Living on the Edges of a Border City: Planning strategies for the spontaneous city. The Case of Cucuta and El Rodeo

Cucuta is a border city between Colombia and Venezuela with complex dynamics due to its location and historical background, affected by drug trafficking, guerrilla warfare, and Venezuela's most recent multidimensional crisis. The city's structural plan (POT) is under review, trying to adapt to the local and global challenges: mass migration;...

Life after fences: Negotiating low-income gated communities in Bogotá

Low-income gated communities have become increasingly popular in Bogotá, despite the contradiction that lies at their core: that life in a self-sufficient and closed type of housing is an unsustainable endeavour for a population that cannot pay for a privatised life. To navigate through this paradox, residents constantly negotiate those...

E-Cooperation Landscape: Design Explorations In The Modaomen Estuary For An Adaptive And Sustainable Dike-Pond System, Water Safety And Ecological Development

Pearl river delta is undoubtedly the most promising area and a very dynamic tidal zone, especially in the southeast part of the delta, Zhuhai province, Modaomen estuary. The whole area of Zhuhai is a remote island scattered outside the mouth of the Pearl River，when after several generations of reclamation and these days, 20% of marshland in...

Jerusalem: Dynamic Planning and Decolonization: Transportation Infrastructure in Conflictual Territory

In the past two decades, two big processes have changed the urban configuration of Jerusalem: The construction of the West Bank separation barrier, leaving the majority of the Palestinian neighborhoods of the city completely cut out from their hinterland and neighboring Palestinian cities, and the ongoing planning and construction of the light...

Rio 2016: reframing the legacy: towards an inclusive city

The process of globalization of the economy created the idea of a global urban hierarchy. Within this context, the Olympic Games and its legacy started to be seen as a tool for cities to attract large scale investment and be projected in this global economic perspective. In the case of the 2016 Olympic Games held in Rio de Janeiro, massive...

Regaining public space in modern Greece: The case of Chania

Taking into consideration that ancient Greece is highly correlated to the democratic public space, the aim of the present thesis is to regain public space in modern Greece, by having as a testing location a medium-sized city, Chania. Public space was an important part of Greek people’s lives in the different chronological periods of its history....

NeighbourFOOD: Raising food awareness in the future city

The studio that I chose to participate was ‘Dutch Housing: Stronghold Amsterdam’. The topic of this studio as mentioned in its studio manual concerns problems with ecology, climate, overpopulation, mass-migration, a shifting global power balance, changing demographics, etc., cities like Amsterdam will face in the future. But the question is: how...

Growing the Dutch mountains: From an economic concentration, towards a strong & diverse economic region

Performing extremely well on the Randstad scale, the polycentric model is lacking functional links and complementarity on the AMA scale. In the following pages, we will explain the conclusions that we have drawn from our detailed analysis, reveal the aspects of the AMA that we identified as key issues and explain our method to tackle these...