Rapid urbanisation in Ahmedabad has created a paradox in which migrant construction workers help build the city while remaining excluded from formal housing systems. This project proposes a flexible housing framework that addresses housing insecurity through a mixed-income neighbourhood organised around shared clusters. By combining incremental housing, shared facilities, threshold spaces and cross-subsidisation, the design supports everyday interactions between work, care and domestic life while allowing housing to adapt to changing household needs. The project introduces Permanent Temporality as a design approach that combines stability with adaptability, creating a more secure and resilient living environment for migrant households. ... Read more

The Sabarmati riverfront represents a condition in which large-scale urban development has reshaped the relationship between the city and the river. While the project has improved environmental conditions and flood control, it has also produced a spatially uniform and highly regulated environment. This raises questions about how infrastructural landscapes can support a wider range of social and spatial activities.

Through a design-based approach, this graduation project investigates how housing, work, public space and everyday life can be reintroduced and recognised within the riverfront. By working with the existing urban framework, the aim is to develop an inclusive mixed-use environment that accommodates different forms of inhabitation and reactivates the river as a lived urban space. ... Read more

Ahmedabad is traditionally known for it’s active streets, courtyards, and thresholds supporting social interaction in everyday life. These environments are commonly found in its characteristic low-rise, high-density neighborhoods. However, with rapid urbanization, population growth and land scarcity, contemporary high-rise developments are increasingly being used as an efficient solution to housing shortages. These developments often prioritize quantitative density metrics over spatial quality and collective life, contrasting to Ahmedabad’s low rise housing environments. This graduation project investigates how the spatial and social qualities found within low-rise environments can coexist with the density required in rapidly growing cities such as Ahmedabad.
Through fieldwork observations in Ahmedabad, comparative case study analysis and architectural exploration, the research examines the relationship between housing form, density, livability, and social cohesion across neighborhood, cluster, and unit scale. The study focuses on “the missing middle” as an alternative housing approach positioned between low rise and high-rise developments in Ahmedabad. Case studies such as LIC Housing, Aranya Housing, PREVI Housing, the Dapperbuurt, Spangen Quarter Housing, and Terrassenhaussiedlung were analyzed to identify spatial and programmatic strategies related to collective living, incrementality, and active street life.
The research is translated into an alternative ‘missing middle’ housing approach within the context of Bimanagar Ahmedabad. The architectural exploration proposes G+6 mid-rise housing organized around courtyards, collective circulation spaces, layered thresholds, and mixed-use environments. The demonstration of the coexistence between density and livability can be found in the diverse housing typologies, massing, shared communal spaces on neighborhood, cluster and unit scale. Ultimately, the graduation project argues approaching housing as habitat rather than purely through quantitative metrics, emphasizing the importance of social interaction, everyday life, and contextual understanding within future housing.
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This research explored how housing in Rajiv Nagar, Ahmedabad can support flexible spatial conditions for domestic life, education and income generation, with the aim of expanding opportunities for stay-at-home women and children across generations. Rapid urbanisation in Ahmedabad has led to the growth of informal settlements, where residents often face inadequate housing, limited access to services and socio-economic marginalisation. Existing redevelopment and resettlement approaches frequently fail to address these conditions, as they rely on standardised housing models that overlook everyday spatial practices and informal livelihoods.

The study focuses on Rajiv Nagar to understand how spatial organisation, infrastructure and everyday practices shape social and economic opportunities, and how these influence daily life and long-term prospects. The findings show that women and children primarily operate within the immediate surroundings of the dwelling, which strengthens social networks but also limits access to education, work and services. Housing is already multifunctional, yet constrained by limited infrastructure, space and dedicated facilities, while informality reveals strong adaptive capacity.

Climate conditions further intensify these limitations, as extreme heat impacts reduce comfort and safety in both indoor and outdoor spaces. At the same time, passive design strategies can significantly improve environmental conditions and extend the usability of spaces for everyday activities.

The research concludes that improving opportunities for women and children cannot be achieved through housing alone. It requires an integrated spatial approach in which housing, social infrastructure, economic activity and climate responsiveness work together. By strengthening flexibility and connectivity across scales, housing can act as a means to break intergenerational cycles of limited access to education and economic opportunity.
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Across cities in the Global South, the home is increasingly a workplace as well. Yet dominant housing typologies are conceived as purely residential, failing to accommodate the income-generating activities that unfold within domestic space. This is especially consequential for home-based women workers, who combine paid production with a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic and care labour, and whose everyday spatial needs remain largely absent from architectural and planning discourse. This thesis examines how housing can be reconceived to support these overlapping practices in Ahmedabad, India, a city where the collapse of the textile-mill economy pushed many low-income households into informal, subcontracted, home-based work.
The research asks the following question: How can housing address the spatial, environmental, and socio-economic needs of home-based women workers in Ahmedabad within rapidly densifying urban contexts? It is structured through three analytical lenses, spatial, environmental, and socio-economic, applied consistently across four scales: urban, neighbourhood, cluster, and dwelling. Theoretically, it draws on feminist critiques of gendered domestic space and on theories of urban informality and incremental housing, positioning the home simultaneously as gendered, as a site of livelihood, and as an evolving process rather than a finished product.
The design proposes a low-rise, high-density, mixed-income scheme on a plot facing the Sabarmati riverfront, in which mid- and high-income housing cross-subsidises affordable units. At the cluster scale, a mirroring strategy generates shared courtyards and threshold spaces, secures cross-ventilation through dual-aspect units, and removes selected units to form collective terraces for skills training and exchange. At the dwelling scale, flexible live-work zones, dedicated storage, folding shopfront thresholds, and an incremental structural framework allow homes to adapt and grow with their users. Passive climate strategies, locally sourced materials, and a phased, cross-subsidised delivery model address comfort and feasibility.
By grounding architectural decisions in women's everyday work, the project contributes to debates on spatial flexibility, adaptable and incremental housing, gendered spatial justice, and economic agency in the rapidly urbanising Global South. Though focused on Ahmedabad, its strategies offer transferable insights for more inclusive, work-integrated housing.
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Traditional housing settlements in India were characterised by spatial elements such as chowks, aangans, otlas, and terraces that supported everyday social interaction and community life. Rapid urbanisation, increasing densities, and the shift towards high-rise housing have reduced the presence and effectiveness of these shared spaces, contributing to social isolation and a diminished public realm.

This thesis investigates how traditional spatial principles can be reinterpreted within contemporary medium-rise, high-density housing in Ahmedabad. Focusing on residual and transitional spaces, particularly terraces (Agaashiyes), courtyards (Aangans) and Otlahs the research examines their potential to support collective life without compromising density or affordability.

The study finds that successful community spaces are accessible, integrated into daily movement patterns, visually connected, and adaptable to multiple uses. It further demonstrates that interconnected terraces and transitional spaces can function as extensions of the ground plane, creating a layered public realm.

These insights inform a housing proposal that reactivates communal spaces, establishes a hierarchy of public and private domains, and accommodates incremental change over time.
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This graduation project investigates how housing can act as an urban patching strategy within the fragmented context of the Calico Mill neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, India. Ahmedabad’s urban development has been strongly shaped by textile industrial growth, labour migration, informal urbanization and later on industrial decline, which produced complex relationships between work, housing, infrastructure and urban transformation. This project responds to this condition through the concept of Connecting Edges. Instead of approaching the site as an empty land for new development, the design begins with what is already present: the existing tree canopies, open and neglected spaces, informal settlement edges, former mill remnants throughout the site and infrastructural disconnections. A specific grid is placed on top of the site and aligned with the direction of the Sabarmati riverfront to insert hierarchy and an ordering system within the project. This grid creates spatial coherence, but is adapted around the existing trees, which are treated as spatial anchors rather than obstacles.


The existing trees play an important role in the formation of the masterplan. The trees are therefore not added after the architectural design, but are used from the beginning to shape routes, courtyards, green pockets and public spaces inbetween housing typologies and clusters. Where large trees are located, the housing grid offers openings, which creates spatial gaps between units, row houses, collective open spaces or landscaped patches. This project integrates different income groups and hierarchies by using a mixed-income strategy framework. It responds to different densities and site conditions that are all living together on the same site. Mixed-income housing is understood here not as a guarantee of social integration, but as a spatial and typological strategy that can combine different housing forms within one shared urban framework and make it work together. Incremental row houses accommodate lower-income households and allow adaptation over time, drawing on theories of dweller control, supports and incremental housing. Collective mid-rise housing provides a transition between lower and higher dwelling masses while these typologies stagger into the landscape. ... Read more

This thesis investigates how energy transitions reshaped the spatial organization of typical Dutch workers' homes between 1900 and 1980. Focusing on the transitions from coal to gas and subsequently to central heating and electrification, the research examines how changes to energy infrastructure influenced the presence, function or disappearance of specific spaces within the home. While previous studies have addressed energy systems, housing policy, and architectural floor plans, the direct impact of energy transition on the Dutch floor plan remains under explored.
A comparative analysis of working-class housing in the Netherlands combined with archival materials from three specific time periods is done in the paper. The analysis is structured around three key categories: energy storage, heating source, and thermal zoning. The findings demonstrate that coal-based systems required significant spatial allocation for storage, usually meant a single heat source and had a strong thermal hierarchy. The introduction of gas reduced storage needs and enabled limited spatial heating flexibility, while central heating fundamentally transformed the floor plan layout by separating heat generation and distribution, eliminating thermal zoning.
This study concludes that energy transitions acted as a primary driver in the evolution of the typical Dutch workers' home floor plan layout, shifting from spatial centralization to open floor plans with uniform and flexible temperature regulation. These historical insights provide a valuable perspective for understanding how current energy transitions may continue to shape residential architecture in the future. ... Read more

This thesis examines how Surinamese-Dutch migrants experienced and responded to Amsterdam’s exclusionary housing policies between 1973 and 1980 and how these experiences challenge common top-down narratives that led these policies.
Racist and exclusionary allocation systems in social housing, dispersal policies and administrative requirements systematically limited access to housing and led many Surinamese-Dutch migrants, despite their Dutch nationality, into temporary housing where overcrowding and poor living conditions became long term solutions while top-down narratives framed issues that followed from these policies as cultural problems related to the behavior and culture of Surinamese.
As a contrast, bottom-up perspectives reveal how migrants actively adapted and protested through protest such as organized squatting and the formation of Surinamese communities. The research combines archival analysis with interpretive writing by drawing from photographs, newspaper articles, documentaries and personal stories to reconstruct housing experiences from that time. This added perspective shows the importance of incorporating marginalized narratives in understanding migration, policy, media narratives and institutional inequality. ... Read more

This thesis examines how the Architects’ Small House Service Bureau (ASHSB) designed The Small Home publications to promote their architect-designed houses and educate readers about architectural design in early twentieth-century United States. Based on a random quantitative sample of issues from 1922 to 1932, this study investigates how layout, structure, imagery, type of content, and textual strategies were used to communicate architectural knowledge and persuade readers to purchase ASHSB house plans.

The analysis show that educational content was central to the publication. Initially designed as a service bulletin, The Small Home focused on practical guidance such as financing, construction, and planning, while reinforcing the Bureau’s professional legitimacy and presenting its house designs to potential buyers. By the late 1920s, the publication had gradually evolved into an architectural magazine, shifting away from promoting their house plans and more towards a broader range of educational topics, including interior design, landscaping, and modern appliances, mostly written by external experts.

The analysis further show that while most house plans followed conventional presentation formats, some were strategically integrated with educational content. By pairing design guidance with educational articles, these plans both informed readers and promoted ASHSB designs. Advertisements, which made up roughly a third of the magazine, were also carefully selected and framed as curated, reliable resources, offering additional guidance and recommendations for readers planning to build their own homes or interiors.
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The transition to a fully circular housing sector is urgent, given the greenhouse gas emissions and waste generated by the building sector, as well as the high energy demand that burdens both residents and the natural environment. This thesis advocates for a social approach to the Circular Built Environment, rather than one-size-fits-all technical solutions. It explores circular living environments and initiatives in the Netherlands to define the roles of architects and planners in the circular housing transition. To this end, ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted on circular initiatives in the Netherlands, such as ecovillages and the energy collective 015Duurzaam in Delft. The methods employed include in-practice studies of everyday human activity, participant observation, sketching, painting, in-depth interviews, volunteer work, and semi-structured interviews with researchers. The results indicate that both the circular housing transition and the energy transition depend on local community efforts, which are often unpaid and underrepresented in the current debate on the Circular Built Environment by policymakers and academia alike. This thesis advocates for a greater recognition of community efforts and identifies a role for architects and designers to facilitate this. Consequently, the thesis outlines six design principles for architects to foster resilient communities. Finally, it concludes with a design proposal for a circular catalyst in the form of a building that integrates a workshop and residential component. Situated in Tanthof, Delft, this proposal illustrates how circular development can respond to and build upon the specific conditions of an existing urban context. ... Read more

This thesis addresses the hidden crisis of food insecurity in the Netherlands, where industrial agriculture has led to nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss, and fragile ecosystems. Focusing on Midden-Delfland, the project proposes “Home to Fork,” a sitopic community that integrates food production, preparation, and consumption into residential design. By designing housing for 100 households in the Duifpolder, the project explores strategies that enable residents to cultivate, process, and share food at multiple scales and skill levels. Drawing from nutritional anthropology, regenerative food systems, and sustainable development, the research examines how architecture can empower communities to reduce reliance on industrial supply chains and adopt regenerative, localized practices. The project reframes food not only as sustenance but as a driver of community cohesion, environmental stewardship, and spatial innovation, positioning architecture as a catalyst for systemic change toward resilient and autonomous ways of living. ... Read more

Waterscapes of Resilience explores how innovative housing design in wetland regions can address the dual imperatives of environmental sustainability and community resilience in the context of increasing flood risks. Grounded in the Dutch Delta—specifically Midden-Delfland—this thesis responds to the ecological vulnerabilities and socio-spatial disconnections caused by rigid flood infrastructure and urbanization. It critiques prevailing paradigms that treat nature as a threat to control and instead proposes a framework rooted in re-territorialization—a spatial, ecological, and cultural realignment between human settlements and dynamic water systems.

The research employs a multi-method approach combining literature review, international case study analysis, ethnographic interviews, site mapping, and iterative design modeling. It synthesizes concepts of de-synchronization, community-based design, and adaptive architecture to develop spatial strategies that reimagine housing not as static shelter, but as an evolving interface between water, ecology, and society.

The resulting design proposal envisions a modular, resilient housing community integrated with green-blue infrastructure. Key technological ideas include floodable wall systems with removable cladding, breathable insulation, and a hybrid timber-concrete foundation system tailored for wetland conditions. Communal spaces—such as water plazas, walkable levees, and shared terraces—support social interaction and collective flood response.

By embedding climate adaptation into the DNA of housing and community design, the project advances a regenerative architectural approach that not only withstands flood events but thrives through ecological cohabitation. This thesis contributes a resilient, scalable, and inclusive housing model for deltaic regions facing climate uncertainty, while reinforcing the role of architecture as a critical mediator between human and natural systems. ... Read more

This research investigates how contemporary design can integrate modernization and efficiency while preserving the historical value, cultural identity, and unique essence of traditional Dutch polder landscapes and their dwellings. Grounded in a qualitative methodology, the study employs a multifaceted research strategy including exploratory, descriptive, correlational, comparative, historical, and case study method. These approaches facilitated a layered understanding of spatial, architectural, and cultural dynamics in the polder landscape, with Midden-Delfland serving as the principal case study.

The study explores how design principles derived from historical research and grounded theory can guide the creation of architecture that respects tradition while meeting modern needs. Through comparative analysis and narrative interpretation, vernacular forms and typologies were examined and reimagined to develop a unified set of contemporary design principles.

The findings culminate in a three-part design framework: [1] urban planning strategies that align future-oriented development with polder logic and environmental systems; [2] rchitectural massing techniques that reinterpret vernacular typologies using durable, symbolic forms; and [3] detailing approaches that combine traditional craftsmanship with digital innovation to enhance experiential and cultural value. This triadic approach offers a resilient and context-sensitive blueprint for modern architecture in heritage landscapes.

Ultimately, the research proposes that the preservation of the Dutch polder’s architectural character lies not in replication but in reinterpretation—through craftsmanship that bridges past and future, tradition and innovation. This vision champions an architecture that is both deeply rooted and forwardthinking, ensuring the continued evolution and recognizability of the polder landscape. ... Read more

This research deals with some big questions architecture students might have during their education: How are good (design) decisions made? What makes a good architect? Why is a design process so uncomfortable? It’s an exploration of design process and ethics, set in the context of the ever-changing world that worries us deeply.

Being an Architecture student at a Technical University over the period of 2017-2025 caused the author of this paper to experience intrinsic discomforts. An accidental wicked problem approach to demystify this experience led to the insight that the knowledge gap was nonexistent in literature. However, the uncovered knowledge led the author to identify a relation between the intrinsic discomforts and lack of clarity about wicked problems and their implications at the faculty. This leads to a new hypothesis: there may be a predisposition for technical universities to favor science based approaches over more volatile iterative design practices. To approach this wicked problem, more explicit inclusion of wicked problem methodology in design education and more general focus on critical thinking are proposed. ... Read more

Since the late 20th century, there has been a significant rise in agricultural companies offering care services in the Netherlands, also known as care farms (van der Meulen et al., 2022). These farms emerged as a response to the large institutions that once housed people with disabilities, often isolating them from society in remote locations surrounded by barriers and fences. While care farms are typically situated in isolated areas, such as rural polders, their purpose is to use this isolation to help people with disabilities engage more actively in society (Elings & Koffijberg, 2022). By removing them from overstimulating environments, negative temptations, and bad friends who can pull them into crime, care farms provide a chance for these individuals to lead better lives. Currently, most care farms offer day care services but do not provide residential options, despite a growing demand for such services from different target groups and the care sector due to evolving care needs (Ferwerda & Hassink, 2015). Care farms prove to contribute successfully to the quality of life, social participation and self-reliance of various people in need of care (Hassink, 2022).

However, care farms situated in polders are facing a significant challenge due to climate change: water (ZUS et al., 2022). Increased rainfall and the need for water storage are prompting plans to flood polders, which could reduce agricultural and building land while creating abundant water. Building homes and providing care on water could become a vital additional income source for existing and future care farms, helping to alleviate pressure on the care sector. While the trend of living on the water has already gained traction among private individuals, it remains an underexplored concept within the care sector.

The largest target group of care farms and with 1.1 million people in the Netherlands a widely represented group, are people with a mild intellectual disability (Landelijk Kenniscentrum LVB, 2024). They can possibly be a well-suited group for living on water within a residential care farm setting. Therefore, this study aims to explore the potential of a housing initiative on water for people with mild intellectual disabilities as part of a residential care farm.

To explore the potential of this concept, the research aims to answer the following question: What kind of spatial qualities can residential care farms provide for people with mild intellectual disabilities in a future with flooded polders? The study focuses on two types of case studies: residential care farms for people with MID and housing on water. Spatial qualities in both types of case studies are analysed through a combination of a literature review, an online survey, and interviews, with a strong emphasis on the perspective of the end users. These methods result in two sets of spatial qualities, which are then compared and evaluated in relation to the housing needs of individuals with a MID.

A residential care farm generally seems to meet the needs of people with MID well, such as creating a place where clients can retreat, living in a community and living in an isolated and natural environment. These qualities are also often mentioned by respondents (without MID) who live on water. The community feeling and the contact with nature are mentioned as major advantages on water. Respondents who live on water also clearly experience more freedom than on land, despite the small distance between neighbours. For residential care farms this could be a reason to realise homes on water, to possibly increase the sense of freedom among this target group. In general, however, living on water cannot directly meet the needs of people with MID that residential care farms do not or cannot meet. However, living on water could possibly provide creative design solutions to meet needs of people with MID in an alternative way, which is shown in the design project at the end of this report. ... Read more