Isfahan is a desert city in the middle of the Iranian plateau, next to the Zāyandeh Rūd. The paper demonstrates how the planners of Isfahan during the Safavid era were able to inhabit its plain despite the limitations of this desert landscape, such as lack of water, especially during warm seasons, extreme water fluctuation of the river, and poor soil conditions. Through īstīnbāt, or the gradual nurturing of its inherent geological and ecological contingencies and the entanglement of soil, water, and air, as well as the infrastructure and architecture of locks, underground dams, pigeon towers, and gardens, they were able to activate the "latent potentialities" of this plain. ... Read more

While the severity of the climate crisis calls for a discussion on transformative and potentially disruptive change, science, engineering, design, governance and practice are currently too detached to effectively contribute to such discussions. The spatial manifestation of climate crisis rarely appeals to one’s imagination. Yet, when reviewing the range of sea level rise projections and their accelerated rate of change, it is clear that understanding when and why to navigate between mitigation, adaptation and transformation measures is essential for flourishing coastal communities globally. The Netherlands is one of those and has been characterised by a long history of renowned flood risk and water management as well as spatial planning. Facing the potential extreme scenarios of sea level rise, the country now however struggles to include measures preparing for a shift from incremental to the required transformative strategies. This research project identifies the criticalities by means of a risk matrix and stress maps as an initial act to introduce the Sea Level Impact Knowledge Collect and its transdisciplinary Research by Design approach to guide the discussion on transformative change and its implementation in living labs. ... Read more

This chapter focuses on a traditional Iranian water infrastructure, the qanat system, a technical solution to the problem of accessing water for irrigation and urbanization that has shaped the landscape and organized the territory. The qanat was the basis for habitation, construction, and prosperity (abadani). It is also a key to understanding the culture and civilization of the Iranian Plateau and has evolved as a form of cultural heritage. Therefore, preserving this heritage is more than protecting an old technology. Rather, it requires a deeper understanding of the territory in which the qanat operated and of its limitations and possibilities. Discussing a historical work, The Extraction of Hidden Waters by Muhammad Al-Karaji (953–1029), this chapter explicates the multivalent role of the qanat system in managing and organizing the territory, society, life, and culture in the Iranian Plateau; this multiplicity of aspects and scales shapes its consideration of qanats’ heritage today. ... Read more

An underground aqueduct is usually a canal built in the subsurface to transfer water from a starting point to a distant location. Systems of underground aqueducts have been applied by ancient civilizations to manage different aspects of water supply. This research reviews underground aqueducts from the prehistoric period to modern times to assess the potential of achieving sustainable development of water distribution in the sectors of agriculture and urban management, and provides valuable insights into various types of ancient underground systems and tunnels. The review illustrates how these old structures are a testament of ancient people’s ability to manage water resources using sustainable tools such as aqueducts, where the functionality works by using, besides gravity, only “natural” engineering tools like inverted siphons. The study sheds new light on human’s capability to collect and use water in the past. In addition, it critically analyzes numerous examples of ancient/historic/pre-industrial underground water supply systems that appear to have remained sustainable up until recent times. The sustainability of several underground structures is examined, correlated to their sound construction and regular maintenance. Moreover, several lessons can be learned from the analysis of ancient hydraulic works, particularly now, as many periodically hydrologic crises have occurred recently, overwhelmingly impacted by climate change and/or over-exploitation and degradation of available water resources. ... Read more

How can the Netherlands adapt to sea level rise on the long term: maintain, advance or retreat? This article compares the results of seven plans and designs from a diverse group of scholars and professionals that offer very different answers to this question. This diversity broadens the options, which is vital in this stage. Both problem solving and design approaches are shown to be worthwhile, when grounded in coastal, landscape, and ecological dynamics as well as visions of the Netherlands in the far future. ... Read more

The ambition of Footprint 23 is to provide a critical survey of the architecture of logistics, unfolding the multivalences of its apparatus, dissecting its buildings and spaces, its technologies and labour relations, its historical evolutions as well as its future projections. Gathering academic papers and visual essays from researchers and emerging scholars in the field, the issue follows three main directions of inquiry.

The first trajectory attempts to define what logistics is and how it operates, focusing on the inherent ambivalence of its apparatus, able to cope with different scales and various temporal dimensions – from barcodes and gadgets to global routes and territorial infrastructures – constituting both a physical and abstract framework supporting, measuring and quantifying movements and actions, thoughts and desires. The second trajectory investigates the way logistics penetrates our existences, not simply by affecting how we live and work but the way in which it provides the very possibility of life as such, or, in other words, how logistics is inherently political. The third trajectory tackles the past, present and future of logistics, considered as the most crucial apparatus determining the human impact on the earth, controlling the distribution and organisation of organisms and ecosystems, triggering new and more violent forms of colonisation and exploitation.

This issue of Footprint does not seek definitive statements or hypothetic solutions for the monstrous nature of logistics. On the opposite, it aims at unfolding its inner contradictions to propose new possibilities of exploration for an architecture and its project. ... Read more

The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, it offers a ‘theoretical reading’ of a historically important architectural entity – namely the bazaar – in order to propose a synthetic understanding of its complexity and to explore the multiplicity of forces and regimes involved in the bazaar’s [historical] formation. Second, by conceptualizing the architecture of the bazaar, this thesis explores the relation between architecture and territory, inhabitation and infrastructure in the context of the Iranian Plateau. In doing so, this thesis contributes to the production of an architectural knowledge which encourages a contextual studying of complex spatial regimes and mechanisms as their prime forces for intervention.
The notion of the bazaar is complex. Not only does it have implications in diverse disciplines, but it also carries various definitions. Depending on the context in which it is used, the bazaar can be depicted as a place, a form of economy, a social class or a way of life, and thus it can embody the notion of a city, a territory or even it can be expanded to the region known as the Middle East or the Islamic world. Within this wide spectrum of possible meanings, the bazaar has been the topic of discourse in architecture and urban history, as well as anthropology, sociology, economics and political science.
The inherent complexity of the notion of the bazaar is attributable to its intermediate position, i.e. its relation to the territory and various ways of life, its spatial complexity, i.e. a space of movement and a place of public and the collective, and the superposition of different scales between architecture and the city. This implies that research on the bazaar needs to deviate from purely typological or urban morphological studies. Rather it needs to devote simultaneous attention to people as well as the numerous spatial interrelations involved in its formation. This means that an architecture is possible which gives form to the accumulation of complex cultural, social, economic and administrative relations. While it enables connection and integration, it provides scope for confrontation and encounter.
The first chapter provides an overview of various conceptions, definitions and perceptions of the bazaar. This chapter will demonstrate that a proper discursive framework that allows us to grasp the spatial complexity of the bazaar is, in fact, missing. While architecture and urban studies have focused mainly on describing and classifying the bazaar’s structural and morphological presence, other disciplines have hardly recognized its physical importance in the process of forming various interrelations. This chapter concludes that the bazaar is not simply an architectural object, rather it is an entity which is territorial. This means that the bazaar’s formation has been closely related to the ways in which the territory has been managed and inhabited.
Subsequently, this research conceptualizes the architecture of the bazaar by revisiting its ‘whereness’ and ‘whatness’, using the ‘territory’ as a theoretical framework. While ‘whereness’ addresses the characteristics of ‘where’ the bazaar is historically located, ‘whatness’ is concerned with what the bazaar is and what it does. In this process, it is important to note that ‘whereness’ and ‘whatness’ are closely linked to each other, and they are both simultaneously a precondition and product.
The second part of the thesis – which includes chapters three and four – presents an understanding of the ‘whereness’. This part seeks means and lenses to open a discussion on territory both as a precondition and product. These two chapters discuss the geographical condition – and what I call the geopolitics of the in-between, through which two kinds of territorialities take form: i.e. the extensive territoriality of the nomadic spatialized through distribution and movement and the intensive territoriality of the sedentary spatialized through managerial knowledge of dehqan to inhabit a land. The coexistence, encounter and assimilation of these territorialities has had an impact on the state-form and the social and economic system on the Iranian Plateau in general and the spatial formation of the bazaar as an intermediate.
The third part of this thesis focuses on the issue of ‘whatness’. This part – chapters five and six – re-examines the established knowledge on the bazaar as a physical and spatial entity by experimenting within two kinds of territorialities proposed in the previous chapters. In other words, the bazaar is seen as an assemblage of various territorial regimes rooted in the extensive nomadic territoriality and intensive sedentary territoriality. This not only pertains to the relation between movement and inhabitation, space and place in the bazaar’s physical structure, but also in its social and legal organization, topology and logistical system. Thus, the bazaar goes beyond the mere circulation space; rather it is perceived as an infra+structure which is situated within the city and operated as the city’s main [public] place.
The present thesis examines the possibility of constructing a discursive platform for studying the bazaar as a complex architectural entity. It posits a critical reading of the bazaar’s primary spatial idea, suggesting that a territorial reading of the bazaar can provide a valuable alternative lens for looking beyond mere preservation concerns or the purely formal imitations that are normally applied when examining the current condition of the bazaar in Iranian cities. It can help to redefine the intermediate position of the bazaar as a way of discovering new orders and hierarchies within and without the city. ... Read more

3rd Wicked Workshop on Architectural and Urban Sustainability. Sustainability Think Tank 01.09.14 – 31.08.17 ... Read more

1st Wicked Workshop on Architectural and Urban Sustainability, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, 19-15 April 2015 ... Read more