Global trends in urbanization, industrialization, and intensive agriculture are harming our (local) environment. These activities require significant mounts of resources, energy, and transportation, whilst creating increased waste streams. Poor management of these sites has led to severe soil, water, and air contamination. Currently, Europe has 2.8 million potentially soil-contaminated sites, with around 340,000 in direct need of remediation. Additionally, these activities cause land cover changes, shrinking and fragmenting the natural landscape. The decreased ecosystem connectivity is harmful to ecological processes and biodiversity. Phytoremediation and green infrastructure (GI) planning offer robust nature-based solutions to these problems. Integrating these solutions holds the potential to utilize the same vegetation for both solutions. However, integration of these solutions is challenging due to the scalar gap between the locality of phytotechnologies and the regional scale that is used for GI planning.
This thesis presents a systematic approach to integrating small-scale phytoremediation interventions within regional-scale GI planning. Using a multi-scalar, data-driven framework, this research uses computational simulations, calculations, and assessments to identify optimal design solutions, including traditional GIS mapping, graph-theoretic networks, and neural networks. This integrated approach aims to enhance environmental remediation and ecosystem connectivity and provides a comprehensive strategy for sustainable regional planning. ... Read more

With urgent urban challenges such as climate adaptation, energy transition, the continued extraction of resources and pushing urbanisation, the urgency of integrating planning and design with urban engineering increases. The implementation of new technological interventions and the utilisation of the natural system is hampered by the lack of an integrated approach incorporating urban planning and design decisions. Meanwhile, urban and economic growth increasingly competes for infrastructure and environment, affecting the success or failure of the daily operating systems of cities and regions and thereby urban competitiveness. The challenge is to fundamentally rethink the urban landscape in light of transitions, new concepts and new technologies – as material and ecological practices. The question is how to renew existing urbanised areas by integrating parameters of the natural system and technological innovations directly into urban development opportunities arising from spatial planning and design. In order to stimulate and design the synergy between design and engineering the course Infrastructure and Environment Design offers the possibility for urban design and landscape architecture students to get well acquainted with the concepts and language of the technical field on the subject of infrastructure and environment.... ... Read more

With the current emissions and disasters due to climate change, the energy transition towards a sustainable and climate resilient future of Northwest Europe is now more important than ever. The fi rst steps have been made, but this transition is happening too slow and in an insufficient and uncollaborative manner. This research studies the spatial implications of the energy transition and aims to construct a framework that helps to accelerate the process and make it more efficient and socially just. The methods used for this are data analysis and research by design, combined with scenario building, by investigating and designing the case study of the province of South-Holland within the context frame of Northwest Europe. The results of this report show an integrated spatial vision on the energy transition on multiple scales. Additionally, it provides a strategic framework that consists of policies, organizational structures and physical interventions, both in space and time, that are structured in a catalog. This proposal helps accelerate the process of the energy transition, to be able to build on a sustainable future for energy production and distribution ... Read more