This thesis investigates how underutilised urban rooftops can be transformed into productive, multifunctional spaces through the integration of water, energy, and food systems within the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus framework. By treating rooftops as interconnected ecosystems, the study demonstrates how water harvesting, renewable energy, and urban agriculture can work together to improve resource efficiency, reduce environmental impacts, and contribute to urban resilience. Through case studies, technical guidelines, and best practices, the research provides a practical model for designing multifunctional rooftops tailored to diverse urban contexts. The findings underscore the potential of WEF-integrated rooftops to address sustainability challenges in cities while setting a foundation for future projects and research in urban infrastructure optimisation.

Over the past decades, various farming methods have evolved to address global challenges of increasing food demands, decreasing availability of arable land, and climate change. One such method is vertical farming, which uses active climate systems and artificial lighting in stacked systems, enabling year-round, stable yields with minimal land-use. Vertical farms (VFs) are often advocated as sustainable, offering benefits such as efficient land-use, high yields, minimal water and nutrient use, no pesticides, and proximity to urban food demands. However, substantial electricity use for lighting and climate control poses a major challenge.

This study assesses the potential to integrate VFs in cities to reduce energy and resource use, and carbon emissions of both entities collectively. It compares the carbon footprint of VFs and conventional farming in the Netherlands, revealing that the substantial electricity use in VFs outweighs their benefits from a carbon footprint perspective. Additionally, it explores reusing residual heat from VFs for building heating at both building and urban scales. It also examines synergies such as reusing water and nutrients outputs from buildings in VFs, and attuning lighting with grid electricity availability.

Findings indicate that synergetic integration of VFs in cities can reduce collective energy use and carbon footprints of both VFs and cities. However, the overall carbon footprint of these cities surpasses that of cities relying on fossil-based heating and conventional farming. These increased emissions should be weighed against the benefits VFs bring to cities, including enhanced food security, self-sufficiency, replacement of fossil-based heating, efficient land-use, and grid flexibility. In conclusion, while VFs offer significant urban benefits, their high carbon footprint due to artificial lighting remains a challenge.

An important part of people and their wellbeing is their living environment. Because of the increase in population and buildings, urban areas suffer from densification and diminishing green environments. These urban environments have substantial risk of mental illness, such as depression and anxiety. Green environments and qualitative features of building have a positive impact on people and their mental health. Because of lacking space caused by the large number of existing buildings, it is important to look at the possibilities to facilitate these healthy living environments within the existing urban fabric.

As a testcase within the research paper strategies for decreasing depression/anxiety levels and -risks in the urban context of Boerhaavewijk (Haarlem) are investigated, with the focus on urban green infrastructures and the facilitation of passive and active care. This research gives a method of improving mental health in urban environments, by providing a system of internal and external interventions with a scoring on effectiveness, cost, amount of functions, passive or active care and implementation time, together with the reflection of users, designers, and planners.

In the design proposal the found strategies are implemented in the renovation and add-on of a post-war flat and its immediate environment in Boerhaavewijk (Haarlem), with the objective of making it more sustainable and facilitate for better mental health, by the implementation of green infrastructures and the facilitation of passive and active care to decrease the depression/anxiety levels and-risks of its users.

The negative effects of global climate change are experienced more clearly every day, meaning that significant alterations across all causing sectors are necessary. However, the influence of the building industry as one of the most polluting sectors, is immense, but therefore this industry also has a high potential in mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions by applying circular design principles, such as circulating products and materials, and thereby designing a more sustainable, circular and healthy living environment. Additionally, increasing the amount of nature in the built environment will also contribute to this manner, nonetheless the ongoing trend of urbanisation causes a challenging dilemma between facilitating more residences and adding extra nature to the cities. Hence, new strategies of greening cities are essential to resolve this problem, at which utilising building envelopes as hosting surfaces for fostering vegetation and fauna form a highly potential solution.

Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to design a low-tech, three-dimensional, circular façade cladding system which utilises waste materials and fosters local biodiversity in urban areas. To properly design and develop this cladding system, research has been conducted through literature and case study review in the fields of circular design and biodiversity implementation in the façade industry and by physical and digital design experimentation and modelling.

Whereas, the research phase resulted in various potential low-tech manufacturing techniques, suitable reclaimed materials, modular and Design-for-Disassembly design principles and a selection of building-reliant flora and fauna species to implement in the design of the system, collectively facilitating the guidelines for the design phase. Finally, after an extensive design process a three-dimensional façade system derived consisting of three main modular elements, constructed from merely five unique planar components. Through the principle of rotation, a total of nine variations of the modules are generated, which facilitates not only the implementation of local biodiversity, but also creates an intriguing architectural language.

From this thesis, various conclusions have been drawn, including that in order to optimise the circular value of the design, the decision has been made to select the majority of the waste materials based on their local availability whenever the system is implemented in a certain location and at a specific timeframe. Moreover, the low-tech design strategy contributes to the involvement of the system’s end-users, eventually accelerating the transitioning process and furthermore increasing people’s awareness, knowledge and interest regarding circular, sustainable and nature-inclusive design subjects.

According to the Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu (RIVM), there will be more focus on tackling the unhealthy effects of urbanization in the near future. This together with the presence of a large stock of vacant buildings and other developments within these urban areas and the challenges which are formed by the developments in healthcare brings up the potential to create so-called healing environments. Although, mostly situated within a natural context, the question could be how to implement the design approach of a healing environment into an existing building within an urban context and what values it could bring to the surrounding neighborhood. Especially when given an user-centered (holistic) approach. This graduation design project explores in which way this user-centered design approach can be optimised by implementing certain 'atmospheres' within an existing context of a building in the station area of Leiden.

As the global population rise, climate conditions get more and more unpredictable, natural resources deplete; cities need to take action in order to sustain healthy living conditions as well as to ensure food safety. Currently, cities are solely dependent on external sources and suburban areas for natural resources and food as well as waste management. This linear metabolism results in cities consuming 60-80% of natural resources and producing 50% of waste globally. (Tsui et al., 2021) This problem can be overcome by introducing urban farming into cities by utilising waste and underused space as a resource for urban food production. Waste can be circulated in the city in order to generate a network of waste producing functions and farms.

There are urban farming systems which can digest waste and produce supplements for urban food production. However, the quest of choosing an urban farming system based on existing vacant spaces and waste flows is a complicated task. The complexity is a result of variables in the equation which may effect decision making such as different systems, waste types, vacant space characteristics as well as the size of spaces and the quantity of available waste. Moreover, in sites consisting of numerous vacant spaces and waste sources decision making is even more complex and laborious. If human designers were to perform this task then they would need to iterate countless times for each vacant space, each waste source close to it and each potential urban farming systems. However, when it comes iterating and repeating the same steps, computers are explicitly faster, time-efficient and error free. Therefore a decision making tool which can assist designers to choose urban farming systems based on existing conditions can be a practical resource.

This paper investigates how to integrate urban farming into cities by utilising under-used spaces and existing waste sources via using a decision making tool. The design rules and the methodology are formed based on literature review regarding different farming systems, varying waste flows and computational approaches. A prototype of the tool is generated and tested on 2 case studies in order to showcase the potential of such an approach combining food production with waste management.

In the global shift towards decarbonization of the built environment, the nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB) goals in the Directive 2010/31/EU had been set as an achievable goal for the EU. By requiring all future constructions to utilize the integration of energy efficient services into the building as well as emphasize the reduction of embodied energy in building materials, the nZEB goals for existing buildings has continued to be a challenge. Within the Netherlands, large estates of post-war housing require the renovation for improved energy efficiency to meet the thermal performance set by the directive, however the low renovation rate of buildings has limited progress thus stunting the major shift towards a more sustainable existing built environment.
In the completed renovation projects, petroleum based materials have been utilized in most cases for insulation and particleboards. This raises the question of if the shift towards a more sustainable built environment that meets nZEB goals should still be utilizing materials that no longer meet the rationality of sustainable practices.
Through the use of Bio-base Materials, renovations have the potential of not only decarbonize aspects of the entire renovation project but also shift towards following a circular economy design approach. By replacing the traditional construction materials, bio-base materials have the possibility of large scale integration in the built environment through a modular panel renovation approach. Specifically focused on agricultural bio-base materials, allow for the possibility of acknowledging the four steps of circular design, origin, composition, assembly, and future. Within the framework of the circular design approach, it was acknowledged that the origin of agriculture bio-base materials have limitations of scalability as well as have the potential of damaging the local ecosystem and land use designations through the increased pressure for cultivation of bio-base materials from agricultural waste flows.
Although bio-base materials are inherently more sustainability sourced than traditional materials, by designing a controlled environment agriculture process for bio-base materials has been a radical and novel idea within the research for the guaranteed harvesting of bio-base material as well as integrated Water Energy Food Nexus concepts. By reducing water consumption of the bio-base materials in a Controlled Environment, as well as the by-product of grains, and increased efficiency, the application of the circular renovation design of the renovation elements acknowledges major parts of the WEF Nexus on a local and regional scale.
A Controlled Environment growing bio-base materials for renovation application is designed for the future resilience of the agriculture bio-base material industry as well as enables positive impact on a local social scale and suggests that the shift towards decarbonized built environment and material elements must require a considerable and radical shift in order to meet the sustainable future goals of 2050.

The population of the world is increasing at a rapid rate and is expected to reach 9.7billion by 2050. Out of this, around 6.3billion people will be living in urban areas. With an ever increasing population, the demand for energy and resources is also increasing. It is becoming difficult to meet these demands with the existing supply conditions. With this research, the aim is to develop a symbiotic energy and resource relationship between residential buildings and modular greenhouses. By doing so, it could help in reducing the primary demands of the buildings while meeting the demands by utilizing the waste flows of the building.

With phenomena such as population growth and urbanisation, expanding cities no longer derive their food supply from their hinterlands but rely on the global food trade which includes vast greenhouse and open-field agriculture. Given the limited availability of land, water and nutrients together with the uncertainty of a changing climate, the sustainability of these networks becomes questionable. Urban agriculture and in particular Plant Factories with Artificial Lighting (PFAL) offer the potential to positively adapt to these changes. In these PFALs, horizontal trays are stacked in a closed environment, using LEDs, HVAC and hydroponic systems to enable an optimal environment for plant growth.

FACTOR LIST
Because of the novelty of plant factories and especially their integration into the built environment, most architects are not equipped with the knowledge to do so. The first step is to provide a document dissecting what is relevant for architects designing building integrated PFAL.

GROWMODULE PROTOTYPE
An automated growmodule prototype is designed, with the aim of optimising social and aesthetic potentials without compromising on production quality and efficiency. These modules can be placed into any building space and include a structural system that allows for modular placement along all axes.

BUILDING TESTCASE
These growmodules do not require any natural light, allowing them to be placed in spaces that are typically regarded as dark and unattractive. When transforming large offices and factories to a residential function, these dark spaces often occur. Hence, the growmodule prototype is tested in one such building, the grain silo Latenstein (Rijnhaven, Rotterdam). The building concept consists of three layers; a vertical farming core, apartments and a green shell. Multiple aspects are explored including user interaction, aesthetic qualities, climate design and reduction of overall energy demands by integration of the vertical farm with the climate system of the building surrounding urban network.