This graduation studio explores the potential of a landscape-based regional design approach to contribute to more resilient coastal landscapes around the globe. Such an approach addresses the interaction between the natural and urban landscape throughout the scales of space and time. It takes the landscape as the basis for sustainable urban development and employs research through design as a strategy to explore the possibilities of landscape architecture principles for water-sensitive design, nature-based solutions, heritage protection, and socio-ecological inclusive development. This landscape approach is transdisciplinary in nature and exploits the power of design to address the complex challenges of our times while connecting long-term strategies and short-term interventions. The projects presented here showcase the wide range of possibilities of the landscape-approach in nature conservation, reduce flood risks, promote sustainable urban transformation and achieve a symbiosis between nature and culture.

Photovoltaic (PV) windows with shading devices benefit buildings in terms of power generation, daylighting control, glare protection, etc. In order to harvest the maximum solar energy from the window area, solar tracking is applied to the PV shading elements. The complicated movement trajectories and dynamic daylighting are difficult to simulate by conventional methods. In this work, we introduce an optical simulation method of daylighting in complex building environment using DIVA and Grasshopper, which are plugins of Rhinoceros, a commercial 3D computer graphics and computer-aided design (CAD) software. An algorithmic model of the PV blinds is built by Grasshopper based on amodified model of a reference office. Then DIVA is applied to evaluate the daylighting performance of the dynamic and static PV blinds. Simulation results show that the working plane reveals higher illuminance level and lower glare level with the dynamic PV blinds than that with their static counter parts. It is demonstrated that the proposed simulation method can deal with the daylighting evaluation of complex and dynamic building environment.

Traditionally, urban traffic is controlled by traffic lights. Recent findings of the Macroscopic or Network Fundamental Diagram (MFD or NFD) have led to the development of novel traffic control strategies that can be applied at a networkwide level. One pertinent example is perimeter flow control (also known as gating or metering), which limits the rate at which vehicles are allowed to enter an urban region. This paper studies to which extent a combination of adaptive traffic control and gating improves the traffic flow. To this end, combinations of gating and traffic signal timing tested implemented in a microsimulation. It is found that gating is much more effective than adaptive signal timing for high traffic loads. Adaptive signal timing can improve the network performance by increasing the maximum flow and increasing the critical accumulation, i.e. the number of vehicles inside a protected network for which the performance is maximized. The latter helps to reduce queuing outside the protected network.