A possible consequence of the contemporary re-evaluation of Dutch flood and water management strategies could be a return to more naturalistic estuarine conditions within the Southwest Delta. This has the potential to re-animate natural systems and habitats as well as bolster cultural connections to, and across, this landscape. But how could this re-naturalisation benefit the urban landscapes and economies that negotiate the transition between one of Europe’s densest urban, industrial and logistics corridors (from Brussels and Antwerp to Rotterdam) and the equally congested territory of the southern portion of the North Sea? Could a new spatial typology of augmented ecologies prompt a re-orientation of both naturalistic and urban ecosystems within the delta towards greater social, economic and ecological efficacy and resilience?

In the challenge of climate change, energetically improving the existing residential buildings offers a way to reduce the CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions of the built environment. In the Netherlands, housing associations own and maintain almost a third (2.3 million housing units) of the entire Dutch housing stock and could therefore play a significant role in the reduction of CO2 emissions. To come to this reduction, housing associations first have to choose which housing unit they would like to energetically improve, followed by the decision of when and how. In this decision- making process, they utilize data they have generated themselves to make an informed decision. However, the role of data that is generated by another person or organization is unclear, and even less clear is the role of open data in this decision- making process. Against this background, this thesis explores the role of open data in the decision-making process by housing associations in the energetic improvement of housing units. It studies the approaches housing associations apply in the energetic improvement of housing units, stakeholders of housing associations in the energetic improvement, possibilities and limitations of the available and relevant data to the decision-making process, desirable features of the conventional decision-making support systems and unconventional yet relevant decision-making support systems regarding the energetic improvement by housing associations. The data is collected by reviewing policy documents, conducting and transcribing sixteen semi-structured interviews and observing decision making support systems. The research shows that open data could play an enabling role in the decision-making process regarding the energetic improvement. It informs housing associations about the plans of stakeholders, what is happening in the vicinity of their real estate and explore pairing opportunities. It is very useful to housing associations in a first analysis but might fall short for more extensive analysis. Thus, open data enables housing associations to start using another person or organization’s data in their decision-making process. What is of importance for data analysis is the housing association’s primary data and its data quality. Anyone can analyze open data but analyzing open data in combination with the housing association’s primary data is what makes it valuable in the decision- making process regarding the energetic improvement. In the end, it is not the open data itself which will cause a reduction in CO2 emissions. It is the collaboration between stakeholders in the heat transition which will. The necessary collaboration in the heat transition not only requires open data, but also the acknowledgement and involvement of stakeholders in the decision-making process regarding the energetic improvement.

The primary aim of this project is to investigate an approach to integrate the study of CE with urban spatial structure, then form a tool to assist the procedure of decision-making by analyzing empirical data.

This research focuses on the relation between the compact city and urban life. Literature suggests that a holistic approach to further compacting a city means also integrating urban life qualities. This is currently lacking in Western European practice due to pragmatism, decentralisation and neo-liberal plot-led development. This while both concepts are crucial for sustainable cities. Therefore an optimization of their relation is needed in order to make better choices regarding densification. The result is a research-by-design that researches three distinct themes that are related to incorporating urban life. These are urban volumes, urban network and urban quality. The Dutch densification site ‘Central Innovation District’ in the Hague is used as a case study for applying the found design principles. In order to measure and predict the character of spaces, modern modes of measuring the city are used. Most prominently are the methods of space syntax angular integration, betweenness shortest path algorithms and the spacematrix GSI/FSI density ratios. Moreover, because of its focus on the human scale, 3D modelling is a crucial part of the research. The research concludes that the compact city and urban life can be integrated with eachother by following a set of principles for volumes, slow traffic networks and urban quality. What is needed is a broader overview of what attractors and pedestrian flows will emerge in a plan area. The associated centralities can then be used to shape the volumetric properties in such a way that significant densification can be achieved while urban life values like human scale stay assured.

Cities inhabit the most people per unit of land surface, and all these people have the need and desire to move around. On top of that, vast amounts of goods are transported into and within these cities. The extensive transportation of people and goods causes a negative influence on the environment and a transition to sustainable mobility is therefore required. Many niche-level sustainable mobility initiatives are started with the goal to support this transition. However, several of these initiatives get stranded in their process of being implemented in the mobility regime. Numerous studies have established on which aspects of mobility the most can be achieved regarding sustainability, but there is limited research performed into the inhibiting factors for sustainable mobility initiatives. This study aims at identifying the factors that negatively affect the potential influence of sustainable mobility initiatives on a regime-level transition to sustainable mobility in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region, as well as identifying the inhibiting factors that are the probable cause of the stranding of these initiatives. In this context, niche initiatives are defined as actors (or groups of actors) aiming to implement a small-scale innovation or service, intended for a specific purpose, into the mobility regime. The regime in this research is the current market field and operation of mobility in Amsterdam. Case studies of initiatives implemented in Amsterdam and interviews with persons connected to these cases were performed to discover inhibiting factors. The interviews were semi-structured by six categories of aspects based on academic literature. The results showed recurring patterns of the need for financial, governmental and societal support by the initiatives. These results indicate that the three dominant aspects of support required by these initiatives are: sufficient financial capacity to develop and sustain the initiative with its required complementary technologies and infrastructure, governmental support and institutional embedding and societal support caused by sustainability awareness. On this basis, future initiative starters must inform and prepare themselves for these aspects to support the implementation of their initiative and governmental parties must participate in supporting these initiatives in order to support the sustainable mobility transition.

Cities never function in isolation but as nodes in overarching systems characterised by flows of goods, people, and information. To fully understand the evolution of cities, a relational approach is needed, which investigates cities in relation to other cities and urban regions. While a significant part of urban system research has focused on aspects such as the concentration of populations and economic activities, the understanding of the actual networks connecting cities and their impact is still limited. However, the required data is notoriously difficult to obtain. This dissertation contributes to knowledge on the relationship between cities in the Netherlands by exploiting – in novel ways – three data sources: web pages mentioning cities, local historical newspapers, and administrative registers. After providing an overview of the systems of cities literature, the toponym co-occurrences method is explored. This method aims at identifying patterns of relations between cities in a systematic way by looking at the co-mentions of cities in text documents (here in web pages). Using text as data appeared as a great direction for studying urban systems, and elements from this first exploration are used in the next section of the thesis where the past dynamics of the Dutch urban system is reconstructed using information flows retrieved from digitised historical newspapers. Finally in a last empirical part, the potential of information from individual-level registers about professional and residential trajectories for measuring relations between places at multiple spatial scales is investigated. This measure is then used to reveal the nested hierarchy of functional regions in the Netherlands. @en