Revitalizing the urban life: Design a three-dimensional public space system by combining top-down and bottom-up approaches through serious gaming in Mong Kok, Hong Kong, China

Rethinking urban utopianism: The fallacy of social mix in the 15-minute city

The concept of urban living is evolving, and there is a growing interest in creating smaller, more connected, and hyperlocal neighbourhoods, where everything people need is within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. This paper challenges the concept of the ‘15-minute city’ as a panacea for urban ills, by exploring the history of utopian urban...

Spatial Justice: A crucial dimension of sustainability

This chapter seeks to describe the concept of spatial justice and to unpack its implications for spatial planning and the role of planners. It addresses spatial justice as a crucial dimension of sustainability, especially of social sustainability. It argues that justice buttresses public reasoning and public justification and therefore...

Enabling citizens’ right to the smart city through the co-creation of digital platforms

In response to increasingly deterministic and all-encompassing implementation of smart city technologies, scholars and activists plea for policies and initiatives to support citizens’ democratic ‘Right to the Smart City.’ Although it is common for government officials and technology companies to make an effort to support citizen participation in...

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...

City Hotel Amsterdam, The Host: Creating communities on different scales

The outcome of constantly striving for economic growth and making a profit has led to a city in which every building is seen as a product. Power, ownership, and mass tourism are taking over the city, exacerbating the housing shortage and making the housing prices rise to an unprecedented height. As a result, inhabitants are being pushed out of...

Loiter City: Spatial Strategies to redefine a woman’s place in a public realm

Gender is a highly context-specific social construct. It explores the social relationships between men and women, a relationship in which women have been systematically subordinated (Oakley 1972). The way gender relations are defined broadly influence the conceptualisation of space and place. In a patriarchy like India, where gender inequality...

The Revival of the Social Housing Community: Providing security and shelter for the urban poor

Adequate housing has long been considered a basic human right. Trends of globalisation, financialisation and urbanisation are oppressing this right. Social housing is neglected by authorities and stigmatised by society. Local, low-income residents are dispossessed and displaced, and social housing is close to disappearance. London has become a...

Regeneration through creativity: Dynamics of a post-socialist, Eastern European society and the possibilities of a creativity-led regeneration in Budapest

The last decades in the spatial development of the cities in Eastern Europe can be described as a complex outcome of the institutional and societal changes after the era change in 1989. During this time the economy of these countries was transformed from a central-planning-controlled system based on state ownership to a neoliberal one, where...

Bridging Realities: A Response to Spatial Inequality in Mumbai & Nalasopara

In Mumbai, “two-thirds of the city’s (Bombay) residents are crowded<br/>into just 5 percent of the total area, while the richer or more rent-protected one-third monopolize the remaining 95 percent.” The Development Plans for Mumbai, criticized as “a form of ‘planned’ exclusion of the poor and the middle class”, have failed to address issues of...

Characterization of Spatial Planning in Brazil: The Right to the City in Theory and Practice

This article characterizes spatial planning in Brazil from a normative point of view. Because of Brazil’s vast geography and uneven development, it is not possible to describe how spatial planning is carried out in all quarters of the country. We explore key aspects of spatial planning in the country using policy goals, the legal and...

The co-creation of convivial city: reclaiming the right to the kampung in the touristic city

Urbanization in developing country does not necessarily means a good thing. An immediate transformation along with the population boom and the property industry transform the city and its people extensively. This applies to the kampung settlement in the Indonesian city. There was a time when kampung’s people can serve food to any guest, a family...

Connecting São Paulo: Experimenting participation in urban development

The motivation for this thesis emerged from my growing questions on the architecture practice. My interest for the collectives and its respective dissemination in the past years were the starting point for this study. Through a long and tortuous way, the research has grown into a complex project. The project touches upon topics of social...

Together: Participatory methods in Architectural Design: creating public values for urban regeneration

Participation is a commonly used word in planning and architecture nowadays. Nevertheless, it seems that few care to understand the complexities and limita- tions of participation. Participation has often been misused for political purpo- ses accepting it as mere feedback from citizens, using voting systems and,exhi- bitions of nished products...

Diversity in Neukölln: Maintaining or creating accessibility (for a diversity of social groups) in a gentrifying central neighbourhood in the case of Berlin

The project tries to anticipate on the gentrification issues in the case of Neukölln in Berlin. How to stimulate/maintain accessibility for a diversity of social groups in a central gentrifying area [in the case of Neukölln, Berlin] ? This is the main research question of the thesis. This resulted in a project that consists of a strategy for...

Re-claiming Amsterdam