on them simultaneously from below and above, influencing urban processes by their interaction with them and with each other, is replacing the simplistic debate on urban participation which asks whether cities should be organized bottom-up or top-down. This conceptualization of cities as...