The graduation project of the studio "Interiors Buildings Cities 24/25" resembles a potential extension of the Art Campus DeSingel, located in Antwerp, Belgium accommodating the VAi. The design proposal represents an innovative and creative manner to identify the notion of archiving and displaying. Repairing the dialog between Léon Stynen and Stéphane Beel is thus one of the main strategies in order to re-establish a new connection between archive materials from the VAi and the city of Antwerp. By bringing people in, archives are brought on a display to the public and the urban corner of DeSingel is activated. ... Read more

This graduation project proposes a building design as a solution for the relocation of the Flanders Architecture institute. The institute collects, stores and shares the archives of Flemish architects and have a mission to be pro-active in their interactions with the public. The VAi has been wanting to relocate their entire institute to art campus DeSingel, located on the edge of Antwerp’s city center. In this new building, they want to house both their public and private functions; a storage depot, processing ateliers, public spaces and offices. This design reconsiders the dichotomy of public and private the VAi deals with in their policy and architecture. Concepts like nature-inclusive design, sustainability, identity and representation are key in the proposed design, which comprises the addition of a new building wing to the existing volume of DeSingel. Furthermore, a landscape design including a large pond -a restoration of DeSingel’s original pond, is proposed. ... Read more

Nocturnal cultural spaces in Rotterdam are under pressure of gentrification. The decline in night club spaces, also results in a decline in cultural innovation and experimentation. In current redevelopment plans for creative clusters such as Schieblock, show the replacement of the creative industry by homogeneous residential neighbourhoods or offices, with no cultural value. There is no long term vision for the creative industry, as they are stuck in a cycle of displacement and do not get the acknowledgement for adding value to the neighbourhoods of the future. By involving the creative industry and nightlife in urban design through a placemaking workshop and expert panel talks, the goal of this research is to bridge the knowledge gap between Dutch planning practices ... Read more

The scarcity of resources is increasing, resulting in the transformation of entire regions. People take a lot of the resources on Earth for granted. This calls for a transition from the current ‘throw-away’-economy to a ‘circular’ economy. The constant circulation of materials and products in this type of system preserves the value of materials. Academics and practitioners are addressing this transition, but they frequently ignore its social and spatial aspects. A socio-spatial framework for reorganizing a district towards a circular system is proposed in this thesis. The solution presented is fundamentally utopian, aiming to challenge established ideas about the current system. In this thesis, the public space’s redesign serves as an entry point to the private and communal spaces.

The design location for this thesis is the Indische Buurt. This district is located in east of Amsterdam. With a large proportion of social housing, the area’s primary use is residential. Additionally, there are a few shopping streets nearby. The approach used in this thesis was context-specific. The three main approaches used were literature reviews, field research, and ‘research by design’.

According to the analysis, residents are crucial in deciding whether and how to dispose of things. But at the moment, the area doesn’t have many resources supporting circular behavior. The issue of waste disposal in public areas is one of the effects. In addition, the district has a high proportion of minima-households, little greenery, and roadways that are mostly occupied by parked cars. The primary observation about governance analysis is the lack of emphasis on the spatial implications necessary for the shift to a circular system.

The district is reorganized using a spatial framework that was constructed using the R-ladder. The R-ladder is a circularity model made up of ten R-strategies for reducing the amount of materials and resources used in product chains. The higher up the strategy is on the ladder, the more value is retained. Following that, a spatial design for a square and its surrounding streets is proposed. The visibility of circularity is prioritized in this design to enhance public awareness. Furthermore, the design aims to maximize the value retention of materials or products by selecting the solution that best retains value. In addition to the design, recommendations will be made to the governance of the Netherlands and Amsterdam. This will improve the existing circular strategy and policy.
... Read more

Urban areas often experience temperature imbalances, resulting in higher temperatures than their rural surroundings, known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This effect has adverse consequences such as heightened heat-related morbidity and mortality, amplified energy demands, aggravated water scarcity, and diminished urban living comfort. These effects are expected to intensify due to urbanization, making cities more susceptible to heat-related problems and increasing the number of inhabitants subjected to them, and climate change, increasing the frequency and Intensity of heatwaves occurring. As more than half of the world population lives in these urban areas, the imperative for effective mitigation strategies becomes paramount.

Addressing the complexity of the urban environment necessitates the collaboration of various disciplines to create effective UHI mitigation strategies. However, the integration and dissemination of multidisciplinary knowledge in this context are currently inadequate. This study bridges this gap by introducing a multidisciplinary typology-based framework employing a concurrent mixed-method approach, encompassing systematic literature reviews, semi-structured expert interviews, and multidisciplinary workshops in four distinct phases. These phases are specifically designed to identify, collect, integrate, and disseminate knowledge in this field, with applicability across diverse disciplines and contexts.

While the framework was first designed for the technologies at "Heat Square" of "The Green Village" in Delft, Netherlands, it is highly adaptable and can accommodate the inclusion of different technologies to enhance its impact. Given the increasing importance of addressing UHI challenges, this framework contributes to integrating and disseminating knowledge, supporting the creation of mitigation strategies and, therefore, contributing to creating livable and resilient urban environments in response to a changing climate.
... Read more

In today’s world, the transport system is essential in helping people reach the activities they want or need to attend. However, like in many other fields, inequality can exist in access to various opportunities based on personal characteristics. Little is known about how gender and intersectional factors impact people's perceived accessibility. This thesis aims to fill this knowledge gap using a mixed methods approach. First, desk research shows that perceived accessibility can be influenced by a large variety of factors, including, but not limited to, the primary mode used, perceived safety in transport and socio-demographic factors. Second, Structural Equation Modelling is used to investigate the strength of relationships between the various found factors and gender intersectional factors. This analysis shows that being a woman has a negative effect on perceived accessibility, which can for a part be explained by women feeling less safe in transport at night. Additionally, the analysis shows that for women having young children negatively impacts perceived accessibility, but not for men, while for men income positively relates to access to a car and in turn to perceived accessibility, an effect which is not found for women. Finally, the subsequent qualitative analysis, using workshops, shows that little attention has been paid in the past to (social) safety issues in transport and to differences in needs between different kinds of travellers. In the future, more cooperation between transport institutions and integrated intersectional policymaking in transport would be of significant value. ... Read more

The built environment of the future should move with the changes the weather brings as well as evolve with slower and larger trends in our society like climate change, demographic changes, and technical advancements. By planning for the future now we can reduce obstacles for future generations of planners, designers, and governing bodies.

The built environment should be able to function well whether water is in high or low flux. Water is fluid. It is shaped by and shapes its surroundings. Cities can learn a lot from this fluidity. By increasing the flexibility of urban design, we can anticipate and move with the changes the future brings instead of being in a continuous cycle of trying to catch up. The built environment should follow the current of the future and adapt to the changes in our climate and weather. Creating a city that adapts to new circumstances and moves with water.
... Read more

Forced migration has been a significant struggle in the Netherlands, politically, socially, spatially and culturally. The costs of this struggle are paid by asylum seekers and status holders, living in uncertainty and isolation. This thesis discusses the position of Syrian status holders in the Netherlands, refugees who have obtained a residency permit to stay in the Netherlands.

The aim of this thesis is to explore which role small towns play in the integration of Syrian status holders. A hypothesis was formulated that formed the basis for the fieldwork. The fieldwork consisted of site visits to two towns: Hardenberg and Dalfsen and interviews with Syrian status holders. The fieldwork provided opportunities and lessons that informed the final results.

The result of this thesis is a roadmap to belonging: an overview of the factors: places, identifications, policies and collaborations, that influence the sense of belonging of Syrian status holders. A sense of belonging is defined by three dimensions: economic integration, social integration and the expression of cultural identity.

Three catalysts are proposed to showcase how combining different factors results in complicated but effective strategies to improve the sense of belonging of Syrian status holders, while also offering opportunities to the host community. The catalysts concern employment, entrepreneurship, social interaction and leisure activities.

This thesis provides a new view on the accommodation of newcomers, where benefits for the local society are synergized with a welcoming home for Syrian status holders. ... Read more

Transport decision-making determines people’s level of accessibility and deeply influences an individual’s access to social and economic opportunities and the quality of life. Socially vulnerable populations are highly dependent on yet often more likely to have less access to transport services and experience lower accessibility. This creates and reinforces social and spatial inequalities by trapping people in disconnected neighborhoods and segregated areas that continue to be deprived of access to opportunities. This research aims to develop a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to explore how re-purposing existing streets for walking and biking could influence the accessibility of vulnerable neighborhoods to support decision-making in enhancing equity of accessibility.

In the SDSS, equity of accessibility is formulated as a generative design (GD) problem, named the Street Allocation Decision Problem (SADP), a single-objective optimization problem that searches for generated designs with the maximum weighted improvement in accessibility per unit of its cost. A GD model is built to solve SADP. Lastly, an operational framework is developed to guide prospective users in tuning and operating the SDSS for their specific context, problem, and objective.

The SDSS is tested on a toy problem, a 0.09km2 area in The Hague, The Netherlands. The toy problem is small in scale, easy and fast to implement and useful for initial testing of the model. Preliminary results have demonstrated the feasibility of the model. This is the first and humble attempt at developing an SDSS for enhancing equity of accessibility with a GD model. However, there are shortcomings in methodology and result quality, which compromise the practicality of the model and the interpretability of results. Although, only a proof of concept at the moment, the SDSS is a valuable starting point due to its advantages, such as transparency, modularity, humane-ness, and flexibility. This SDSS is built to involve decision-makers in the design process, which could serve as a useful learning experience for questioning and understanding what is the problem, what is considered equitable, and what are possible solutions. The SDSS has the potential to facilitate learning during transport decision-making in experimental settings or as explorative aids in early design stages. ... Read more

With increasing urbanization it has become increasingly important to focus on reducing emissions at a residential level. Decisions of households to adopt emissions reducing technologies are influenced not just by economic factors, but by the type of social networks they are embedded in. There is however little insight into the relationship between underlying networks and effectiveness of policy interventions. This thesis builds a Data-Driven Agent-based Model grounded in Theory of Planned Behavior, initialised with synthetic household population for a case-study of Albany County, (New York, USA). It uses network modelling to study how social network structures influence adoption rates of different communities. Results show that flat tax-credit schemes can result in poor adoption rates in segregated networks, with performance worsening if the network size is small. Seeding policies and information agents, do not necessarily result in better adoption rates, highlighting the importance of trusted information sources than mass communicators. The resulting understanding of social networks’ influence over adoption of energy-efficient technologies can assist policy-makers in designing energy policy interventions that improve access of clean energy technologies for all socioeconomic groups. ... Read more