From heritage to sustainability: Lessons from Delft's circular design approach

In the pursuit of creating monumental and desirable cities with a sustainable character, the municipality of Delft has embarked on a journey of integrating sustainability principles into its urban development strategies. This paper traces Delft's evolution in sustainable design practices through a historical lens over the past three decades....

Serious gaming to support the adoption of sustainable drainage solutions: A serious game to educate citizens about private household SuDS

There is an urgent need for urban environments to be more flood resilient. The public can participate in addressing this by adopting household sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS). However, their lack of knowledge and awareness is a barrier. This paper presents an educational serious game to overcome this barrier and explores whether it can...

Ecology in Urban Development: The potential of systems thinking to make ecology a more prominent concept in urban development

Changes to ecosystems due to human activity have occurred more quickly in the previous 65 years than at any other period in history, this has resulted in an irreversible loss in biodiversity worldwide. A direct consequence is a decrease in ecosystem services - the benefits for humans that are provided by ecology - which are needed to keep...

Place identities of transforming port-city areas: A study on the place identities of the municipality of Stockholm and the residents of the Stockholm Royal Seaport

The municipality of Stockholm is currently working on one of Stockholm’s most extensive and complex urban areas: The Stockholm Royal Seaport (se: Norra Djurgårdsstaden). The area is an example of how a former industrial port area is being transformed into a sustainable urban district. Because of the transformation of the area, the identity of...

Welkom: Towards sustainable urban development for a socio-economically mixed neighbourhood and liveable Spangen, Tussendijken and Bospolder

Improved liveability in the neighbourhoods Spangen, Tussendijken and Bospolder is desirable. A more socio-economically diverse population partly contributes to this. Gentrification makes wealthier residents move into the neighbourhoods in a short period of time. Yet, it causes a decrease in affordable housing and a chance of the disappearing of...

The Energy Transition in the Built Environment: Modelling and Visualising Sustainable Urban Development

EPA: Multi-Modelling for Complex Challenges With the acknowledgement of international grand challenges, the demand for better and ever more complex models is likely to increase a manifold. Where single models may no longer be able to grasp the complexities of a system, multi-modelling (Nikolic, Warnier, et al., 2019;...

Rethinking Waste: Urban integration of waste collection and treatment systems based on circular concepts; Recommendations for Amsterdam

The worldwide trends of depleting natural resources and increasing generation of waste create challenges concerning the development and growth of our cities. Urban growth is enforcing these trends, resulting in growing problems and reaching limitations to the growth of our economies. In this thesis, these worldwide trends will be challenged in...

Truck-Free-Amsterdam: Remodelling a sustainable Urban Freight Transport System in the city of Amsterdam

Cities are on a constant move. People hurry from home to work, from business meetings to sports clubs, or from shopping tours back home. Cars, trucks, bicycles and scooters are rolling along streets, bringing people and goods to their destinations. But sometimes this never-ending movement staggers, and with it the dynamism that is the trademark...

Integration by Landscape: Integration by using landscape as infrastructure

Urban expansion and development are normally guided by road infrastructure.<br/>Such road-oriented development ignores the profits that landscape could bring and it breaks the integrity of natural layer.The thesis researches on how to use landscape (as infrastructure) to “integrate” and guide the future urban development. Integration by...

Bridging the gap between sustainable urban policies and sustainable urban development projects: A recommendation for public planners

The focus on sustainability in urban development, policy implementation gaps and the role of public planner as ‘market actor’ have led to this research where we study how the implementation gap between sustainable urban policies and sustainable urban development projects can be bridged with the four planning tools of Adams et al. (2005). By...

Revisited Composition: Implementation Strategy for Mobility Based Development in Bandung City, Indonesia

As of today, most of the world’s population is living in urban areas. A lot of people is either migrating or commuting to the city every day. Urban sprawl in many cities in the world tends to trigger severe urban mobility challenges because the development is rarely supported by adequate infrastructure. In addition, the monocentric...

Designing Circular Cities: Exploring the development of circular economy in cities

Urban policymakers face more complex issues than ever before in developing a socially-, economically- and environmentally sustainable cities. Some cities have already started transitioning towards a circular economy in this endeavor. This research explores the ways in which four pioneering cities have started navigating this transition, and uses...

Transition towards Sustainable City

Location for graduation project – Kaunas, Lithuania. Lithuania is one of the countries that have been for 50years a part of the communist bloc. 50 years of central planning and plan economy highly influenced the form of cities, the traditions of spatial planning and the habits of people to use space. After becoming independent, cities went...

Het concept Stedelijk Metabolisme: Verkenning van het concept ‘Stedelijk Metabolisme’ met het oog op de bruikbaarheid ervan voor duurzame stedelijke ontwikkeling.

This study aims to determine the usefulness of the concept of Urban Metabolism for sustainable urban development. In this concept, the total of urban flows (like building materials, food and waste) together with the processes which transform those flows are metaphorically viewed as the metabolism of a city. The thesis starts with a search for a...