This paper examines thick mapping as a design-driven research method applied in the educational setting of an international architectural design workshop. The workshop brings together 45 students at different levels and fields of education, academics, and practitioners in a collaborative exercise to co-create new knowledge about mobility at railway stations. Participants reinterpret stations as architectures of interchanges through three thematic lenses of investigation: articulation (flows), light & safety (perception), and interfaces (interaction with users). By combining mixed-media drawings with thick mapping practices, the workshop explores the visible and invisible relationships between mobility infrastructure, architectural space, and human perceptions in stations. The contribution of this paper is threefold: 1- to demonstrate how thick mapping can reveal new spatial narratives, creative potentials, and constraints that define mobility architecture and its experience; 2- to illustrate how it provides a deeper understanding of stations by visualising interactions between multiple scales, systems, modalities, agents, and flows; 3- to show how it supports co-design across different disciplines. Thick mapping thus emerges as a critical collaborative method of production linking research, learning, and design in addressing the complexities of mobility architecture.

Society is increasingly tech-driven, with AI, automation, IoT, and MaaS reshaping daily life. Mobility hubs like transit stations prioritise efficiency and cost-effectiveness, using digital platforms for personalised travel. Competition among private providers fosters innovation, reducing costs and overshadowing public transit. Digital twins predict and manage congestion, ensuring smooth operations and controlled maintenance. Hubs now feature flexible, modular designs that reconfigure in real-time, optimising operations and enabling a decentralised, sprawled urban fabric. Major hubs such as airports and central stations, including hyperloops for long-distance travel, accommodate automated vehicles, offering on-demand services that cut wait times and improve efficiency. The shift from predetermined shuttle routes to more dynamic systems aligns with car-free streets and residential zones. Small hubs, strategically placed in these areas, become essential for providing convenient and efficient access to mobility services, ensuring that people and goods can move seamlessly within these pedestrian-friendly environments without relying on private cars or fixed transit schedules. Goods distribution relies on micromobility, drones, and automated systems. Urban air mobility solutions serve as premium services in congested centres, transforming hubs into high-tech innovation centres but raising concerns about affordability and inclusivity. While these advancements maximise space and efficiency, they risk prioritising data providers' interests over public welfare. The real-time reconfigurations demand significant energy, and the increased modularity risks rendering existing stations obsolete, necessitating retrofitting to avoid abandonment. […]

The concept of sustainable development introduced issues of urban growth and climate change to the domains of geography, urban planning and architecture, becoming major components in research, teaching and practice. The IPCC reports have heightened awareness on climate change and put pressure on the need for action to bring about real-world changes to the built environment. Climatologists note that global urbanisation has greatly influenced the spatial distribution and intensity of carbon emissions and is having a negative impact on climate change. However, they emphasise that well-planned cities with densely populated centres produce numerous benefits if good access to infrastructure and services is guaranteed (energy efficiency and air quality in particular). In this context, Transit Oriented Development becomes a key concept for sustainable urbanization, and Geodesign gains stage as a method to support design decisions in such projects, across domains.

Design principles are widely used in the design field, yet some remain visionary rather than grounded in real-world applications. Assessing their effectiveness is therefore essential before implementation. This study focuses on a set of visionary design principles intended to promote the flexible use of railway station areas: (1) Ensuring event visibility by aligning paths and spaces; (2) Incorporating reconfigurable elements and reconfiguration-supportive layouts; (3) Establishing high-quality connections at different scales; (4) Adopting scattered layouts for high capacity or vibrancy; (5) Prioritizing core spaces for humans instead of vehicles. This study aims to address the gap in validating these design principles. Recognizing the potential of jointly employing research-by-design and agent-based simulation, this study presents a major research question: How effective are these design principles, as demonstrated through research-by-design (RbD) and agent-based simulation (ABS)? Methodologically, it first applies the design principles to Station Xtreme and generates multiple design proposals, then simulates the generated proposals, followed by assessments and reflections. The results suggest that the principles are generally effective, though limitations emerged: for example, quality connections may demand greater investment and space, while scattered layouts can increase wayfinding difficulty and operational complexity. This study contributes to the growing body of design knowledge by validating these flexible-use principles. It also introduces a transferable conceptual framework that integrates RbD and ABS, offering a novel methodological approach for testing other visionary design principles.

Despite growing interest in human-building interaction (HBI) studies to improve performance and comfort in building operations, existing architectural design and representation methods primarily focus on static layouts and material forms, overlooking the spatio-temporal, invisible characteristics of interactions. This paper proposes a novel visualization method grounded on affordance theory, dynamic network graphs to computationally model HBI in Grasshopper. Using a multipurpose educational space as a case study, the study illustrates a multilayered workflow that visualizes material components, immaterial affordances, and dynamic multimodal interactions in three programmatic scenarios. Resulting representations and animations spatialize the footprint, distribution, and modalities of afforded interactions in relationship with occupant patterns. This scenario-based, computationally-driven HBI model supports the qualitative assessment and strategic allocation of sensing, actuation, and control interfaces, identifying spatial opportunities and challenges. This study offers an architecturally informed HBI visualization framework to enhance interdisciplinary communication and critical early-stage decisions in designing responsive environments.

Student visions on TU Delft MedTech Building for Education & Research in Waalhaven, Rotterdam.

Aims
Railway station areas can play a crucial role in promoting sustainable development if integrated with cities and be fluctuation-responsive through effective urban design. However, during the design stage, assessing the station areas' performance, of which user satisfaction is indicative, is challenging due to methodological limitations. Agent-based simulation (ABS) is promising as it can link spatial features with agents' behavior features. This research questions to what extent ABS can help assess the urban design of station areas.

Methods
This paper adopts the user pyramid as the theoretical framework, which outlines five types of user needs: safety, speed, ease, comfort, and experience. The paper selects indicators linking satisfaction and spatial features at the district and building levels. These indicators are measured in the simulation of the station system using digital tools, including MassMotion and Python scripts. The theory, indicators, and tools, in combination, serve as an assessment framework. Rotterdam Central Station is used as a case to demonstrate how the framework works.

Results
The framework is capable of assessing design alternatives by identifying changes in user satisfaction. It can be applied on the district level (at a scale of 250 m) with substantial details to inform design decision-making, and it is useful during the design stage when only limited data is available. This paper strengthens the scientific knowledge of railway station areas through the multidisciplinary literature review that translates user needs for urban design use, and it advances the digital means to visualize user satisfaction affected by design.

Mobility is vital for societal wellbeing, economic growth, social inclusion, and access to essential amenities. However, the current system faces significant challenges, including environmental impact, unequal access, and safety concerns. […]

Depuis l’avenement de l’expression ≪developpement durable≫, les enjeux de la croissance urbaine et du changement climatique sont devenus des elements majeurs de la recherche et de l’enseignement dans toutes les ecoles de geographie, d’urbanisme et d’architecture du monde. Les rapports du Groupe d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’evolution du climat (GIEC) renforcent la prise de conscience de l’urgence a agir et mettent la pression sur l’importance de la recherche-action pour modifier concretement le cadre urbain. Les climatologues notent que l’urbanisation planetaire a grandement influence la distribution spatiale et l’intensite des emissions de carbone, et qu’elle affecte negativement le changement climatique. Pour autant, ils soulignent que des metropoles bien planifiees, avec des centres densement peuples, produisent des benefices nombreux si une bonne accessibilite aux infrastructures et services est garantie (economies d’energie, qualite de l’air, notamment). […]

With the growing demand for sustainable accountability, the European Directive 2014/24/EU (EU 2014) pushes architects to deliver Building Information Models (BIM) as a part of procurement processes for public buildings. In the Netherlands, BIM model data is relevant to the building permitting process, which involves an environmental performance calculation (MPG). This assessment takes into consideration the embodied carbon of materials in a building. Although this analysis is performed by a qualified expert in late design phases, architects benefit from integrating carbon data in early design decision-making. Design methods supported by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) values are needed before involving expert collaborators, and not only when applying for a building permit. The existing carbon assessment tools require detailed data from BIM models, which are often not available at early design phases. Simplified tools have been discussed in theory, and explored in their potential applications, however, there lacks scientific literature discussing the hurdles designers face in their attempt to create such tools in practice, for their internal use throughout early design phases. This paper focuses on the architecture professional practice and design methods supported by digital and computational technologies, regarding embodied carbon data. It investigates the challenges in integrating embodied carbon data in the design workflow, through the development of a digital tool made by designers, for designers. This paper conducts an empirical investigation within a Rotterdam-based architecture office, with a broad portfolio in BIM usage and public building projects, to identify and categorize the factors affecting carbon data integration into the design workflows. It proposes a taxonomy of challenges within the architecture office, to better communicate the designer's needs to the data providers and software developers with architects as a target user. Amongst the bottlenecks encountered are: access to data (data inclusiveness), data literacy and connecting data usage with design decision-making.

With the growing demand for sustainable accountability, the European Directive 2014/24/EU (EU 2014) pushes architects to deliver Building Information Models (BIM) as a part of procurement processes for public buildings. In the Netherlands, BIM model data is relevant to the building permitting process, which involves an environmental performance calculation (MPG). This assessment takes into consideration the embodied carbon of materials in a building. Although this analysis is performed by a qualified expert in late design phases, architects benefit from integrating carbon data in early design decision-making. Design methods supported by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) values are needed before involving expert collaborators, and not only when applying for a building permit. The existing carbon assessment tools require detailed data from BIM models, which are often not available at early design phases. Simplified tools have been discussed in theory, and explored in their potential applications, however, there lacks scientific literature discussing the hurdles designers face in their attempt to create such tools in practice, for their internal use throughout early design phases. This paper focuses on the architecture professional practice and design methods supported by digital and computational technologies, regarding embodied carbon data. It investigates the challenges in integrating embodied carbon data in the design workflow, through the development of a digital tool made by designers, for designers. This paper conducts an empirical investigation within a Rotterdam-based architecture office, with a broad portfolio in BIM usage and public building projects, to identify and categorize the factors affecting carbon data integration into the design workflow. It proposes a taxonomy of challenges within the architecture office, to better communicate the designer’s needs to the data providers and software developers with architects as a target user. Amongst the bottlenecks encountered are: access to data inclusiveness), data literacy and connecting data usage with design decision-making.

What does your local station mean to you? For some, it represents opportunity: the chance to go anywhere. Others might actively dislike the noise, the crowds, the aesthetic... Or perhaps you never think too deeply about stations. But they definitely affect you, according to Dr. Manuela Triggianese. “At stations, all scales come together: from the building and its elements, to the neighbourhood, the city, region, even country. They are involved in every aspect of urban life.”

The LCS DATA-HUB is an interactive report for the LCS (Low-Carbon Stations) Workshop. The workshop held in March 12th of 2024, in TU Delft, gathered experts from academia, industry and public authorities to exchange knowledge and experiences pertinent to the integration of data (embodied carbon) in design of the built environment.

The event “Low-Carbon Station Workshop: A roadmap for integrating carbon data in cross-scale station design" was organized by PhD Candidate Halina Veloso e Zarate and Assistant Professor Dr. Manuela Triggianese, as methodological support to one of three empirical investigations of Zarate's PhD research.

The workshop aimed to explore the integration of data about embodied carbon in construction materials through low-carbon design methodologies for architecture and urban design, with a specific focus on stations and station areas.

In this platform, you can find the documentation of the event and navigate through the data that supported the hands-on design case of Lombardijen Station.

This article explores the pivotal role of design as a decision-making tool within multi-stakeholder collaborations, focusing on the early phases of the Rotterdam Central Railway Station and its surroundings project. Spanning from 1996, when it gained National Key Project status, to 2007, when construction commenced, this period precedes the preliminary design, during which the design process becomes the primary method of collaboration among multiple stakeholders, including designers and clients involved in the station area’s development.

After introducing the post-war reconstruction of the station area and the ‘Platform Zero’ experiment, this article defines three key stages of design in the initial phase, each of which left a distinct mark on the station project. These stages are:

– From 1996 to 2001: Design for political communication.

– From 2002 to 2004: Parallel design.

– From 2004 to 2007: Design co-creation and integration.

To provide a comprehensive view of the design’s development, this article includes insights from conversations with architects and planners engaged in the process. In a dynamic exchange between various stakeholders and designers, the evolution of Rotterdam Central Station’s design reveals how political decisions have been informed by thorough design studies, offering a platform for robust discourse on critical issues.

The book is the result of the course ‘City of Innovations Project’ at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, led by the group of Complex Projects at the Department of Architecture. ‘Transit stations: sub-centres in Rotterdam Zuid’ is the theme of the course running in spring 2022. It is connected to the research project Walk-In (acronym of Widening sustAinable mobiLity networKs: Impact on Nodes) financed by NWO and part of the KIEM GoCi program. Students presented their research and design scenarios to the project partners in April 2022 and they learned from their expertise throughout the course. Those are the City of Rotterdam, Delta Metropool Association, De Zwarte Hond, PosadMaxwan, Mecanoo, Bureau Spoorbouwmeester, I&M, Prorail with the collaboration of the University of Gustave Eiffel. By doing so, students contributed to the objective of Walk-In: to investigate the potential of suburban stations in transition in the context of the low car inner city of Rotterdam and to develop generic guidelines and spatial solutions for the integration of sustainable mobility with public space and mixed urban functions and services.

Introduction: In China, Station-City Integration is proposed by the design academy in China to solve problems and add value. This research focuses on urban design for the redevelopment of Old Major Railway Stations in Megacities in China.

Problems & Goals: From our focused cases, two problems are discovered: Stuckness and congestion on peak days, Space underuse on normal days. Two goals are proposed correspondingly: Mobility Resilience and Public Space Flexibility.

Knowledge Gaps: Theoretical and practical knowledge are lacking for the proposed goals. The component words of the goals all have rich meanings. Some of them have related assessment tools and design recommendations.

Research Questions: For urban design research and practice, how can Mobility Resilience and Public Space Flexibility be defined, assessed, and designed?

Deliverables: The deliverables will be Concept Definitions, Assessment Frameworks, and Design Principles. The Concept Definitions offer researchers a new way to see the Station City problems. The Assessment Frameworks offer researchers a new tool to assess the Station City problems through different dimensions. It can also be used for evaluations during the iterative design process. The Design Principles can be used for the scheme establishment.

Methods: For Concept Definitions, papers about mobility, resilience, public space, and flexibility were examined to propose definitions. For Assessment Framework, available technologies & data will be tested. For Design Principles, case studies of the best practices will be conducted.

Relevance: Scientifically, the Problem Identifications show a creative way of framing research problems between specification and generalization. These Concept Definitions show a solid way of transferring knowledge from other disciplines to urban design fields. Societally, the Problems Identifications and Concept Definitions set a starting point for practitioners to take action. The Assessment Frameworks and Design Principles are practical tools for designers.