Urban populations are rising all over the world. According to the United Nations 60% of global populations is projected to live in urban area’s by 2030. The formation of the urban heat island effect (UHI) and it’s impact on human health and well-being by the increase of heat stress in hard surfaced urban area’s has been described and measured by a multitude of studies. (Oke, 1989) The cooling ability of urban green infrastructures (Pauleit et al., 2020) with trees in particular is currently widely acknowledged. (Rahman et al., 2020). However, planting trees in city centres where they are most needed for a healthy and sustainable living environment still remains a challenge due to extreme growth conditions (Sjöman et al., 2018). Densely populated urban area’s are constantly developing and due to the limited above and underground space new planted trees rarely reach maturity. In addition the underground utilities with frequent maintenance, soil compression and the lack of nutrients further complicate healthy and consistent growth of tree canopies. (Ferrini et al., 2019) If we want our trees in the hardscaped everchanging urban environments of city centres to provide many of its benefits for the next generation, the technical design for planting, maintaining and strategically locating trees in urban area’s should be reassessed now.

The Haagse Beemden in Breda is a neighbourhood that is designed towards the concept of the ‘’inverse town planning’’. In this concept, the underlying landscape structures the layout of the neighbourhood, resulting in an urban area with the landscape at its core. In the case of the Haagse Beemden this means that the neighbourhood was built around an old ‘’estate zone’’ and old green structures and waterways are still present in the design of the area, making the neighbourhood very green. The green character of the Haagse Beemden together with the used ‘’bloemkoolwijk’’ structure are focussed upon creating a neighbourhood with good social values and liveability. However, times have passed since the creation of the neighbourhood and nowadays its liveability and social values are under pressure. This thesis focuses on analysing what spatial aspects and characteristics could possibly cause these problems and how the green structure of the neighbourhood could be improved to stimulate a better nature connectedness, as nature connectedness can act as a catalyst for better social cohesion. The result is a design proposal for an ‘’estate park’’ that connects the neighbourhood to its core identity. This design is based on four created typologies (Central Green, Selective Collective, Connecting Green and Semi-Collective) that are funded by the findings in the theory and analysis phases.

In recent decades, the world’s population has increased exponentially and is expected to increase even more in the coming years. More and more people are moving to the city. In the Netherlands, too, we are dealing with population growth in the Randstad, and therefore also in Leiden. This increase puts extra pressure on the already extensive road network. The road network of Leiden has a negative impact on the ecosystem services that are related to roads. This lack of improving road ecosystem services makes the road network unable to cope with today’s urban challenges, such as climate change, people’s health and urban biodiversity. The current road system can even form a barrier between ecological structures. Roads play a significant role in the city’s performance, and therefore also have great potential to make a positive contribution to the aforementioned problems. A road network will always be part of modern developed cities, so serious discussion about alternative design for road infrastructure within urban landscaped are now needed.

Before you lies the graduation project ‘Tree-Ways for Water Issues’. This project is made within the Urban Forestry Lab as part of the Flowscapes Graduation Studio of the master track Landscape Architecture at the TU Delft.

This graduation project for Zwolle investigates how the revision of the tree and blue structure, necessary for climate change, can be used simultaneously for a number of future spatial challenges for the city as a healthy living environment.
The motivation for this is the demand for more space for water storage and the improvement of greenery by adding and transforming it in conjunction with landscape and urban challenges.

Based on the morphological analysis of the entire city, current policy documents, research into water issues, and the landscape architectural concept of Urban Forestry, an Urban Forestry Plan has been created for the area enclosed by the city ring road, with a detailed plan for the neighborhood Kamperpoort, where greenery, traffic, urbanization, and water challenges converge.

This report presents a literature study, site research, and a design proposal for a new tree structure in Zwolle. The purpose of this project is to showcase how a potential forested structure in an urban environment can help alleviate waterproblems.

With nearly 70% of people living in cities by 2050 (United Nations, 2018), our urban environments are being put to the test, with more severe and frequent heat waves, droughts, floods, ongoing biodiversity loss, air pollution, and land subsidence. To sustain and increase the liveability and climate resilience of cities, the design and implementation of urban green infrastructure, with the urban forest as its backbone, is one of the most critical solutions (Spronken-Smith & Oke, 1998; Rosenzweig et al., 2015; Norton et al., 2015). However, the current indifference that runs through the veins of the anthropocentric political, economic, and socio-technical systems limits the urban forest from being a central part of the built environment.

As an attempt to put urban trees on the political agenda, the USDA Forest Service developed and launched the i-Tree software in 2006 to quantify the ecosystem services provided by urban trees (Nowak, 2020). In 2019, the first version became applicable to the Netherlands. This project is part of the three-year-long follow-up, i-Tree 2.0-NL, consisting of a consortium of 28 stakeholders to further elaborate the cooling performance, model growth curves, and synchronise the potential of the software for the stakeholders. This thesis concerns the latter.

The project starts with an understanding of the overarching transitions, exploring the direction in which the urban green domain should (and currently is) heading to calibrate the compass for change (see Figure 1). The newly proposed paradigm illustrates five societal shifts in how we relate to, integrate, account for, collaborate for and provide access to the urban forest. The ideal is to reposition the urban forest as critical infrastructure. The project is moving towards mapping the current system and processes of the consortium stakeholders, localising the role of the public green sector in urbanisation and discovering interrelationships. The different domains are strategically separated and examined in isolation to explore opportunities for integrating i-Tree into architectural, municipal and nursery processes. From this set of five opportunity areas, the concept of a management dashboard was selected for further development with the aim of linking municipal green space policy and green space management.

The ‘Urban Forest Portfolio’ is created, evolving the use of i-Tree from static assessments to a dynamic portfolio. The dashboard aims to integrate the urban forest lifecycle into planning, management and design, to track progress towards the realisation of long-term quantified targets, and to enable scenario evaluation for just compensation.

The integration of the proposition into the system is discussed, leading to eight concrete new practices and six speculations on a system scale, one of which is the establishment of the ‘Rijksgroenstaat’. Finally, the principles behind these new practices helped to make the new paradigm tangible, operationalise the transitions and bring into focus the parts specific to the domain of this project.

The project aims to discover the systemic granularity of the urban green domain, oscillating between abstract paradigms, concrete practice, and levels in between. A systemic strategy developed side by side with the stakeholders in the green sector.

The urban heat island effect refers to increased temperatures in highly developed urban areas and has negative impact for human activities and the social environment. This project aims to address this effect by integrating urban forests into the cityscape, while enhancing the living experience of residents.

The project focuses on analyzing cool vegetation characteristics in existing areas and incorporating them into subsequent designs to utilize trees’ cooling capabilities, in order to combating the urban heat island effect and promoting city climate mitigation ability.

Through analyzing the urban ground surface temperature and its relationship with trees, a positive correlation exists. The further design strategy considers tree types, leaf cooling rates, appropriate tree arrangements, and species selection, while addressing factors like shade coverage and adaptability to the urban environment.

Except involves improving existing climate weak areas, this project also formulating a climate mitigation urban development strategy around the urban forest for the city future development.

It’s important to note that the temperature discussed in this project refers specifically to urban surface temperature.

Throughout humanity, we have told each other stories to explain the world around us. Stories of myths, folklore and legends, used to connect us with our physical environment, their objects, events and processes. Nowadays we mostly use scientific stories to explore our landscape.

In landscape architecture we also use scientific stories to justify our designs. But even though these stories prove an urgency and credibility for our interventions in the landscape, they sometimes have difficulty connecting with people. Kagan, et al. (2019) argues that a more imaginary approach to narrative, instead of purely scientific, would help people connect to these stories.
In this graduation project this question is explored in the city of Delft in the Netherlands through the narrative approach of myths. The three most important spatial stories in Delft are dissected using the narrative realms as posed by Potteiger and Purinton (1998). These stories are then transformed into the imaginary narrative of myths. These stories are: The story of Delft and the water. The industrial story of Delft and the royal Yeast factory. The ecological story of the urban forests and nature in Delft. These myths formed the basis for an exploration into the landscape and their design.

I found that narrative realms allowed for an approachable method of reading and writing stories in the landscape. Understanding how the story and its parts are interacting in the landscape is crucial for us as designers, because this allows us to know exactly where and what we can change of the stories in the landscape.
The imaginary narrative of myths simplifies and abstracts the elements of the story to their most essential form while still respecting the technical depth behind them. I think that myths offer great potential to be a way of communicating complex stories and meaning to the common layman.

Cities are in an urgent need to adapt to the impacts of climate change, particularly, high temperatures and heat stress. Urban Forests are the most effective means of climate adaptation. However, the multiple benefits of urban trees are highly undervalued in the urban contexts. This project focuses on positioning urban trees as effective agents in improving the overall liveability of cities. The premise of the project lies in the fuzzy front end of the innovation process where the i-Tree technology is being redeveloped for its effective adoption in Netherlands. The goal of the project is to synchronize the technical potential of i-Tree as a tool and communicate the benefits of trees to multiple stakeholders in the process.

The overall design direction aims to address these problems through a series of interventions across the system of urban forestry. The concept introduces a public awareness campaign to bridge the knowledge gap between citizens and other stakeholders. The campaign is proposed to stretch over a duration of 10-11 months with several touchpoints along the way for citizens to get enthusiastic about the idea of maintaining and taking care of urban trees. The touchpoints aim to target events like Dutch Design week, Boomfeestdag (Tree Festival) and Springsnow festival. To make the awareness program desirable and interesting. A podcast series and a guide is developed called “How to befriend a Tree?”. A concept for the i-Tree Eco tool is proposed which communicates tree benefits in a way that is comprehensible by all the citizens. All the touch points lead the audience of the campaign to the digital platform of i-Tree Netherlands which helps people become caretakers of trees easily.

Owing to the unique landscape characteristics of Dutch lowland, forests in Randstad region are found being the result of the interaction between historical development and natural conditions. As cultural influences are genetically embedded in forest formation, the landscape approach to urban forestry provides a novel and wholistic lens looking at the interrelationship between trees and the cities, which enables deeper understandings of analysis and is possible to function as an integrated design tool.

South-west Randstad is facing the pressure of population growth and loss of natural landscape due to projected urban expansion in the following decades. Countermeasures of creating 52,000 new dwellings plus 5,000 hectors of forest by the year of 2040 are proposed in the development vision by the province Zuid-Holland. Therefore, this project aims at providing a spatial scheme that integrates future urban development and forest network that is rich and healthy.

The project starts with urban forest typological analysis, which concludes the interrelationships between underlayers and the urban forest pattens. By the typological analysis, health qualities are evaluated and compared between types that stand for different spatial qualities. The conclusion and comparison of the analysis enable further instrumental function of urban forest typology in landscape design.

The design part of this project envisions a regional urban forest network that consists of existing forest in urban context and an interurban forest which integrates the polycentricity and fragmented forest patches of the region. By the design approaches of structural experiential and dynamic program planning, a throughout design scheme is proposed, leading to desired spatial qualities which are carried out by utilisation of urban forest typology.

This graduation project tries to rediscover the importance of three concepts - urban forestry, infrastructure and aesthetics – and unites them with each other, in an attempt to develop a method to design ‘aesthetic urban forest infrastructure’ and discover the potential of such a method. Whereas urban forestry will need more space in our future cities, because of its positive influence on social, environmental and ecological aspects, the form and function of infrastructure are changing and this calls the need for a more integral way of designing it.

Aesthetic perception and experience are a new approach to look at this problem. It is hypothesised that combing these concepts will make it more feasible to create urban forestry and will make sure that future infrastructure will be more than just functional.

The site specific design is done on and along the Prinses Beatrixlaan in Delft, a road that currently creates a barrier between the neighbourhoods surrounding it.

By transforming some aspects of the private, car-oriented, infrastructure and creating a new east-west public transport connection along the Prinses Beatrixlaan, the road can be downgraded and lanes can be removed. This opens up a lot of space along the road, that can be used for urban forestry and better connections between surrounding neighbourhoods. Using four aesthetic categories – the sublime, beautiful, interesting and plain – this urban forest has been shaped to create an aesthetic experience for the users of different modes of transport that move along the road.

The design mainly consists out of three scales, those of the Prinses Beatrixlaan itself, of several location along the road and some details that elaborate on the aesthetic categories. Also a toolbox has been created that gives insight in how to work with these aesthetic categories on different themes.

Finally, a conclusion could be drawn that combining these three concepts – urban forestry, infrastructure and aesthetics - has a lot of potential, for both designers, visitors and nature itself. It gives more space for nature to develop freely, it makes infrastructure more integrated in the urban fabric and creates aesthetically pleasing spaces for people to enjoy their city.

This thesis reflects on the exclusion of refugees and other migrants from mobility in border space. The research suggests that, while society is becoming increasingly mobile, refugees and other ‘undesired movers’ are excluded from the otherwise unrestricted possibilities to move that have been established across national borders. Following the integration of spatial and social mobility as described by Vincent Kaufmann, it is suggested that enhancing the potentiality to be mobile for all can improve equal access to opportunities for people in border space. The thesis proposes an urban design strategy for the area along the Como (IT) – Chiasso (CH) border. The design moves away from nation-oriented planning, in which borders are seen as in-between spaces that should be crossed as efficiently as possible, towards a cosmopolitan perspective on planning and design as described by Ulrich Beck. The nation state is put forward as a malleable social construct that urban planners and designers should challenge, by planning and designing for various, hybrid territories that overlap, rather than for a singular national territory. The proposal puts forward border space as an integrative space that can accommodate inclusive mobility (i.e. to establish equitable access to opportunities by securing people’s potentiality to be mobile). Migration is framed as a permanent temporality and design measures are adapted to this notion. Three main design ambitions are experimented with through research by design: the development of affordable housing, diverse public spaces and slow traffic networks. Each of these interventions are expected to contribute to the liveability of border areas as well as access to social and economic opportunities, both for people who currently benefit from border crossing, as well as for those who are stuck in isolated places. To further highlight certain themes, two zoom-in projects explore the themes of designing an adaptive plan, flexible to various futures, and the theme of refugee integration. The first theme is researched through the development of a landscape in place of a current customs area. To research the second theme, a small scale refugee community is integrated into the urban border space envisioned. The ‘camp’ is designed according to the principles of incremental urbanism, meaning that the inhabitable spaces are designed to grow in quality over time and to form the foundation of what will later be part of the interwoven urban fabric.

In recent years, population ageing is becoming more and more of a challenge for cities to prepare for. Improving facilities for an all-age-friendly city can provide a healthy and supportive life for both the young and the old living in cities. One of the cities of interest in this is Amsterdam. Amsterdam has been exploring sustainable and healthy city development, such as garden city in the 1920s. In Amsterdam Noord, a central area of Amsterdam, the post-industrial IJ bank and the attached garden villages currently need renovation. Amsterdam Noord is the potential site for an all-age-friendly development. Amsterdam Noord was built with the concept of garden city, where urban forest is used mainly as green buffer and formed entities from industrial nuisances. However, since the industry is moving out, the existing urban forest becomes barriers for connectivity and undermines the dike-polder landscape of Noord. Thus, this project takes urban forest as a key element to renovate Amsterdam Noord and aims to explore an urban forest framework for Amsterdam Noord to be all-age-friendly and to develop the Noord identity as a dike city and a garden city.
Firstly, theoretical study is executed in topics of urban identity, all-age-friendly city, and urban forest to conclude a theoretical framework of restorative and identity-narrative green network. Secondly, based on the theoretical framework, site study is executed in topics of urban fabric, site visit of the dike, and urban forest tradition. Thirdly, these studies provide site-speci c strategies to build Amsterdam Noord with a restorative and identity-narrative plan, to develop the all-age-friendly-ness and its identity. As the result, this project proposes a multi-scale plan for Amsterdam Noord. In city scale (L), Amsterdam Noord is divided into 3 zones, with different urbanization plans, to integrate into the expanding Amsterdam center as well as preserve and develop its identity. In green system scale (M), a multi-functional and restorative urban forest network is designed with the old dike as its spine, to improve connectivity within and beyond Amsterdam Noord. In green space scale (S), urban forest places are designed to offer sensorial experiences related to identity elements, as well as provide all-age-friendly space and program for Noord. The results of this project will provide a new view about how Amsterdam Noord can be developed into a future garden city, which is all-age-friendly, green, and related to its own identity as a dike city.

This thesis project, as part of the urban forest places graduation lab, focuses on the relationship between urban environments and the healing aspects of nature. Urban environments affect our body and state of mind, and are not always beneficial for our mental health. Landscape and urban design can do something about this. But the question is how? The city of Amsterdam is used as a location to investigate this. The city is surrounded with a diverse metropolitan landscape, which enters far into the city in the form of green wedges, also called the Scheggen. Amsterdam has a long history in investing in green spaces during urban expansions. Since the sixteenth century every period of growth has been accompanied by planned investment in green spaces. First by planting trees along the canals in the sixteenth century. Than by creating city parks in the nineteenth century. The existing green structure was planned during the General Expansion Plan in 1934, made by van Eesteren. The purpose of the General Expansion Plan was not only to expand urban development but also to create a balance between city and green space. This green structure ensures that every resident of Amsterdam can reach a green space within ten minutes, even from the heart of the city centre. Nowadays, the city of Amsterdam has to deal with the following problems. Firstly, the big pressure on the housing market, is forcing the city to densify as well as expand outside of its current urban borders, which makes the Scheggen vulnerable. Not only densification is a problem, but also the fact that more and more people suffer from mental health issues, such as stress, burn-outs, anxiety and depression. Of course we all need a little bit of stress, but if people cannot restore from too much stress for a prolonged period of time, their health will be negatively affected in many ways. Additionally, the city also has to deal with a number of other complex issues, such as climate change issues and biodiversity loss. This has led to the main research question: How can a forest park be designed in such a way that it contributes to reducing mental stress in an urban environment? The findings from the literature study provided evidence that a forest park can contribute to reduce mental stress. Visiting or viewing a forest has a positive effect on people’s mental health and recovering from stress, especially for people from urban environments. The literature study, together with a thorough site research, formed the site specific design principles for the design intervention. The result of this thesis is a design proposal for an urban forest park for Amsterdam Sloterdijk. The project shows that the design proposal for a forest park not only contributes to reduce mental stress in an urban environment, but also increases biodiversity, and acts as a climate buffer by managing rainwater and cooling the environment.

Currently cities are becoming more densified, resulting in overpopulated areas with fewer green spaces. Together with this rising health care expenses caused by mental health and current environmental design questions such as water nuisance, heath island effect, densification demands and creating a healthy living environment, leads to questioning current city structures. This thesis rethinks existing city structures, by creating a new way of designing cities which respond to current environmental design questions and offers restorative nature. It explores methods of creating restorative nature and by researching restorative theories and their affiliation to movement and bodily experience. Movement acts as a tool for designing with an eye-level - and sensorial experience which are both crucial for perceiving nature and its beneficial effects. To design a new city structure, a historical overview is created to research healthy living environments and how these can be spatially recognised in landscape structures, urban plans and ideal city movements. The Garden City movement is used as a starting point for the research. From this research the Urban Forest Movement is designed, working through three scales: the city/region, a main structure of the city and the site. The movement focusses on creating healthy living environments by reacting to current environmental design questions and by emphasising the importance of how green spaces are experienced. The generic model is applied to the city of Den Haag, testing it in the process. The site was chosen because of its history and its different relation to the surrounding landscape due to the lack of a city wall. To apply the Movement, it is adapted to fit the design brief that is concluded from an analysis of the site. A vision is created for the city/region scale that focusses on the main spatial framework, densification and green spaces. One of these elements of the spatial framework is further elaborated, zooming in to the line scale. To implement the ideas on the lowest scale on how to create restorative green spaces which help to create healthy living environments, a design on eye-level perspective and movement is made. These crucial design methods are used to design a park along the line. Here elevations, buildings, water structures, materialisation and a planting plan are used to create various bodily experiences through movement. Three different movements are introduced in the park; Gliding, Grazing and Wandering, offering different levels of emerging in nature and experiencing its restorative effects. Finally, conclusions and limitations of the thesis are discussed and evaluated to provide future suggestions.

The New Dutch Waterline (NDW) was built to defend Holland. It comprised of a system of waterworks for inundating and military elements for troops. This study will focus on the part around Utrecht of the New Dutch Waterline, one which is in urban fringe and faces urbanization.The main research question is whether it is possible to transform the language (historical image, the composition grammar and spatial features) of the New Dutch Waterline into a functional and narrative framework of urbanization. Specifically, the design is aimed to provide a framework for the urbanization, which can make the visible and invisible heritage legible (represent historical stories and the new characters of heritage colored by the complex environments) and solve the urban problems (de-fragment and resilient water management). In this case, landscape plays the role as language and machine at the same time.

In the wake of climate change and rising water levels the city of Dordrecht is looking for alternative ways to prepare for coming threats other than keep raising the current dikes. In an exploration a suggestion is made to use the southern side of the island as a buffer for excess water. This research takes that suggestion a step further and upgrades it towards a room for the river project.

In contrast to normal room for the river projects this case is located on a city border where the city even has wishes to expand. Within this research the city dynamics that have implications for the dike in the room for the river plan are identified. A research by design process was aimed at working towards a solution to account for these city dynamics as well as future water safety needs. This resulted in a framework for the placement of a number of mounds. Mounds that are scaled up to be able to accommodate different types of developments as well as be able to have integrated solutions for self reliance and sustainability.

Thesis in which a spatial strategy is proposed to structure the transition of the harbour of Rotterdam as an oil harbour to a harbour beyond oil.

When planning a new intervention in the city with a complex and sometimes violent past, such as Sarajevo, the aspect of time is particularly important. The blooming of a landscape has not the same speed of the fast-changing urban conditions. There is an absence of synchronization. Agriculture and agricultural practices help shortening this gap, giving immediate meaning to these spaces, and offering a glimpse on the time passing. The goal is to make the space useful and meaningful, with the resources already present and very few time. Students and people from the neighborhood can engage with the soil from the first moment, work with it, try new techniques and learn from it. The area becomes a symbol for experimentation. The city is given an enclave, a cultural reservoir where experiments become useful not only to the students (in this case) but to the community in general. The spaces for agriculture are alternated to open lawns and public areas where inhabitants can spend time. In this way, experimentation is showcased to people and is likely to spread and rise interest.

The site is, therefore, an open laboratory, immediately readable and comprehensible to all. The urban field is now a privileged area for diverse research in a public manner.
This originates a new type of evocative space, an intermediate landscape between agriculture and public space, that may sparkle playful social practices, shared between different groups. The main goal underlying this type of space is firstly aesthetic but also scientific.
Meanwhile, the surrounding area is planted with a growing forest resulting into a large intervention of reforestation. The produced urban space, this micro forest for agricultural experimentations set himself in a new relationship with nature. On one hand, we are in front of a process of re-appropriation by nature of the human space, on the other hand, man is engaging with the soil to benefit from it.
Nor man, nor nature is now prevailing but we find ourselves in front of a process of action and reaction. The man observes and allows nature to develop and reacts to it only when its own survival sphere is touched.

The site becomes now a metaphor for a laboratory dedicated to the relationship between man and its territory, in order to research how to reach a situation of balance.