This graduation project aims to address the pressing issues of climate change, the population growth and population shifts, as well as the housing crisis that is simultaneously created, in the Dutch context. As cities in the Netherlands are facing shortages in housing, more and more strategies are being created on a National and a Regional level to tackle this problem. In order to build more homes, less space need to be given to nature in the urban environments. As a result, cities and their inhabitants, are vulnerable against the effects of climate change. The quality of life shrinks, although the environment to live in grows.

Zwolle, is one of these cities: as the capital of the province Overijssel, the city is prompt to grow in the next decades, and is already conducting strategies to accommodate the population growth. A number of strategies and plans have been created to address the housing crisis, and yet, the natural elements come as “additions” to them. More people in houses means also more people in the public space. So how do we create green vibrant public spaces when the priorities lie in tackling the housing demand?

This graduation project is in the search of a new strategy for integrating nature into Zwolle’s urban environment, by using the “3-30-300” rule by Dr. Cecil Konijnendijk. This tool provides simple and measurable guidelines to integrate green spaces into the city, to provide better quality of life and create climate resilient environments.

Focusing on the Kamperpoort neighbourhood of Zwolle, which is susceptible to the effects of climate change (Urban Heat Island Effect, flooding probability, etc.), due to lack of accessible green spaces, the projects aims to create a design framework that prioritises the human-nature relationship, fostering the creation of a city that is healthy, liveable and resilient.

For the last decades, technologies, new agricultural trade policies, environmental restrictions, high pressure through economic competition in combination with a sharp competition of land lead to the development of intensive farming. As a result, patchy landscapes have been replaced by monofunctional, homogeneous agricultural landscapes that fragment natural landscapes and take away natural and cultural diversity. The consequences of the processes of fragmentation and homogenization are both socio-economic and landscape-ecological and cause biodiversity loss and social injustice among farmers.
Through changing existing paradigms about nature conservation, this project suggests an alternative approach for understanding possible interrelations between nature and agricultural practices. By reintroducing concepts about commons, a synergy can be found that compliments natural connectivity and agricultural landscapes through the establishment of a regenerative agro-ecological network that connects biotopes in a multi-functional way using current agricultural parcels and natural zones. This newly introduced Common Ground network produces a new farming method in which agricultural practice has a temporal character and is a continuous modifiable process. In this way, the vision makes use of the dual crisis as a solution rather than seeing it as the source of the problems.
The Commons also resemble a new way of practising agriculture, in which land, knowledge, resources and financial risks are shared among farmers in a socially just way. In addition, these shared landscapes reflect on the social context in which farmers are considered as environmental stewards who share some of the responsibility for an ecologically balanced system.