Risk, Resettlement, & Renewal: Mitigating the displacement of vulnerable São Paulo residents from areas of ecological risk without proper infrastructure

As the Global South continues to rapidly urbanize, finding affordable and sustainable housing solutions is paramount. The Global Housing Graduation studio provides the opportunity to design new housing typologies through environmental and social lenses. São Paulo’s challenges with rapid urbanization and social inequality has left more than a...

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...

Measuring social resilience: Trade-offs, challenges and opportunities for indicator models in transforming societies

More than any other facet of resilience, social resilience raises the inherent tension within the concept between identity or persistence, and transformation. Is a community the people who make it up, or the geography or physical infrastructure they share? What about the resilience of communities that transform, as a result of a sudden...

Permeable Borders: Addressing multidimensional conflicts between polarized communities in Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro has become a ’broken city’ (Ventura, 1994): rapid urbanization processes, wealth concentration, market-oriented development, governmental neglect and socio-spatial segregation have been enlarging the societal gap between rich and poor in Brazil. Those processes have shaped the fragmentation of the city, where multidimensional...

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...

The Declining and the Thriving Neighborhoods: Urban Regeneration in the Chinese Context of Migration and Economic Transition

In the past few years, one of the major changes in urban development strategies of the first-tier cities in China is the increasing focus on urban regeneration. To cope with the magnitude of migration and challenges of economic transition, these cities are forced to find new models of urban redevelopment. This has brought up a few challenging...