This research project reimagines planning through a critically reflexive and decolonial perspective. It positions the Western planning tradition within the oppressive structures of coloniality and neoliberalism, shaping the role of planning in the marginalisation of vulnerable communities. Modern planning is largely a product of the Western knowledge system and culture. Through its focus on rational and ‘objective’ knowledge inherently excludes many Indigenous knowledges and the lived experiences of vulnerable citizens. Due to the normalised application and adulation of the Western knowledge system, the colonial inheritance of an unjust built environment, and the increasing domination of neoliberal policy, these dynamics of exclusion remain unchanged.

As the Western planning tradition continuously proves to be unfit to meaningfully address the structural injustices in our built environment and society, because it is situated within the oppressive societal structures that cause these injustices, this thesis explores alternative approaches to planning to create just outcomes, such as humanist urbanism, feminist urbanism, Indigenous knowledges, and traditional planning practices.

This research bridges the gap between theory and practice by continuously connecting decolonial planning theory with the case of Old Fadama, an informal settlement in Accra, Ghana. Through critical reflexivity on the role of the planner and planning methodology, and empirical research in Old Fadama, a decolonial planning meta-methodology is proposed. The meta-methodology centres embodied and experienced knowledge in the planning process, promotes community-led and autonomous planning, and regards critical reflexivity as a key planning activity for Western planners working in non-Western contexts. The research itself is an important body of self-reflexivity and displays the transformation in thinking and acting that is necessary for decolonial planning.

The planning practices and spatial outcomes of Old Fadama are reimagined through this decolonial planning meta-methodology. By viewing Old Fadama as an example of community-led planning and governance rooted in decoloniality, our understanding of urban informality and urban planning can be transformed. The thesis contains a set of radical imagination exercises that visualise possible spatial outcomes of a decolonial planning approach that goes beyond the formal-informal binary and towards a just and decolonial future for Old Fadama. ... Read more

Energy price fluctuations have been occurring more frequently as global insecurity rises and the energy transition continues. Households have reacted to these energy price increases in diverse ways, many by reducing their home energy consumption habits. Depending on factors like household income, construction date, quality of dwelling and the significance of the price increase, these energy consumption reductions range in severity. Severe energy price increases can result in energy poverty, a situation where a households’ permittable energy consumption is too little to suffice the households’ needs. Effects of energy poverty on the indoor temperatures of dwellings can be quite drastic, with indoor temperatures as low as 13 degrees becoming a reality for households which are affected heavily. Current strategies and interventions which aim towards reducing energy poverty have been inefficient, as they fail to structurally solve the issue and focus too much on temporary financial aid. In order to increase the effectiveness of these strategies, a clear definition of energy poverty is needed, and focus should shift towards providing case-level assessments of energy poverty within buildings. At the same
time, energy efficiency interventions applied in these strategies need to be reviewed under different criteria. Not just energy efficiency, but also thermal comfort and financial efficiency are crucial in identifying the optimal interventions for a given case. The research provides a framework for the assessment of energy poverty within a building case. Besides this, review criteria are constructed to analyse interventions on their effectiveness in reducing energy poverty. With the use of the Poptahof Noord case study, the effectiveness of different existing interventions is simulated. The research discusses the factors which influence the effectiveness of these interventions and provides examples of how the proposed assessment method can be used to successfully assess and decrease energy poverty in cases. ... Read more

The Mediterranean Basin – defined and restricted by its own boundness – embodies a mesocosm for the network of Critical Zones containing in its dense space all the fragilities, urgencies and uncertainties that characterize living in the 21st century, while being the world’s most appropriated, militarized and instrumentalized sea. In its deep – and often intentionally obscured oceanic space – the notion of coexistence is constantly negotiated through overlapping (re)territorialization processes, accelerated climatic or geological transformations, and increased interaction between its complex human and more-than-human assemblages, especially in light of the emerging climate crisis. As the focus of urbanization shifts from the land to the sea, the question of sympoiesis and response-ability becomes central for the establishment of a counter paradigm for the worlding of the sea; opposed to the prevailing processes of domination, expulsion and colonization that accompany anthropogenic practices in the state-regime nexus. This counter paradigm arises from the understanding of borderscapes as critical in-between conditions of proximities, intensities, and assimilations whose investigational mapping can induce soft territorial acts and practices of care.

In this context, the aim of this thesis is twofold: firstly, to critically map the Mediterranean Basin painting its fragmentary portrait as a sociocultural product of interconnected and conflicting political, cultural, historical and environmental forces – while simultaneously revealing situated traces of immanence and resistance – and secondly, to experiment with soft territorial acts and practices of care in the process of deterritorialization and creation of a new common ground for the neglected Mediterranean human and more-than-human entities. To do so, the thesis project revolves around the concept of the island as an in-between space of viscosity that reconceptualizes the spatiotemporal understanding of the boundary; connected to the prototypical human territorial act. The conceptual experimentation lands to the discovery of the ephemeral volcanic formation of Julia island that becomes the speculative (re)fabulation of a conscious act of extraterritoriality bridging the natural and the praxeological space through processes of terraforming. Using Julia, then, as a synecdoche for the whole Mediterranean Basin, the project concludes by weaving an alternative model not only for the understanding and the planning of the sea but generally for the inhabitation – or more precisely cohabitation – of the ‘damaged’ planet. ... Read more

Scientists observe changes in the registers of our earth, rising Co² levels, changes in methane concentration, acidification of the oceans, and the degradation of soil. These changes in the registers of our earth proliferate environmental catastrophes that destabilize intricate webs of life. The human in the Anthropocene, and with it its dominant narratives of growth and economization is currently destabilizing this web to a point where scientists warn that we are currently entering the sixth extinction event. Being entangled in this status quo through the economization of land, extractive practices, and greenwashing narratives, the architecture practice has become complicit in the destruction of our live support systems. To stop or at least attenuate the suffering that results in the destabilized ecologies necessitates a fundamental repositioning of the architectural practice in the face of the looming catastrophe. In the last decade a new force has emerged, that challenges the dominant social, economic, and political paradigms. Climate activist movements like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion The Last Generation, and Ende Gelände are using a multitude of protest tactics, to de-territorialize the axiology of values and reterritorialize new values of life, survival, and collaboration. The project ‚towards an architecture activist practice‘, researches these activist assemblages to understand the interrelation of its components and transpose the obtained knowledge to a design practice. Through action research I emerged myself in Extinction Rebellion Netherlands where I participated in the planning and execution of the Spring Rebellion 22. During this process I made maps and cartographies to analyze and visualize the interaction between the interwoven codes, groups, happenings, individuals, and spaces that made the movement during that period. ... Read more

The Hospital of Thinkable Boundaries: Methods for Noetic Design; addresses how the modern city and knowledge-context deals with mental illness and healing. Rather than studying medical spaces this research stems from personal evidence of embetterment through the noetic experience, where productive and vital experience is materialized by the ingestion of psychedelic/synaesthetic compounds. By studying and experiencing non-western/shamanic healing practices where these mind altering plant medicines are culturally integrated, the research on the noetic concerns topics of perception, cognition, body, collectivity and ecology. The design methods derived is what is called situated design, where the personal, material and the situated becomes the main directionality for design; a layered architectural method that concerns the following: (i) the dialogue between the material and the immaterial context, (ii) the notion of liminality, and how to respond to binary opposition through approaching the threshold as process, this also inquires approaching architecture as process, as an event ontology, materializing this sense of continuity, ritual, agency and intentionality (iii) the body as mediator, where the main method is about getting insight into the immediate context and relation through bodily experience. The design proposal The Hospital of Thinkable Boundaries is a system of healing interventions on the site in Skanstull, Stockholm, a liminal place in the city and an abandoned train track where modern vernacular interventions of awareness and healing relates to the material symbol of the industrial locomotive. The proposal includes seven interventions relating to the shamanic ritual of healing where the ceremony is the main spatial and perceptual experience, but it also includes the production of the psychedelic compounds, as well as functions that relates to the cleansing and preparation of the body before entering the ceremony. These additional spaces becomes a means of extending and rethinking the shamanic ritual in an urban modern context, intending to bridge between knowledge-contexts and cultures. ... Read more

This project is about transforming existing buildings that are facing demolition. In opposition to the constant renewing of our physical world for better performing building, this graduation proposes a gradual mutation of a locality. ... Read more

This project is about transforming existing buildings that are facing demolition. In opposition to the constant renewing of our physical world for better performing building, this graduation proposes a gradual mutation of a locality. ... Read more

As labor increasingly takes place solely in the confines of a laptop screen, the office as a building type seems almost redundant. At the same time the profitability of data collected of consumption puts conventional understandings of value production under question. How does information become valuable, and how should we think of value to begin with? The project employs an understanding of value as a qualitative, subjective excess effect of life that can only be quantified as profit through the production of metrics that make it compatible with the field of economy. Helsinki Central Station provides a case study of an intensely public site where original functions have been gradually replaced by opportunities for consumption that economize its life-value. The goal of the project is to counter these processes of capture and re-intensify the experience of moving through the terminal building. Focusing on the habit of voyeurism, the project speculates new constraints to put travellers into unexpectedly close relations to intensify the station’s singular quality as a composite of strangers in a certain rhythmic movement. ... Read more

Through the synthesis of a speculative design project I explore the meditative process of working together with earth forces to create alternative ways of valuing the Arctic and its critic yet fragile environments. Emerging as a response to the changing global trends of climate change, territorial claims and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic region; this research evolved as an investigation into the theoretical concepts of Architecture x Power x Territory within the context of the Arctic. To understand the complex conditions and factors that have influence within the Arctic Ocean a process of mapping conflicts – defined as disruptive forces – documented the interactions and relations between assemblages and ecologies existing within past, present and future organisations of territory. The overall methodology and investigation into the mediation of this planetary condition unravels through Levi Bryant’s Onto-Cartography and his three dimensions of geophilosophy: cartography, deconstruction, and terraformation (Bryant 2014). The political practice of cartography combined with the deconstruction of the theoretical concepts establish a point of intervention, mediation and negotiation of relations between assemblages and ecologies through an iterative process of mapping, analysis, deconstructing and redefining. The deconstruction of the key concepts – Architecture, Power and Territory translates and shifts the application from the territorial context of land and constructed landscapes into the context of the ocean, challenging the current understanding, dynamic and interaction of the concepts. Where Territory is explored through the notion of Terrain, a term that considers volume, the three-dimensional space or verticality of territory (Elden 2017), Power is expanded to include earth Forces and Architecture is inherently linked to Environment and its critical ecologies. Finally, the terraformation dimension or the “building of alternative worlds” (Bryant 2014) materialises as an alternative path of movement - enabling humans the ability to escape existing conditions such as those of extractive measures, creating the possibility of projecting new realities through the relations and intermingling of ecologies and the built environment. Thus, projecting an alternative future for the territory by rendering ecological and intrinsic processes visible.
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