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A.L.J. Martens

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The Netherlands is facing a large housing crisis, with a shortage of 390.000 dwellings in 2023. To speed up the construction process, modular building can be used. In this paper, the creation of spatial quality within modular building is investigated. Spatial quality is here understood as the combination of experience value, user value, and future value. The investigation focused on the communal spaces of buildings. Literature was used to find fifteen positive influences on spatial quality. An assessment method was created by observing how many influences were present within specific cases. By comparing this result to an initial judgement of the spatial quality of the cases, the reliability of this tool was found to be good. When comparing the communal spaces of the different case studies to each other, not every influence was directly affected by the change of the organization. When considering only the influences that change with different organizations, the exterior vertical core and “portiek” organization both scored the highest, suggesting these ways of organizing the communal space of modular building brings the highest spatial quality. The assessment method that was used to get this result should be expanded further to remove some of the flaws. The current method does not apply a weight to the different influences, and there might be other influences not yet included in the assessment. ...
Student report (2024) - A.L.J. Martens, V. Baptist
Most academic papers never give a concrete definition of what a resort town is, which makes discussion of the topic difficult. To create more clarity on the subject this paper investigates the Dutch town of Kaatsheuvel, and if the theme park within its borders, the Efteling, makes the town an example of a resort town. To achieve this the history and development of the town were traced back to the inception of the Efteling in 1933, and this development was then compared to academic sources on resort towns, with the six stages of resort town development by Butler (1980) playing a key role. In the end, Kaatsheuvel has a lot of similarities to other resort towns, but especially the early stages of the resort town are not present in the history of Kaatsheuvel. This means that Kaatsheuvel can be considered as a resort town, but the path it took to get to that status differs from other more conventional cases. This conclusion has both specified and expanded the concept of the resort town, making future discussions on the topic more precise. ...