This study analyses how the governance of urban green spaces can foster social inclusion in cities affected by globalisation and inequality. To address the question of which institutional governance configurations are most effective in promoting social inclusion, an ethnographic approach was combined with a multiple-case study design in the Netherlands and Spain. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis, cooperative processes and tensions were identified in various urban green spaces that differed in property regimes and scale. The findings show that agreements on access and usage rules, flexible governance structures, and the coordination of tangible and intangible resource exchanges between urban managers, residents and visitors are key to enhancing inclusion. Finally, a typology of inclusive governance forms is proposed, arranged along a continuum from centrally administered municipal governance to community-based governance, with an intermediate hybrid governance model between them.

Today’s urbanization pressures present complex challenges in sustainable and socio-ecological transitions. Historical planning tools and theories, such as the Open Society concept, offer alternative approaches to regeneration and inclusivity. Critical mapping is a growing method in urban regeneration. However, we observed that this tool has not been sufficiently explored in a comparative fashion. In this paper, we examine the Open Society concept by comparing and contrasting ’t Hool, Eindhoven and Montbau, Barcelona to assess the concept’s continuing relevance for the regeneration of Modernist housing in the twenty-first century. We construct a comparative critical cartography using mixed-methods (mostly qualitative) to highlight interspatial relations on both neighborhoods. This method is a tool that aids us to highlight power-knowledge relations and detect spatial patterns from different fields, to extract site-specific lessons that inform urban regeneration. This research bridges the gap between theory, design and practice providing tools and comparative approaches to promote more transdisciplinary and more holistic approach to space and place. Addressing the complexity of space with a creative and systematic approach should address the relativism of site-specific knowledge and turn it into more generalizable lessons for urban regeneration.

Work: "Random Stack”, at: XVII Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism “Flujos Comunes”, Location: La Térmica Cultural, Ponferrada, Spain. Exhibition curated by Ander Bados and Miguel Ramón, 11 December 2025 to 15 March 2026.

Reconnecting Cities, People, and Nature is a call to action for urban designers to deeply engage with the living fabric of the city. By working together with humans, non-humans, and allied disciplines, designers can spark a transformation that reshapes cities into thriving, sustainable social and natural ecosystems. Twenty thought-provoking design exercises explore what the city as a complex biotope could be like, inspiring action and creating change.

Controlled-environment horticulture is one of several automation technologies emerging as possible ways of guaranteeing the future of food production. However, studies on the implications of horticulture’s infrastructuralization for urbanization remain limited in literature. This article presents an exploratory study that examines the Dutch agro-industrial cluster of Westland. We draw on semi-structured interviews to understand emerging networks and socio-technical systems and identify spatial and environmental outcomes of automation. Analysis around the themes of technology, land, energy, and labor revealed spatial tensions, limitations of technologies, capital concentration, and accelerating technological diffusion. We conclude that automation technologies affect scalability, increase the need for space, and call greenhouse’s sustainability claims into question given the distinct disparities between an enclosed artificial and technologically intensive inside and a natural outside.

The transition towards nature-based cities has increasingly become a central focus in political–environmental agendas and urban design practices, aiming to enhance climate adaptation, urban biodiversity, spatial equilibrium, and social well-being as part of the ongoing socio-ecological urban transition process. Climate adaptation in cities is a complex problem and one of the main collective challenges for society, but the relationships between city managers and citizens as to urban green care still face many challenges. Parks design guided by technical-expert and globalised criteria; inflexibility from bureaucratic inertia; and citizens’ demands to participate in the urban green transition, sometimes without the necessary knowledge or time, are some of the challenges that require further research. In this study, we examine four long-lasting approaches to green-space management in four cities in the Netherlands, ranging from municipality-driven to community-driven management forms, and encompassing diverse spatial configurations of greenery within the urban fabric. Utilising the theoretical lens of the Social–Ecological Systems Framework, we employ a multiple-case-study approach and ethnographic fieldwork analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding of the norms, collective-choice rules, and social conventions embodied in each urban green management arrangement. The purpose of this research is applied, that is, to provide urban managers and decision-makers with a deeper understanding of drivers to promote effective collaborative management approaches, focusing on specific organisational rules that may contribute to more sustained planning and maintenance pathways for urban green spaces, regardless of changes in political leadership or significant external funding sources. The results of the investigated cases show that long-lasting collaborative management of forests and parks has established a set of collective-choice rules for resource transfer between municipalities and citizens, including non-monetary resources (such as pruning-training courses or guided tours that attract tourists and researchers). Additionally, these arrangements have been favoured by the existence of legal norms that enable co-ownership of the land, and monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms that offer a slightly different interpretation from the evidence identified so far in the scientific literature on collective resource management and organisational studies.

The concentration of human populations in dense settlements, from small towns, to cities, to metropolitan and post-metropolitan formations and diffuse agglomeration zones, lies at the core of the urbanization process. But these high concentrations of people, economic activities, capital, structures, and infrastructures that characterize urban life are impossible to be sustained without a much more geographically extensive web of landscapes of primary production, circulation and waste disposal that form the other side of the urbanization process. In fact, cities due to their high densities, cover no more that 3% of the planetary terrain, while these “other” landscapes that support these high densities, activate more than 70% of the earth’s land surface. In the context of accelerated environmental crises and transition planning efforts, addressing these indirect consequences of urbanization (e.g. pollution, environmental degradation, or biodiversity loss) on more than city, more-than-human landscapes is conditioning the planning of future urban and infrastructural developments. This contribution aims to interrogate the condition of urban density in this broader perspective, illustrating how the densification of human populations in cities, constructs more-than-human densification patterns across more-than-city environments. Specifically, we situate our investigation in the Dutch context and its more-than-city environments. We explore how, in this respect, densification can be conceived as a broader characteristic of the urbanization process, not just the city. Industrial agricultural systems pack plants together in extreme densities, as do large scale Confined Animal Feeding Operations with livestock. We use this framework to examine the country’s long history of agricultural modernization, intensification, and crises, highlighting the convoluted interdependencies between more-than-city landscapes and dense cities. Through historical, conceptual and cartographic exploration, this contribution aims to help reveal the mirror image of urban densities, extending the scope of the conference’s theme of the dense city to include the dense more-than city in planning history.

Rahul Mehrotra is the founder and principal of RMA Architects, as well as Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at Har-vard University School of Design. His practice can be described as multimodal and multi-scalar, emphasizing the hybridization of research, wri-ting, teaching, design, policy advocacy, and civic engagement. With several books and dozens of essays, he has built a reputation as, arguably, the leading commentator on issues to do with the built environment in Mumbai and India.

Una rápida compañera presenta, por primera vez en castellano, los escritos de Víctor Muñoz Sanz en torno a los nuevos espacios creados alrededor de las tecnologías de la automatización. Es un viaje que nos traslada a fábricas de calzado de finales del siglo XIX, a innovadores puertos logísticos e invernaderos en los que no encontramos rastro de trabajadores humanos y a terrenos fangosos donde vacas frisonas fruto de la selección genética conviven con robots de la más alta tecnología. Este ensayo, entre la observación más aguda y la especulación más sugestiva, no se deja cegar por el brillo de las tecnologías más recientes ni fascinar por productos espaciales nunca vistos. Su trabajo nos ayuda a entender los avances espaciales que día tras día transforman toda clase de entornos de trabajo tras los muros opacos del oscurantismo empresarial y, a la vez, la forma en que la tecnología, la ciencia y la arquitectura moldean, días tras día, cuerpos humanos y no humanos. “A Muñoz Sanz le preocupa la manera en que se expresa hoy ese flujo de capital. Por ello, analiza su concreción técnica y su dimensión digital, ampliando la cuestión más allá de lo humano, para entender qué papel juegan agentes tan diversos como los algoritmos, las plataformas, los animales, las toxinas o los virus, sean biológicos o informáticos. Así, ha conseguido trazar cierta dimensión espacial de nuestro presente, en especial la que más tiempo ocupa en nuestro día a día: la del trabajo.” - Landa Hernández Martínez, autora del prólogo Víctor Muñoz Sanz es arquitecto e investigador, y está afincado en los Países Bajos. Es profesor asistente de Diseño Urbano en la TU Delft, donde conceptualiza, lidera y desarrolla estudios críticos sobre la arquitectura y el urbanismo del pasado, presente y futuro del trabajo. Es coeditor de Automated Landscapes (Nieuwe Instituut, 2023), Roadside Picnics: Encounters with the Uncanny (drp Barcelona, 2022) y Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture (NAI010, 2020). Víctor estudió Arquitectura en la ETSA de Madrid (2006), Diseño Urbano en la Graduate School of Design de la Universidad de Harvard (2011) y finalizó su doctorado en 2016 en la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

The excesses of this system are currently reflected in the state of decline of the Dutch landscape. Scaling up, intensification, as well as the accompanying increase in traffic, are resulting in the deterioration of the landscape. Whether we are talking about the nitrogen crisis, the protection of the Wadden Sea against oil drilling, floods in Limburg, or earthquakes in Groningen, political reality seems extremely flexible while the boundaries of our ecosystems are fixed. In the exhibition 'From Raster to Vector: The Netherlands as Profit Landscape', artists and other stakeholders are researching possibilities for a more balanced interpretation of the landscape, with proposals for more circular and sustainable relationships between economic and ecological interests. However, the participants are not considering the landscape to be an entity that is best left to its own devices. Landscaping is a verb, something that requires a continuous effort to ensure a better spatial quality, albeit beyond exclusively human-oriented interests, and as a unilateral answer to climate change. For this we need proper designers, imagination, and design talent.

This article explores the use of the pattern language approach in bridging the gap between formal and informal urban planning practices in the African context. This study focuses on a case application within the urbanised region encompassing the Nakivubo wetland located in Kampala, Uganda. As in other cities in Africa with a colonial past, Kampala’s planning system signals a profound gap between a technocratic, European paradigms-based type of planning and the everyday practices of citizens. This results in a “dual city,” with formal and informal communities using resources and spaces differently, leading to spatial segregation and non-implementation of urban plans. To overcome this challenge, the pattern language approach is utilised in this research to link formal and informal practices through facilitating meaningful community participation and integrating tacit knowledge into the planning process. To achieve this, the researchers conducted fieldwork and interacted with the local community in informal settlements to develop informal patterns, while analysing the history and current organisation of formal planning institutions in Kampala to formulate formal patterns. The patterns were used as input for a community workshop, which resulted in a pattern language of wetland management practices and a framework that begins to bridge both formal and informal domains of urban practice. By using the pattern language approach as a tool to understand informal practices and their possible incorporation into a planning process that captures the needs of citizens, this research offers relevant insights into achieving sustainable and inclusive urban environments.

'The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he [sic] will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the Futurists and discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognized as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him.' These cautionary, and still relevant, words by Rayner Banham in his book 'Theory and Design in the First Machine Age' are very telling of the key challenge of dealing with the implications of technology in our cities. [...]

The introduction of forests in cities has been an observable trend in recent years, with planned forest management projects proliferating around the world. The fact that many urban forests in the public space are traditionally managed by top-down bureaucratic procedures and guided by expert knowledge raises questions about whether green areas should follow the same management approach as other urban infrastructures, such as mobility infrastructures, or whether they should explore a collaborative approach designed to engage diverse stakeholders. This article examines the challenges of innovating in urban forests, changing the management rules that may limit participatory and deliberative processes to support decision-making. In particular, we analyzed how introducing a co-creation stage impacted the traditional competitive public tender procedure in the Madrid Metropolitan Forest project, using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. Results showed that the costs and benefits of innovation differ among involved actors, generating unintended deterrent effects for experimentation. To mitigate these decoupling effects, we suggest a strategic design of working rules and updating the shared incentive to move from a competitive and transactional logic to a more collaborative and co-creative form of connection.

This issue of Footprint explores specific spatialities and materialities found across those operational landscapes of primary production that constitute the metabolic basis of urbanisation. To the extent that these landscapes are increasingly automated and digitised, production and circulation practices are becoming more capital intensive and even less labour-intensive. While amplifying the precarity of human labour, this process relies on appropriating the work of more-than-human assemblages of machines, plants, animals and microorganisms. Central to the focus of this issue is understanding the way these processes are grounded in specific architectural and landscape configurations. In this way, we also aim to complement the debates on past issues of Footprint, offering an investigation of the impact of technological transformations beyond the concentrated landscapes of human inhabitation.

The Open Society appeared as a concept in planning discourse at the Congrès
International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM XI). It attempted to create urban
conditions which would allow society to prosper. Despite its good theoretical
intentions, the project did not always translate well into practice. We observe that
historic approaches and tools have tended to be neglected in urban regeneration
projects and discussions, yet we think that they can bring valuable urban
transformations. This paper therefore considers the extent to which historic
planning tools and theories can be useful for assessing built projects to provide
fresh approaches for urban renovation. This paper will reappraise the concept of
the Open Society empirically by analysing, critiquing, and imagining its relevance
in twenty-first-century planning projects and discourse. This research uses a
mostly qualitative approach through critical cartographies as a main medium and
to draw conclusions that highlight the power relations in the Dutch neighbourhood
of ‘t Hool (Eindhoven) as well as the local conditions and materials that can enable
them to plan for a more resilient future. We aim to bridge the gap between theory
and practice through a methodology that allows for a broader and deeper
understanding of place, history, potentials, and urgencies.

This article analyzes the acceptance of climate policy measures in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam to understand how policy and planning interrelate with private and public interests. While legitimizing climate policy and measures, values can also cause conflict when operationalized locally. By analyzing value conflicts in public discourse, we gain insights into questions of environmental behavior and their influence on the acceptance of climate action. We report on quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis covering 410 articles from Dutch newspapers between 2015 and 2021 in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam related to the energy transition, mobility, and urban greening. Our findings show that public discourse mostly remains abstract and detached from local contexts. As experts and politicians dominate the debate, the discourse mainly addresses science- and policy-related arguments, representing the public interest but reflecting only insufficiently private interests and the local (re-)distribution of benefits and burdens. Therefore, we attribute spontaneous protest to the lack of reference to differentiated values at the local level and find the argument of NIMBYism insufficient to explain residents’ opposition. Instead, our findings point to experts’ and decision-makers’ lack of recognition of the local “idea of place” and a community’s identity as an explanation for the sudden emergence of protests. Here, urban design may bridge the gap between policy and planning by translating technical and economic constraints into place-specific designs.

Between 1929 and 1935, the Bata Shoe Company planned the construction of a series of modern industrial satellite towns in Europe, Asia, and America. From an initial constellation of architecture and urbanism references, Bata’s management and company architects developed a distinct and recognizable urban form across all of the towns. An explanation of the rationale behind the sequence of choices that set the specific trajectory consolidating Bata’s urbanism and, ultimately, its industrial heritage, remains as a gap in the existing literature on the Bata Shoe Company. In this article, the conceptual framework of historical institutionalism is used to study how questions of meaning and social legitimacy, and path dependency influenced the design of the urban form of the Bata Shoe Company towns. The methodology employed involved the triangulation of the study of secondary sources and research into Bata’s archives, with fieldwork in 13 of the towns. The research reveals a process of path dependence of design ideas—with instances of lock-in, positive feedback, increasing returns, and self-reinforcement—which have conditioned their subsequent transformations. This article will posit that interdisciplinary readings on urban history can bring new insights towards a better understanding of industrial heritage resulting from activities by multinational organizations.