Iconic projects as catalysts for brownfield redevelopments: The developers’ perspective towards the conditions of iconic projects that incite brownfield redevelopments

Urbanisation is a global trend that continues to occur as the percentage will rise up for 55% to 68% in 2050 (United Nations, 2018). This movement of society towards the urban environment is clearly evident in the Netherlands too, particularly in the country’s four major cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague. Due to its increasing...

Winch balcony: Transformable unitised facade system

The main goal of this graduation project is to create a feasibility study. The objective is to design, calculate and test different ways of how a unitized façade element can transform, rotate or convert for creating a temporary outdoor space. This façade element is connected with the same façade brackets used in the unitized façade system. The...

Architecture Nose: Towards multisensory architecture, an exploration of the sense of smell

Smells are everywhere around us. They are within ourselves and around us, they impact us in our mother’s womb and throughout our entire lives, until death. But while sight and touch prevail in the contemporary approach of design and architecture, the olfactive dimension of our built environment is often forgotten.<br/>This thesis aims at...

DIVER-CITY: Designing for Just Publicness: Inclusive design towards hyper-diversity, Hackney

The development of a city is always accompanied by the debate of justice. London, a world city, changing towards a hyper-diversity scenario, is even criticized by different groups about their right to live in the city. The injustice show on both social and spatial dimension here and the inequality and injustice in London usually illustrated as...

The death and life of Chinatowns: Towards an integrated and authentic transformation of ‘Chinatown’ in Amsterdam

The advent of steamship in the 19th century is accompanying with the Chinese immigration. Chinese seamen gathered around the dockland at a certain scale and formed Chinese quarters. Therefore, Chinatowns appeared in many harbour cities in European countries. With the urban development and migrant shifts within the recent one hundred years,...

Unsafety: Improving perceived safety through spatial design in Pendrecht

This research focuses on the relationship between perceived safety and the physical environment and is conducted in the neighborhood Pendrecht, a modernist neighborhood in Rotterdam-Zuid. The research has identified the effects of the spatial environment on perceived safety and has selected design principles that according to theory would...

Configurational Morphology: A Vision of Adaptive Urban Form

Configurational Morphology is a research and design project exploring the potentials of configurational design as a systematic approach to generating site-specific urban form responsive to its environmental, social end economic context. By looking into both the theoretical potentials of configurational thinking as well as its practical...

Resilient governance during crises: COVID-19 in community BoTu Rotterdam

Due to the current pandemic caused by COVID-19, its impact has again become clear that resilience is essential within cities and communities. An important aspect of this community resilience is the relationship between local institutions and local communities. To discover how this dynamic between formal and informal actors, and networks changes...

Together through Flex-Housing

The inclusive living environment in Delft Tanthof brings together Elderly with other generations, offers places to interact with each other on different scales, provides flexible structures to create a future-proof neighbourhood and offers a large amount of variety and options to accomodate different residents.

Cities for Citizens: Identification of Public Values and their Conflicts in Urban Space

In the wake of more inclusive and sustainable cities, as targeted in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11, public administrators and urban planners aspire to incorporate the pluralism of public values into decision making. Although theoretical work exists since the 1990, public values and their conflicts are yet to be empirically identified...

Affordable housing in an urban commons: The Community Land Trust as an alternative model for housing development in Rotterdam

Trends of neoliberalisation and globalisation have led to the financialisation of housing on a global scale. This has led to the increasing deployment of state-led gentrification as a strategy for urban development, as cities aim to strengthen their position as nodes in the global economy. In the Netherlands, these trends have led to the...

The Revival of the Just City: A planning and design methodology that allows steering complex urban development and contributes to the revival of the Just City that Amsterdam once was

Inequality in the city of Amsterdam is growing. While in the 70s, the city was described as a prime example of a Just City, the contemporary metropolis is growing as a city of the elite. Neoliberal planning in recent decades has focused on attracting knowledge workers to Amsterdam with a strategy of privatization, deregulation and...

Revitalizing the post-war neighborhood: Towards inclusive and strategic new perspectives for Schiedam Nieuwland

The neighborhood of Nieuwland, located in Schiedam, Zuid-Holland is one example of the many post-war neighborhoods the Netherlands offers. It formed the extension of Schiedam’s city center and consisted of a clear functionalist lay-out upon its completion in 1965, characterized by monotony, frugal architecture, and a clear separation of...

Breaking the Pattern: Densification as a catalyst for improving the liveability of post-war neighborhoods.

The Netherlands is dealing with two problems. The first is a large housing crisis. Housing is unavailable, unaffordable and lacking in quality and perfomance. There is also a liveability crisis. While the overall liveability score in The Netherlands has been going up in the last two decades, the neighborhood that score the worst have not been...

Planning for justice: A value-based framework to help spatial planners develop just housing strategies in Dutch regions

The current Dutch housing domain is characterised by injustices on multiple scales, such as a shortage of housing, disparities in well-being across regions, and unaffordable housing. This situation can partially be attributed to spatial planning practices focused on promoting growth-oriented economic thinking. These contemporary planning...