Sense of Place within Transience: Reconfiguring housing efficiency and resilience in Sao Paulo’s peripheral urban condition

Sao Paulo, Brazil, a megacity home to 22.4 million inhabitants as of 2022 has “one of the most inequitable distributions of wealth in the world” (Caldeira 1996, 303). In the various districts, the inequality either shouts or whispers its presence. An open city, where the street-scape is the backdrop for social convergence, segregates itself in...

From Peril to Promise: Towards a Socially Resilient Urban Village, the Case of Dongguan

Rural migrants are being evicted from China’s metropolis. Urban villages used to be a refuge for rural migrants fleeing excessive living expenses, where they might find reasonable housing, social connections, and even work opportunities. However, as these villages are now being redeveloped mainly to create land revenues for local municipalities,...

Building balance to build resilience: An empirical study on the neighbourhood balance policy of Rotterdam's resilience strategy

The rise in urban stresses has prompted the need for preparedness of urban areas to face precarious circumstances. Consequently, the concept of urban resilience has grown in popularity not only to tackle sudden shocks but also to face long-lasting socio-economic tensions. To implement the arrangements for resilience policy, literature suggests...

Participation at your doorstep: Stimulating social cohesion and building new relations between Rotterdammers and the municipality

Citizens experience a growing gap between their lived world and that of governmental institutions. The historical low turnup rate of last municipal elections in Rotterdam, 39%, reflect the low trust people have in the municipality and how they feel unrepresented by the city council. Because of this, municipalities are striving to bring politics...

Institutional enablers and barriers towards social resilience: A case study in Rotterdam Bospolder-Tussendijken

Solutions to contemporary urban challenges are increasingly the outcome of the complex interactions between formal and informal actors that take part in a variety of networks. Resilience-thinking has become a global popular perspective for the governance of urban systems, concerning the ability of communities to deal with urban challenges, that...

A Benevolent Future: Towards a strategic spatial framework fostering social resilience - The case of Dharavi, Mumbai

The thesis explores the social potential of space i.e. the social logic of space to enhance resilience of society. As social resilience is defined as the capacity of society to cope, adapt or transform societal relations towards external stress, space that is a ‘construction’ and a function of the structure of society hosts the ability in...

Resilient me for tomorrow: Towards socio-resilient regeneration of urban village in Guangzhou

This project is an attempt to search for an alternative regeneration approach of urban villages under the huge redevelopment pressure in Guangzhou. The past lessons we learned from the monotonous urban paradigm of housing commodities, has shown the emerging gaps between rich and poor, between traditional and modern, between migrants and citizens...