Redefine the border of water: Exploring the potential of the Grand Canal as a backbone for adaptive and resilient urban development in Tongzhou

In the past centuries, water structures such as canals, etc. were important as a lifeline for a city instead of being a facility only for water. However, globally, cities are turning their back to the water. Despite their potential for urban development, many canals or watercourses are losing their identity in urban areas....

Eco-Inclusive Opportunity: Operationalising Environmental assets towards a resilient densification

We have entered the epoch of the Anthropocene. Now with humanity itself being a sizeable force of nature, we can no longer ignore the impact we have on the planet’s systems, as it is also increasingly impacting our societies, through climate change. This is occurring while major cities are still experiencing an increase in population. Amsterdam...

KiNTSUGi: Improving resilience capacities in a hazardscape, Otsuchi, Japan

The project aims at contributing to integrated emergency planning in hazardscapes. The research takes the case of tsunami scape of Otsuchi, a town in the Iwate prefecture of Japan. Learning from the 3/11 disaster about the dependency of decisions that affect the nature of recovery has led to the formation of a methodology and guiding principles...

From resistance to coexistence: Towards a more integrated coastal defence system in city of Ostend by adapting nature-based solutions

Belgian coastal area is one of the densest areas in the world, facing strom surge risks due to the climate change. However, the current coastal defence system in Belgium is engineering-based defence line, blocking the dynamic relation between sea and urban, causing larger risks in the future. On the other hand, Nature-based solutions are hard to...

Re-Hydrating Jaipur: Towards sustainable integrated urban water management for the region of Jaipur, India

Climate change and its effect on water is an unavoidable phenomenon. However, the scarcity of this precious resource is not just due to changing natural patterns but a highly man made disaster. ‘Water use has been growing globally at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and an increasing number of regions are...

Integrated Mitigation: Flood Risk mitigation fostering Social Integration

Guayaquil is the 2nd Largest city of Ecuador, located in one of the largest estuary ecosystems of the pacific coast in South-America (Delgado, 2011). Since 1960’s the city has gone through a rapid process of urbanization and informal settlements. This has caused severe spatial segregation and a development model that ignores the existing...

Conserving Coastal Lagoons by Enhancing Ecosystem Services: A Case Study of the Muni-Pomadze Lagoon in Ghana

Rapid urbanisation and globalisation are bringing increasingly complex issues to the forefront. Improper planning of human activities and over exploitation of the surrounding natural resources has successfully damaged the biodiversity and the natural processes. Today humanity is at a stage where these ecosystem services are essential for our...

Don't waste the river!: Limuthi Re-Cycle Valley

These are challenges we have worked on with a multidisciplinary team of students from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and several universities in Albania. Eventually, a development strategy was made for three locations in and around the capital Tirana. This report is a landscape architectural elaboration of one of these...

Activate resilience of the Miyagi coast

This graduation plan set in Japan, focussing on the reconstruction of the Japanese east coast in the prefecture of Miyagi that has been struck by a devastating tsunami in 2011. Working in an interdisciplinary set we design future prospects in an intertwined matter. Representing a new regional design strategy for the affected region by...

The path towards Modern Urban Renewal: Adaptive reconstruction process after tsunami disaster in coastal cities of Japan

Japan has a vast history of earthquake and tsunami disasters that Japan had to cope with, the country can be defined as a disaster society. The most recent disaster, The Great East Japan Earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0, resulted in a tsunami which had a devastating effect on the coastal regions of Tohoku. However, these crisis situations also...

Reverse to Reboot: Urban landscape Infrastructure Design Based on Carrying Capacity of Landscape Structure Towards New Urbanization Logic

“The ideal is seldom a choice of either/or, but rather the combination of both or all. One dreams of the museum and cabaret, concert hall and ball park within stones’ throw, but it would be as splendid if the mountains, the ocean and the primeval forest were at the doorstep.”- IAN L. McHARG<br/> <br/>Over 220km² of the UK’s land surface was...

Surges of the 21st Century: Addressing flood risk, public- and ecological value through urban regeneration, to reduce socio-economic pressure and flood risk in coastal areas

In the last decennia, the world has seen a staggering increase in urbanization in coastal areas. Socio-economic pressure in coastal areas is increasing, while extreme weather events become more common. This thesis focuses on the development of coastal areas in order to combat the rising threats of flood risk and socio-economic pressure. Through...

Flows Revalued: A future-oriented revaluation of the Strategy of the Two Networks

From the environmental point of view, future mobility (positive) and the change in the hydrological system (negative) are taken as trends from which the urban program needs to develop. This research starts with the conception that the Strategy of te Two Networks (S2N) internalizes a method that could help face the given challenges occurring both...

Adaptive Urban Housing: A floating, modular and self-sustaining neighbourhood

As a response to land scarcity, climate change, the decreasing stock of fossil fuels and the pressure on the drinking water system, this proposal proposes to extend cities onto the water within a floating, modular and self-sustaining neighbourhood. This proposal includes research into floating mechanisms, modular systems, and various systems to...

Land | Waterscape as projective infrastructure: To condition landscape as an infrastructure addressing hydrological uncertainties within deltaic territories

The research focuses on developing a system based resilience strategy to manage hydraulic challenges related to pluvial and storm surge flooding in the light of climate change. The project embarks an ecological approach by conditioning landscape into a hybrid infrastructure of green and blue networks which operate across spatial and temporal...

A River Rediscovered: Building with Nature as flood defense in urban systems

Contemporary mono-functional flood defense solutions are no longer accepted, as they tend to not take their surrounding system into account. Today’s solutions require sustainability, multi-functionality and different stakeholders want to be heard. <br/><br/>One of the concepts that offers an alternative approach is the concept of Building with...

Variable Vulnerability: A comparative understanding of different socioeconomic systems - San Francisco Bay region

In this graduation project, I have tried to focus on the aspects of socio-economic development and resilience to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay region. The comparison is between two cases namely East Palo Alto and Foster City which has a variable difference in their socio–economic the system in terms of the communities that it hosts and...

Landscape Interface Development

While natural environment and urban environment influence on each other, the interaction between human induced factors and nature environment add more vulnerability of the whole landscape. In order to study with these interactions, I developed the concept of ‘interface’. It is the territory where human system and natural system confront and be...