Introducing Tolerance: Strategies for Operating on the ‘As Found’ in Self-Built Settlements of Caracas

In Venezuela, the term ‘rancho’ designates dwellings built by the urban poor. The word connotes a precarious structure and the crudest material expression of poverty. However, ranchos are the result of adaptation to changing needs and networks of cooperation. Strategies developed around material scarcity and gradual change are relevant to...

Second Life Shelter: Freetown of Christiania as an Example of Affordable, Circular Housing

This thesis investigates the squatting community Freetown of Christiania as a case of self-built housing that is both affordable and circular. Affordability of housing has been an existing problem in Europe, followed by a relatively recently identified need for transition from a linear to a circular economy. Squatting communities have emerged in...

Keep fish, keep water: Low-cost water village for aquacultural district in Tainan city

In coastal Tainan, aquaculture had become prosperous for more than 200 years. But the local communities are facing some difficulties in the past decades. These include over-development, flooding, and unstable living quality. The built environment had changed a lot on the site. Developers keep filling soil to the fishponds and build more and more...

Sparking Stories: Turning an abandoned coal mine into a culture mine to help a community find its future

An investigation into how our world is shaped by narratives and storytelling, the design results in the re-imagining of a mining community. Having no story for their future, the design is an exploration of potential and how the community can be nudged into creating the stories they need to think positively about the future.

Informal Network: A urban strategy for embracing difference and otherness in Bogota

Informal actors possess a practical knowledge of the city, a sort of ‘secret know-how’, of how to move and operate in an environment that is unwelcoming to them. How could this knowledge be used as a tool or input of urban design? By considering the knowledge and ways of operating of the informal actors in a city, the following research has...

Self-Craft Community - Bandung: Symbiotic of local craft techniques and construction knowledge for Kampung regeneration by retrofitting an existing structure in the city centre of Bandung

How can local craftsmanship be intensified by way of unqualified and qualified workers in the urban centre of Bandung in order to retrofit existing structures in a creative and durable manner?<br/> By using the existing shared vernacular and craftsmanship knowledge and available resources, the self-build tradition which is already strongly...

Reinventing the Craftsmanship: Transforming Indonesia’s urban kampungs into sustainable and circular neighbourhoods

The main focus of this graduation project is on the transformation of the building industry within the self-built environment of slums towards a local, circular economy. To do this, it influences the building process, as well as the building materials and its production cycle. The currently highly polluting building industry has an influence on...