Since the 1970s, cities world-wide have been witness to radical de-industrialisation. Manufacturing was considered incompatible with urban life and was actively pushed out. As economies have grown, public officials and developers have instinctively shifted their priorities to short-term,...

This research introduces the concept of visibility as a useful tool to assess the democratic features of public spaces. We understand democratic public spaces as open spaces, which are accessible to all and allow different cultural expressions for individuals and groups. The concept of...

The EAAE Annual Conference of 2019 is titled ‘The Hidden School’, aiming to discuss an architecture school’s true character, the substance and the quality of architectural education in the broadest sense, and that which is beyond the stated curricula, yet — whether concretely manifested or...

This research aims to develop user-focused design principles for energy-efficient office renovations. The goal of this is to improve the quality and comfort of workspaces without compromising on energy-saving goals. Due to increasing sustainability requirements, new ways of working and...

The central question and purpose of the thesis is to understand how landscape as a design concept is changing our understanding of architecture. It explores the ways in which landscape is relevant for design strategies in architecture.

Buildings that have been designed like landscapes...

A book about a university docent and one of his courses – why would you do that? And what is the academic impact?

The question of impact, especially as it relates to the rapidly developing culture of publications in scientific journals, should be the topic of a separate discussion....

This research is aimed at better understanding how occupants use energy in their homes from a comfort-driven perspective, in order to propose customized environmental characteristics that could improve the occupants’ comfort while reducing energy consumption. To propose such bespoke...

One of the long-standing issues in the field of corporate real estate management is the alignment of an organization’s real estate to its corporate strategy. In the last thirty years, fourteen Corporate Real Estate (CRE) alignment models have been made. In some of these CRE alignment models it...

The subject of this dissertation concerns the investment decisions made by housing associations in urban renewal neighbourhoods in cooperation with other stakeholders.

Project background and problem statement

A number of radical changes are taking place in the...

Passive cooling for thermal comfort in summer is a big issue in low-energy building design. An important reason is global warming because global warming increases the number of cooling degree days. In addition, the energy demand of buildings has increased rapidly due to both the improvement of...

Glass as a material has always fascinated architects. Its inherent transparency has given us the ability to create diaphanous barriers between the interior and the exterior that allow for space and light continuity. Yet, we are just starting to understand the full potential, properties and...

The Department of Urbanism of the TU Delft is organised in five sections: Spatial Planning & Strategy (SPS), Urban Design, Environmental Modelling, Urban Studies, and Landscape Architecture. SPS has three distinct and complementary pillars: (i) Spatial Planning & Strategy, (ii)...

SPACERGY builds upon the need for planning authorities to develop new models to implement energy transition strategies in the urban environment, departing from the exploitation or reciprocity between space and energy systems. Several policies have been made by each EU nation, but effective and...

This doctoral thesis presents the results of ten years of research on informal settlements, with particular reference to Brazilian favelas. The research aimed to understand the social dynamics of the production of space in these settlements. To this purpose, the author took residence in...

Nishiyama Uzo-, educated as an architect between 1930 and 1933, was a key figure in Japanese urban planning. He was a prolific writer who influenced a whole generation of Japanese urban planners and his interpretations of foreign planning and local practice still influence Japanese planning...

Patrick Geddes is one of the most important figures in planning history, variously presented as an inspiration to regional planning, environmental planning and sustainability, grass-roots planning, citizen democracy, historic preservation, neighbourhood upgrading, university–community...

The Festival of Britain is perhaps best known for its South Bank Exhibition promoting British science and art to the post-war world, but one of the most important elements was the Architecture Exhibition, based in Poplar in East London. This exhibition was used to demonstrate the principles of...

Unlike European countries, where the consolidation of town planning was based on legislative reforms, Latin America’s urbanismo mainly stemmed from urban plans for national capitals and metropolises. Austrian academic and planner Karl Brunner was hired in Chile, Colombia and Panama from the...

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–83) was a British town planner, editor, and educator. These four key Tyrwhitt texts illustrate how she forged and promoted a synthesis of Patrick Geddes’ bioregionalism and the utopian ideals of European modernist urbanism, which influenced post-war academic discourse...

This work was written and compiled by the then Secretary of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association in 1913. It shows just how much the conception of the garden city had been broadened from Howard’s original texts. Indeed the Association’s own name had been broadened to add the newly...

During World War II, many European government authorities and planners believed that the damage caused by bombing constituted a great opportunity to transform their cities. Even as the fighting continued, a great many plans were drawn up, and this has been the subject of much scholarship....

Traffic in Towns, also known as the Buchanan report, is regarded as one of the most influential planning documents of the twentieth century. The report reflected mounting concern about the impact on Britain’s towns and cities of rapid growth in the ownership and use of motor vehicles. Its...

The UK’s largest new town, Milton Keynes, is the product of a transatlantic planning culture and a plan for a relatively low-density motorised city generously endowed with roads, parklands, and the infrastructure of cabling for communications technology. At its heart was the charismatic and...

The publication of The Planning of a New Town in 1961 aroused remarkable interest. Its pages described a private new town, sponsored by the London County Council (LCC), to be built at Hook in Hampshire; a scheme that innovatively combined Garden City/New Town traditions with sensitivity to...

George Taylor’s Town Planning for Australia was the first dedicated book on the subject of urban planning published in Australia. Journalistic and ideological in style, it sets out a robust vision for a specifically Australian approach to planning and development of towns in a young...

This book, published in 1937, reported on a four-week visit to Moscow in 1936 to study the making of Moscow as a showpiece Soviet capital. At its core was the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow but the book was a study of planning in the Soviet rather than the Western sense....

Between the World Wars, the talent of Dutch town planner J. M. de Casseres (1902–1990) found expression in two visionary books and a clutch of influential articles.

In an in-depth article published in February 1929 in the magazine De Gids under the title ‘Grondslagen der planologie’...

By 1900 the British had undertaken various types of urban planning in their colonial territories, but the early twentieth century brought new ideas and the birth of the modern planning movement. In India these new planning ideas inspired several specialized reports after 1900, most of which...

Europe Rehoused was one of the most influential housing texts of the 1930s, and is still widely cited. Written by the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby (1894–1965) it offered a survey of the nearly two decades of social housing built across Europe since the end of World War I, with the aim of...

John Nolen’s New Ideals in the Planning of Cities, Towns and Villages is the most thorough assessment of city planning written by an American practitioner before 1920. It records the interplay of urban reform in Europe and the United States, the rise of the planning expert, the design of new...

Rodrigo Pérez de Arce’s essay Urban Transformations and the Architecture of Additions was published during the formative stages of postmodernism, at the point where theory was becoming seriously established. Jencks’ first essays formalising the term postmodernism in architecture and the...

This short account of the planning of Lusaka as the new capital of Northern Rhodesia, written for its offi cial opening in 1935 as part of jubilee celebrations for King George V, was printed in a limited edition specifi cally for that event, and is now very scarce and diffi cult to obtain, but...

The Ghent Congress on town planning was the first genuinely international conference to address all aspects of civic life and design. Attended by representatives of 22 governments and 150 cities, as well as by hundreds of architects, planners, politicians, and scientists, it marked the...

Tropical Architecture, although now a highly contested and debated term, is the name given to European modern architecture that has been modified to suit the climatic and sometimes cultural context of hot countries. These hot countries were labelled ‘the tropics’ and were often European...

The Skeffington Committee was appointed in 1968 to look at ways of involving the wider public in the formative stages of local development plans. It was the first concerted effort to encourage a systematic approach to resident participation in planning and the decision-making process, in...

Like many UK cities Birmingham was heavily bombed during the Second World War and, as with so many bombed British cities, and many un-bombed ones that jumped onto the re-planning bandwagon, there was a clear imperative to reconstruct. But Birmingham was atypical in how it went about this. The...

Thomas Sharp was a key figure in mid-C20 British planning whose renown stems from two periods in his career. First, he came to attention as a polemical writer in the 1930s on planning issues, including as a virulent opponent of garden cities. His prose tempered over time and this phase perhaps...

The Netherlands Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (NALACS), in cooperation with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, organised the joint conference, ‘Cities and Citizenship in Contemporary Latin America and the...

13th IPHS Conference (2008, Chicago, USA) of the International Planning History Society (IPHS) and its proceedings place presentations from different continents and on varied topics side by side, providing insight into state-of-the art research in the field of planning history and offering a...

In the 1980s, planning approaches in European regions have changed as a result of increasing attention to regional spatial developments and a diminishing reliance on government-led statutory planning schemes. Emerging new approaches, often called spatial planning, shifted the focus from...

Aim and outline of the research

The aim of this dissertation is to identify and classify the various Holland country houses landscapes based on the most important factors and motives involved in building of the large amount country-houses between 1630 and 1730. The...

In 1990 the then Minister for Culture, Hedy d’Ancona, issued the Delta Plan for Cultural Preservation: a large-scale and national program to thoroughly improve collection storage conditions in Dutch museums. This signalled the start of a transformation of the Dutch museum.he reason for this...

By using Amsterdam as a living laboratory, graduate students, researchers and teachers of the architectural design chair of Complex Projects at the Department of Architecture at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment have been interested in seeing how ‘growth’ and rapid...

Anchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal...

Over the last half century, the Global South has faced a strong rise in the rate of urbanisation. Although this process differs from region to region, rapid urbanisation has created many challenges for countries in the Global South. Brazil is no different. The largest country in South America...

With a little help from my friends

What would you think if I designed a new world, would you stand up and join me? Lend me your knowledge and I’ll design you a place that can help to make a better world.

In 1967 the Beatles made a song in which they asked each other questions:...

Resource consumption mostly overcomes the embedded capacity of global ecosystems, which are self-regenerating until they reach the point of the planet’s limits. Moreover, the consumption of virgin resources and raw materials is strictly related to a consequent production of waste, which is...

How can we create more human-centered, resilient, and sustainable cities in the tech age? Can we make use of technology and the opportunities presented rather than resisting its fast-paced evolution? What are the biggest and most likely spatial...