The Delflandsedijk is one of the most important dikes in the Netherlands, protecting the Delt’s residents from constant flooding. In Maassluis it runs parallel to the river Het Scheur and is located less than 450 meters from a pleasant boulevard, where many people walk or bike daily. It is the boundary of Het Balkon, a recent functional neighbourhood of Maassluis, whose residents are mainly kids and people between 35-50 years old.

Walking along the Delflandsedijk is a disturbing and lonely experience. There are very few people over there. Merged into the urban landscape of Maassluis, it performs as a utilitarian element, emitting safety notes (not perceived by people) in a non-orchestrated urban landscape, with a very poor environment, where sounds are reflected and reverberated since it is a flat area, with very few absorption surfaces and elements. It is an underused and under-vegetated public space, muted for social interaction opportunities. There are no “sounds of life” such as conversations, laughs, screams or cries. Sounds of birds, insects or other non-human lives are insignificant and there are moments of almost silence. The systematic sounds of the metro and its gate alarms are very intense and combined with vehicle traffic, especially during rush hours, mask any other sounds.

This research values the utilitarian character of the Delflandsedijk and other Dutch dikes, highlighting their richer urban landscape and a great public space for people, where multiple uses and functions can occur. It can become a robust and resilient landscape by connecting local fragmented green structures (enriching biodiversity) while promoting well-being, health and social interactions.

To achieve that, landscape architecture was defined and understood phenomenologically, with a human-centered perspective that allows people to relate to it and find meaning in it. This particular landscape was investigated and understood as such, using our sensory capacities to extract and collect information to find answers to the posed problem.

Through the lenses of Soundscape ecology, a “Catalogue of soundscape design” was developed to show design possibilities within this theoretical approach, which is an important contribution to landscape architecture studies, since there are scarce references for this topic.

Furthermore, a practical application of the soundscape designs from the catalogue was implemented through a landscape project for a city park on the Delflandsedijk in Maassluis.

Soundscape ecology is confirmed as essential for urban design, as it effectively addresses the complexity of the human-environment relationship. Natural environments have the potential to provide psychological restoration for people and living organisms and soundscape is being proved to be a great asset in this regard.

Resilient and robust landscapes can be built using a soundscape approach and as a result, we can create great places for people to live, work, sport, enjoy nature, recreate, play, eat, rest or simply listen to the sounds that are there.

This study investigates Bengaluru’s Chamarajpet Eidgah Maidan as a proxy of Hindu-Muslim religious communalism manifesting in public space. The maidan has been a ground of controversy since June 2022 due to a conflict over its use for (religious) ritual activities. The incumbent Hindu-nationalist BJP government fails to mediate such contestations of socio-religious public space between Hindu and Muslim groups. The main risk, among others, is an escalation of communal violence.
However, other major risks include the disenfranchisement of Chamarajpet Maidan’s everyday existence, and by extension, of its everyday stakeholders. A failure to understand these tensions will exacerbate the megacity’s existing infrastructural and social woes. This study explores how public space could address religious communalism. It has been found that, in addition to exploring the religious and ritual meanings of the maidan through analytical cartographies, an analysis of its ‘worldings’ - through media representations and physical-social realities - were invaluable to produce a countercartography of the maidan. These countercartographies were possible with reference to books, journal articles, news articles, historical maps, site observations and interviews. Public architecture could address religious communalism if the maidan’s religious conflict is addressed alongside its everyday social needs. A longterm view necessitates the integration of (unanticipated) stakeholder uses and clear governance for infrastructural resilience. Politicised religions, which normalise a Muslim versus Hindu antagonism, is becoming ever more rampant in India. To understand its spatial ramifications is a first step in addressing a nation-wide problem.

The story of modern Botswana is that of dualities. At the time of independence in 1966, it was the second poorest country in the world in terms of GDP. Since then, it has seen explosive economic growth and accompanying improvements in human development. It is now ranks third in sub-saharan Africa in both GDP per capita and HDI. This impressive record, however, does not tell the full story. Botswana is the 10th most economically unequal country in the world and is ranked 132nd out of 137 surveyed countries in the World Happiness Report.
This project seeks to explore the relationships between the urban system, inequality and life fulfilment by analyzing the spatial and societal systems active both in the present day and in the traditional/pre-colonial era. An anthropological and philosophical lens is used throughout the analysis in order to distill the value systems that have underpinned life in these different historical eras. These value systems, in turn, reveal the perspective through which people have been experiencing their environments, which helps to explain why this concept of life fulfilment inequality is present here. There is a clear disconnect between the cultural and historical makeup of society in Botswana and the modern systems, spaces and institutions which govern everyday life.
Thirteen principles for a new urban system are then proposed, which when taken together, attempt to define a system which prioritizes economic/socio-spatial equity and the maximization of life fulfilment. Design demonstrations are created to imagine how these principles could be translated into space.

The post-war neighborhood is a result of the modernist and socialist thoughts in the time period of 1945 to 1960. Its concept was to provide everyone of an equal and good place to live, with access to green, facilities and ‘light, air and space’. This resulted mostly into vast amounts of green space. The buildings in these neighborhoods are evaluated as heritage, but the public and communal space around the buildings are often not taken into consideration.

This study assumes that the concept of the post-war neighborhood and its spatial translation is important to keep and treasure, as it provides important historical insights. This study aims to find the role of the green structure for the case study of Osdorp, Amsterdam. Additional heritage and user value maps (next to the existing building value maps) are made for the public space, based on thorough literature and field analysis of the district.

The main conclusions include that the overall structure of the neighborhood, a framework branching out in increasingly more private areas is very important. Next to that, the most important embodiment of the concept does not lay within the amount of green that is present, but how it used. The green strips and spaces on the smaller scales are more likely to be transformed into the demand of today: functional and ecological.
The outcomes result in a toolbox for the different green types that are present in the post-war neighborhood and this forms the base for the design of the Wildemanbuurt, a neighborhood within Osdorp. This design is based on increasing connectivity, re-emphasizing the importance of the courtyards, bringing more ecological zones into the neighborhood and improving the multi-functionality of underused areas.

The project navigates the intricate connections between fashion, architecture, and urban development, culminating in developing a “fashion city” as a unique urban typology. By exploring this intricate relationship’s historical, socio-economic, and environmental facets, it provides novel insights that can guide future urban planning and design in the context of the fashion industry’s influence.

As the Soviet Union's territories spanned across 30 countries, the prefabricated apartment buildings (Panelka) have tattooed numerous cities across Europe.The ideological “leftovers” of the typology, together with their predetermined lifespan, the decaying material state, and the fragmented ownership create difficulties for big-scale interventions. As a result, 170 million Panelka inhabitants face the possibility of demolition of their homes.

The graduation project focuses on the revitalization of the Panelka through the case study of the Trakiya district in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Supported by in-depth research of Panelkas’ development, the project aims to reimagine Trakiya through the local vernacular characteristics of the globally mass produced Panelka. The research showed that although Panelka’s perception is influenced by the negative connotations due to its ideological past, it is in flux due to constant recreation by its residents. The project’s approach is sensitive to Trakiya’s latent opportunities, and resulted in a framework, which can spatially as well as socially correspond to the needs of the residents. In order to improve the living conditions and tackle the negative perception of Panelka, a set of interventions founded on circularity aspects is proposed.

(re)Displaced in City explores the link between architecture and human rights concerning newcomers’ (refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants) marginalization and degrading treatment in Paris. A specific focus is drawn on newcomers who have limited or no resources and are “trapped” in the complex bureaucratic system that limits access to fundamental rights, expulse from society and leaves no alternatives but to live in degrading conditions. The research brings an argument that universal rights do not align with state territorial politics and that architecture attributed to helping newcomers is a product of the current politics that keeps feeding the faulty system rather than tackling the problem. Opposite of this, rights-based architecture to overcome newcomers’ marginalization and degrading treatment not just provides a shelter but architecture that empowers social changes of acceptance and a co-living mindset. The research leads to the architectural intervention in the square de la Chapelle alongside the boulevard de la Chapelle in the north of Paris. One of the most reclaimed spaces by newcomers since 2015 where inhuman living conditions, repeatable re-displacement social expulsion and violence against newcomers are evident in the urban fabrics. The proposed design aims to show how architecture based on a social-mixed-shared program could be used to strengthen the social bond and a sense of collectivity to overcome newcomers’ marginalization and degrading treatment urgency. This research-based project is structured in three main parts: (re)Displaced – the research, (re)Position – the link between research and architectural design, and (re)Shape – the architectural intervention.

The sixth episode of 'Post-Pandemic Public Spaces' is the last chapter of the series. The previous five episodes have explored the future of our public spaces. At the end of each episode, key factors are summarised. This final episode concludes the journey by bringing together important lessons learned and setting the agenda for the future design of the public space.

The second episode ‘Design’ dives further into the challenges in the post-pandemic era and it illuminates possible design solutions. The documentary searches for approaches in which the design of public spaces can be updated and improved. It also questions if there is any one-size-fits-all public space at all. Depending on how and if people can get there, public space are very different as are people. Not all spaces are equally attractive and safe to stay in. From a different angle we may question; who is touched by which place, and how. Differences have become very clear during the pandemics and awareness on this has risen. Public space is also no longer static, but constantly adaptive to new needs. How can we design for this? Can we design for flexibility? Can we release physical design; if so, to what extend? The increasing need for green space is also exemplary for the post-pandemic era; partly grown out of necessity for health reasons, recreational purposes, or simply a lack of space in the house. We will have to design green spaces as a new quiet place, and for outdoor activities like sports, online connectivity in public, and/or just natural climate-adaptive space at the same time.

Starting from the Lefebvrian notion of urban society as a society that can realise itself only when urban occupants collectively use their ‘right’ to shape it, this research explores the impact of alternative socio-spatial processes on the contemporary cityscapes. At the same time inspecting the everyday human condition in relation to the evolving built environment. Where economic competitiveness acted and acts as the prior imperative of policy-making, the struggle to empower its consequent heterogeneities corresponds to a variety of inhabitants dispossessed in their own (everyday) space. This calls for the need to promote the production of new forms of (inclusive) ‘agency’.
While the current economic drive is affecting the notion of sociality and the ecological dynamics of our cities, the city of Rotterdam prefigures as testbed for a transgressive rebirth.
Its patterns of discontinuities stage the return of the Lefebvrian experimental utopia, which could become more concrete by accepting a heterogeneous urban approach that recognises their diverse value.It’s the search for a Heterutopia.

The fifth episode presents 'Behaviour'. With the interviewees, the discussion on inequality is stretched to people’s behaviour in the public space. How has it changed during and after the pandemics and did their perceptions of public spaces change along? City beaches and parks have become popular, while the lack of outdoor terraces, restaurants, or discos has been manifest. Measurements taken during the pandemic have forced a change in our behaviour. While social distancing will be abandoned and masks in general, we seem to have become aware of human vulnerability. Public health will be related to public space again. What more will stay in the future? A lot of people have canceled their sports club subscriptions. Everyone is training outside now. It's really nice to see all those active people, says Annemieke Fontein; but at the same time, it also takes up space and changes the nature of parks as designed for quiet relaxation. Also in other forms, we can see that the need for connection, and in particular for encounters and meetings, in public spaces has grown. Yet whereas online presence continues to grow, thus new networks emerge and ways to meet change, thus place to meet also change. Communities gather in a wide variety of public spaces. Are new bubbles emerging? When will people come together as a whole? The culture of a place; and of a city will change and develop. Appreciating public space as a daily life environment in the Netherlands has one of the positive outcomes of the pandemics.

The fourth episode of the series presents the topic 'Inequality'. In line with last episode, it is important to remember how mobility relates to (in)equality. The measurements taken during COVID-19 outbreak, like social distancing and staying home, has shown once more that not everyone has the same pattern, can have the same pattern, and/or is able to have equal patterns. Public spaces in different neighbourhoods have different qualities. The pandemic has shown that not everyone lives under the same conditions. Not everyone has access to equal public spaces. There is, for example, not always shaded space near the house. Places for stay in general and distances to recreational (green) spaces can differ greatly, as is the safety along the routes not equal. Power structures and distribution of resources, if we define public space along these lines, are unequal almost by definition, and thus access abilities and agency is diverse. This, generates questions: How can we realise a more inclusive network of public space? How can we create a human space, lively at the street level? What public amenities and facilities should we include? Is privately-owned public space a (fair) solution? Can we create common spaces on the roof, for example? What needs to be done in different neighborhoods to contribute to a just city?

The third episode ‘Mobility’ follows up on the discussed new ways to approach the design of public spaces and it shines particularly the light on the changing mobility patterns. This includes general strategies to remove cars and give space back to the residents. Yet, induced by the COVID-19 crisis, these approaches move to a shift in commuting patterns: Will people keep working from home? Do they want to spend an hour in the car or on the train for four or five days when there is an alternative in the remote office and on-distance work? Other travel needs emerge, depending on the needs and desires of the different social groups. The pandemic influenced public transport. Many people feared this mode. Trust will have to be regained in order to make mobility more sustainable by traditional means. New forms of individual transport have taken off in addition. Think of micro-mobility, like shared scooters. Thus multi-modal chain mobility seems to increase in importance. The concept of the 15-minute city, in which living and working hybridise and facilities and amenities are nearby, also seems to have made a breakthrough too. Places and mobility are being brought together, in the words of Lior Steinberg. This may resemble the Dutch-rooted idea of neighborhood thought ('wijkgedachte'), making cities fairly democratic: Everyone uses similar modes of transport; bike use as examplars for the world. Still, also in the Dutch city, pedestrian traffic and social safety need to be improved.

The first episode of the documentary Post-Pandemic Public Spaces ‘Challenges’ introduces expected paradigmatic shifts caused by the situation induced by the COVID-19 crisis. It extends the discussion on public space, which has been about making cities more sustainable and liveable while working with major transitions. During the pandemic, health has been challenged in addition. Also, new ways of using public space have become manifest. This exposes different claims. Can we continue to use public spaces as we did? Are we reverting to our old behaviour? Do we realise how important public space is? In conjecture with the challenges that already emerged before the crisis, we can question if we shouldn’t reduce traffic, for example, and kick-off from our car addiction? New challenges have an effect on the size, accessibility, and quality of the public spaces and, together with changing human needs, its presence and design remain to be essential in the future.

My master thesis project revolves around the theme of festivalisation of contemporary cities. This emerging phenomenon sees the instrumentalization of cultural events and festivals into powerful economic tools to attract a global flow of event-driven tourists. This economic model, together with the fast development of infrastructural fast connection has led to an intensification of the number of events planned throughout the year, which shifts the notion of events as temporal manifestations, towards a permanent asset of our contemporary cities. Such constant intensity of global flow is threatening the traditional role of public space, as commercial space for global customer is prioritised over civic space for local inhabitants. The research investigates the new spatial consequences of such phenomenon in the dynamics of contemporary cities and searchers for solutions that can address this necessary dichotomy between the global and the local. In search of new spaces that are able to host this necessary dichotomy and also to equally address both perspectives, the global one and the local. The design project analyses the case of the city of Milan, a contemporary city that is strongly betting on the cultural economy, hence the festivalisation of its city centre to attract global event-driven tourism.The project looks at the area of Rogoredo, one of the 7 abandoned railway yards, surrounding the city of Milan, as a key site that can embrace this contemporary dichotomy. Looking into spatial solutions that can transform what today is an infrastructural barrier into a valuable event-based public space of the future. The project focuses on architectural solutions to maintain and revalue the railway yard of Rogoredo (Milan) and its surrounding.By the reuse of the existing infrastructural framework of the site, no longer as a transit hub but as a construction hub, this project shows how it could lead to the design of flexible, reversible public spaces to host these series of cultural/economic events, and improving the local contexts.In other words, looking at the advantages (economical and sustainable) of avoiding a tabula rasa scenario of the site, and instead reusing, and integrate the existing infrastructural framework ( from train tracks, train cars, abandoned warehouse, etc) together with the series of industrial clusters that are present in the proximity of the site, to regenerate the area from an ex-mobility node to future proof, flexible construction arteria which can rely upon local (on-site) construction industries. Eventually transforming Rogoredo as one of the key glo-cal cultural nodes of the city of Milan.

Every human being is driven towards creating its own bubble, self-contained worlds, islands. It can be equally seen on the urban level where this insular condition is a proliferating phenomenon. The contemporary city is characterized by the widespread propension of certain metropolitan fragments to detach themselves from their continuum of the city. Driven by the increasing dependency on logistics, this condition becomes a globalized urban form. It tends to become the privileged form of spatial organization in the contemporary city. Ports being its most accomplished version, by their monumentality, radicality and juxtaposition with the city. They tend to become territorial exceptions, ground exceptions, urbanization exceptions, time exceptions and legal exceptions at the heart of the city.

This is particularly visible in the cities neighbouring the port of Pireas, that has for some years been the site of an impressive transformation since the port was acquired by the Chinese. Since then, the port grows exponentially with the ambition to become the main commercial door to Europe for Asian importations. To accommodate ever more docks, the port progressively cannibalizes any available coastline. Gradually, the city finds itself encapsulated, trapped and asphyxiated by a large infrastructural barrier, without any access to the sea. The ports, supposed to be windows on the worlds become constrictive elements. The city of islands is at risk of becoming a city of conflicts. We need to find ways of diffusing that tension.

This project suggests an aggressive welcome to the urban condition created by the port while proposing to reclaim Pireas’ relationship with the seaboard. As the waterfront of the cities is turning into an infrastructural product, the new boardwalks may become perpendicular lines. This project investigates this hypothesis. It thus proposes a perforation through the infrastructural barrier from town to sea in an underused interstitial space of the port. It invites us to re-imagine the spatial relationships between architecture, landscape, energy and infrastructure in ports.

In today’s cities, global urbanisation has created a fragmented, unresponsive and socially divisive landscape. Intensifying agglomerations to urban centres across the globe due to the displacement and mass migrations of large populations has increased the pressure of organising a dense urban habitat. In its dominion over nature modern life was so caught up in establishing the narratives of individual life that it was naive to the complexity of everyday activity. The celebration of the Individual and the rationalisation of nature and society attempted to find order amongst the chaos of a city. The intensity of diversification in cities due to agglomerations to global centres highlights the changing face society and culture in dense formations and its immediacy. But when the practices of a past epoch continue to pervade themselves into the contemporary narrative, when the ethical practice of past time refuses discontinue for the continuity of a new ethical practice and the development of collective memory then we find ourselves in a cycle of self-contradiction. The condition it creates formulates something hybrid, repetitive, standardised and universally proliferated. There is an inherent issue with creating a dense urban ecology, especially in verticality, that is both equitable to its inhabitants and sustainable to its environment. Between establishing forms of density and the articulation of diversity in our cities there exists an inability to inform the everyday perspective, the continued withering away of political character in our public space and a lack of avenues to establish resilient forms of citizenship. Creating a future perspective for our city becomes increasingly unclear and clouded amongst the ubiquity and generic nature of universal design and the destruction of our urban heritage. When the ability for the urban to produce space for the possibility of specificity is reduced, whether through urban segregation, stratification or fragmentation, then the reference plane for the city wither’s away. A loss of identity in density that cam as result of the modernisation for cities and city life.


The Future Primitive is a reframe for looking at the city, one that can enliven the stories of the common and everyday. It means to see the city as a continue process of collective memory and reflection. The research project was to use this concept of as a way to establishing the city as a common future. Through a series of theoretical discussions which aimed to enlighten an inherent paradox in the way we deal with the relationship between space and time in our cities through aesthetics and territory the research pretend how this is proliferated in the articulation of diversity and density in our cities ultimately constraining the possibilities for our common future and furthering the divide of Earth and World. This produced a set of theoretical notions and principals that established the basis for a design brief for prototyping the development of civic common space through the vertical densification of an existing urban landscape.

As the creative industries started gaining their recognition as beneficial forces for socio-economic transformation in the 1990s, there have been plenty of discussions regarding such phenomenon in urban planning policy and academia. While certain sectors of creative industries are enjoying the economic growth brought by globalisation, some others, especially the Nomadic Creative Community (NCC) as this thesis identifies as young, mobile, highly educated, artistically employed, and low income groups, are suffering from cities’ high land values caused by gentrifications. This thesis aims to explore the potentiality and obstacles of facilitating the NCC as the bottom-up forces for locally based urban regenerations in the case of global city London. On top of that, the thesis adapts the Creative City concept and evaluates the effect of globalisation in the context of creative industries and how they respond to the conditions. Through multi-scale spatial and governance analysis, example reviews as well as empirical findings collected via on-site interviews and observation, the project reveals the importance and values of community-oriented creative and cultural amenities supported by involved stakeholders. In the end, the thesis proposes several design and planning recommendations with aims of improving liveability for all and steering the current London’s metropolitan structures towards better spatial, socio-economic inclusivity.

Out of all the countries in the world, the Netherlands has the most ‘autonomous vehicle’-ready road network (KPMG, 2019). It is the result of years of investing in state-of-the-art technologies and putting in place the needed policies, and it seems to pay off: our country is likely to be amongst the early adapters as soon as these vehicles enter the market. Claiming this desired role of a frontrunner comes with many large challenges and responsibility, however. Being one of the first to be able to put autonomous vehicles on the roads, means that we should be one of the first also to have the right policies in place - there is no luxury of waiting and learning from good examples, or mistakes, made elsewhere. But what are these ‘right’ policies then? And what other kind of – perhaps unexpected - moments of choice might appear? What happens after we have made the decision to allow private autonomous vehicles full access to our inner-cities. Or what are the consequences of leaving a large role for the market to experiment freely, whilst staying passive as a public sector? There is a need for forecasting studies that help to expose these kind of potential choices - projects that try to speculate about the future from diverse perspectives. Amsterdam 2049 is such a project that aims to generate insights into these required actions, through constructing and providing future scenarios that give an idea of the potential implications of autonomous vehicles on the city of the future. By doing so, it establishes a sense of urgency amongst policy-makers and planners, as well as providing them with recommendations, from policies to spatial interventions, on how to act. Structural behind these future scenarios is the development of a unique storytelling-scenario method, which will in its own way combine several useful theories and urbanism insights to produce informative, imaginative and compelling stories about Amsterdam and autonomous vehicles. The stories thus end up as a unique combination of urbanism - with maps, sections and impressions -, ‘complex system theory’ – giving insight into ‘system transitions’ that provides a structure and timeline – and the visual language of the graphic novel – with personal perspectives, dialogues and imaginative visualizations – which altogether lead to accessible, forecasts that can inspire and inform those involved in decision-making.

The urban agenda is demanding new approaches for urban development. Urban flexibility has been recognized as crucial for coping with uncertainty and smart growth has been advocated as a sustainable urban practice. Urban flexibility and smart growth combined lead to a more dynamic land use, in which building adaptation leads to intensification of existing built areas. However, the impacts of such large-scale and faster intensification on transport and accessibility remain unknown, as well as the required policies to respond to those impacts. This study applies scenario planning and transport modelling to explore the implications of dynamic land use for transport and spatial planning, using the city of Eindhoven as case study. Results show that central areas are suitable for dynamic land use, where intensification does not demand any road infrastructure upgrade. Directed development to central areas can increase bike share, but no form of dynamic land use leads to higher shares of public transport. Finally, spatial randomness is the dominant variable on transport and accessibility performance. Further research should look at the interaction between dynamic land use and transport over time and the design of adaptive transport policies in a dynamic land use context.