Business incubators are considered important contributors to innovation, as they foster and support entrepreneurship. Incubators, nurturing creative start-ups, may also function as ancillary activities in spatially concentrated creative clusters. Furthermore, an incubator itself may even function as, or be the centre of a cluster. Such incubators may actively encourage start-up entrepreneurs to cooperate, thus creating a cluster-like project ecology. This chapter provides researchers and policymakers with a framework of the potential roles of incubators in the development of creative clusters. These can be found mainly in four areas. First, incubators may provide hard infrastructure or enable the use of hard infrastructure such as old, derelict buildings, hence avoiding waste of useful spaces. Second, incubators may act as mediator between incubatees and the primary and secondary activities in the cluster. Third, incubators can contribute to a soft infrastructure containing factors such as liveliness, image, buzz and social networks, which may increase the performance of creative clusters. Finally, incubators contribute to the agglomeration economies that are considered crucial for geographical concentration, by constituting a more diverse labour pool and by fostering cooperation and coordination of activities and other spillovers between firms.@en

Over the last century, Casablanca has become the economical capital of Morocco. To deal with this ever congesting metropolis, the French Europeans and later wealthy Moroccans, have established an entire region to escape from Casablanca's everyday. The research investigates this relationship between the escape from the everyday into spaces for the holiday. Spaces wherein the political and economical norm are suspended, resulting in an opportunity for play (in contrast to work, labor and action). In Casablanca, beach club structures barricade the relation between the coastal boulevard and the Atlantic as natural common resource, resulting in a condition wherein one needs to pay to enjoy the ocean and its consequent holiday. Through investigating the characteristic figure of the club, the research unfolds its strategies and motives, to subsequently learn from it for a counter-project.

As a response to the disparity between the everyday and the holiday in Casablanca, to the research on the club and to the investigation on spaces of play, the project proposes a strategy to infiltrate the Casablanca with spaces for the holiday. By exploiting the newly established infrastructure of the tram network, the project taps into many daily routines, claiming territory adjacent to the strategically chosen tram stations. These territories are then reserved for the holiday, accommodated in an urban void, guaranteeing the possibility of refuge in the holiday and the livability of the metropolis.

To offer an alternative to the exclusive figure of the club, the proposed spaces for the holiday must ensure to be inclusive, both socially and architecturally. The absolute architecture of the club is broken open and becoming, transformed into a dual project; a pliant surface and a set of autonomous architectures. Together, they provide a protected holiday space separated from Casablanca’s everyday visually, acoustically, thermally, emotionally. While still providing accessibility from all sides due to its resulting porous nature. Therefore offering a true and pleasant sanctuary in middle of Casablanca’s turmoil. Through the duality of the project, a certain ambiguity is achieved, resulting in a range of conditions wherein citizens can celebrate their holiday.

In order to evoke direct associations of holiday within the interventions, the Casablanca’s collective memory is being exploited through abstractions of the coast in architectural form. The pliant surface is materialized in bright white natural stone, mimicking the tactics of Casablanca’s beach clubs, which imported white beach sand to create paradisaical beaches. The white (artificial) surface offers a first inversion of the everyday on which the autonomous architectural elements are imposed, in turn referencing to the beauty of the natural coast. Each element subtly referencing to phenomena of the Atlantic.

Together resulting in a predefined set of elements and rules which can generate precise architectural interventions when confronted with given urban conditions. The project is therefore designed as a tangram, from the scale of the entire configuration to the detail. In the thesis, three sites are fully developed, as proof of concept, exploring the potential to offer an inclusive form of holiday, inverting Casablanca’s everyday life.

Shell structures have been regularly used in the past for creating huge spanning structures, with the use of minimal material. Even though this method saves a lot of material, the labor cost of constructing these structures is high, due to the amount of work on the building site. By prefabricating these structures, a huge amount of labor and therefor money is saved. While research into prefabricating shell structures has been done, some research needs to be done before shell structures can be prefabricated. On of these topics is the connection of prefabricated segments. To make sure the connections suffice, a method is designed to have the connection tested and analysed. Besides small scale testing, a model for analyzing the connections in a shell is proposed, to make sure the connections hold up in a full scale shell.

This research investigates events as an elementary tool to change the physicality of the environment, the perception of the environment and the behaviour of users within an environment. The main research question being, How can an event influence architecture? To find out what an event is, the literature study will focus on the writing of Bernard Tschumi Herman Hertzberger and J. J. Gibson, both in a different way involved in the philosophy of the event. Subsequently we will take a closer look at the documenta, the quinquennial contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, a provincial city in the middle of Germany. The meaning of an event is investigated by looking at several noteworthy events that happened during documentas throughout the years. Their impact on their surroundings is studied through archive photos, reports, video and news articles on the documenta. Findings are that an event is signified by a physical change of the environment, a perceptional change of the environment and/or a behavioural change towards the environment. Depending on the event, these changes are either temporary or permanent. The finding of the method derived from numerous attempts to capture the essence of such an event, that will also be discussed.

The design that follows from this research focusses on the city Kassel itself, especially on the Nordstadt, Kassels most neglected district. As a result from location analysis the designbrief for a youth-centre is created. The basis of this design relies on the reference to garages and the events that can take place in and around these spaces.

Clusters of cultural and creative industries are rather widespread in and surrounding inner cities. The development and dynamics of these clusters are objects of study of various conceptual approaches: some aim at their role and significance for urban development, others at their development and dynamics as such. These latter approaches focus primarily on producers or consumers of cultural or creative goods. By contrast, this paper explores the role of a particular type of secondary or ancillary activity - the business incubator - in the development of these clusters. The paper is explorative and draws no explicit conclusions. Nevertheless, the incubator appears to be an ancillary activity that contributes in various manners to sustainable cluster development, i.e. not only by their output of young, trained entrepreneurs in possession of up-to-date knowledge and skills, but also by means of, for instance, their buildings and social networks.

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Amsterdam and Rotterdam have followed rather different trajectories after 1970 when deindustrialisation set in. Amsterdam benefited strongly from the growth in financial services, creative and cultural industries (CCIs) and tourism after 1990. Moreover, it has been quite successful in attracting highly skilled workers. Rotterdam, meanwhile, has fared less well. This has also become apparent after 2008, when employment growth in Amsterdam bounced back while that in Rotterdam stagnated. The Amsterdam economy, in other words, appears to be more resilient than that of Rotterdam. Resilience is a complex concept and many potential explanations are on offer. In this paper, we focus on the role of the sectoral composition in explaining the divergent growth paths of Amsterdam and Rotterdam using a shift-share analysis of employment data over the period 2000-2014 as a strategic window. This is a first explorative step to a more comprehensive understanding of these cities’ growth paths.@en