The deprived district of Molenbeek is globally known as Europe’s terrorism capital, as worldwide news outlets have drawn attention to the involvement of multiple Molenbeek residents in terrorist attacks in the past. This has resulted in a pressuring reputation disproportionately affecting all residents, causing them to develop adverse feelings towards their neighbourhood.

Extremism is not at all apparent in everyday life, opposing the radical reputation composed by the outside-in perspective. The residents within the inside-out perspective seek justice through a re-appreciation of their culturally rich neighbourhood. The current lack of qualitative public space and active public life results in the expression of fear of crime and vandalism. The streetscape is littered by locked gates, closed blinds and garage doors, negatively influencing the perceived safety in the public realm.

This thesis aims to reactivate the porosity embedded in the urban fabric of Molenbeek. Developing these pockets of porous potential according to the needs of the local population creates urban spaces for clear user groups to express their desired behavioural patterns in the public realm. The design of these urban living rooms activates confidence and comfort among users, activating public life through the empowerment of residents.

With urgent urban challenges such as climate adaptation, energy transition, the continued extraction of resources and pushing urbanisation, the urgency of integrating planning and design with urban engineering increases. The implementation of new technological interventions and the utilisation of the natural system is hampered by the lack of an integrated approach incorporating urban planning and design decisions. Meanwhile, urban and economic growth increasingly competes for infrastructure and environment, affecting the success or failure of the daily operating systems of cities and regions and thereby urban competitiveness. The challenge is to fundamentally rethink the urban landscape in light of transitions, new concepts and new technologies – as material and ecological practices. The question is how to renew existing urbanised areas by integrating parameters of the natural system and technological innovations directly into urban development opportunities arising from spatial planning and design. In order to stimulate and design the synergy between design and engineering the course Infrastructure and Environment Design offers the possibility for urban design and landscape architecture students to get well acquainted with the concepts and language of the technical field on the subject of infrastructure and environment....

This project aims to address the challenges posed by the transition to renewable energy sources. This will cause an unstable and unreliable energy flow, which does not correspond with the current energy use patterns of society. Different elements of the current energy network are analysed. They have a big role in the transition towards a completely renewable energy system. The proposed solution involves the utilisation of hydrogen as a means to store and transport renewable energy. In order to achieve this, consumption and production patterns in North-western Europe are analysed in relation to existing energy infrastructure that is suitable for carrying hydrogen. With a combination of different data sources and a created algorithm a model is created that is able to generate clusters. These clusters resulted in a continental framework containing 3 typologies of energy landscapes. A centralized, decentralized and a resilient zone; inbetween. These landscapes are characterised by their population, proximity and current land use against societal challenges such as justice, resilience, polarisation, and reliability. Self-made algorithms are used to transcribe the landscapes into a collection of physical energy elements that will be needed in areas. These measurements are visualized to propose what the future “energyscapes” could look like. The project suggests implementations on different scales for the new paradigm in the energy transition where hydrogen contributes to a just and reliable energy system.