Given the urgency of addressing climate change impacts, collaborations between local governments and diverse stakeholders are imperative for successful climate adaptation efforts in urban areas. This master thesis explores the role of collaborative governance capacities in policy and their implementations in practice within the context of the climate adaptation strategy of Amsterdam (Strategie Klimaatadaptatie Amsterdam). Through document evidence and interviews analysed in Atlas ti, the study examines four key collaborative governance capacities: adaptive inclusivity, integration of communication methods, reflectiveness on past projects, and the availability of resources. Findings reveal how the presence or lack of these capacities influence the collaboration outcomes in 2 climate adaptation projects, highlighting the importance of context-specific strategies and flexibility in municipal roles. Despite challenges such as institutional constraints and difficulty engaging vulnerable groups, the municipality demonstrates a commitment to enhancing collaborations in their strategy. The study underscores the necessity of a holistic approach to implementing collaborative governance capacities for effective climate adaptation, offering recommendations for future policy and practice.

It is necessary to reduce meat consumption due to its impact on the climate. Various organisations, including the municipality of Amsterdam, are already taking steps to address this issue. However, these efforts often face resistance from the public. This emotional reaction hinders the establishment from implementing meat curtailment policies (MCPs). Therefore, it is essential to investigate the underlying reasons for these emotional reactions and whether these insights can be used to design meat curtailment interventions that cause less emotional responses. Consequently, this research addresses the following question: "What underlies the emotional reaction to reducing the meat supply in company restaurants, and how can these underlying reasons be used to design policies to reduce meat consumption at company restaurants?"

This study employed two research methods: emotion networking and brainstorming. The first part of the study employed emotion networking to explore the reasons behind the emotional reaction. It revealed that reducing meat consumption, whether through meat reduction policies or otherwise, evokes feelings of threats to freedom of choice, coercion, and exclusion. People perceive meat as essential and consume it consciously. These positive feelings about meat reinforce the negative feelings about reducing meat consumption. The underlying reasons for the emotional reactions seem strongly interconnected, with individuals often experiencing multiple underlying reasons.

The second part of the study consisted of a brainstorming session, focused on designing interventions based on the outcomes of the first part of the study. However, the ambiguity and interconnectedness of these emotions and underlying reasons prevented valuable interventions from being designed. This raises a crucial question: what are effective interventions?
The findings of this study contribute to the transition away from meat consumption as it showed that threats to the need to feel socially or culturally included cause resistance against reducing meat consumption, and meat offering at company’s restaurants or MCPs. Moreover, it suggests that there is a negative perception that eating vegetarian means eating meat substitutes, which causes resistance. Also, the lens of transition pain has proven insightful to research resistance against MCPs. Finally, this study suggests that designing effective interventions that do not cause resistance is complex and perhaps impossible. Consequently, it seems valuable to focus on designing interventions that effectively reduce meat consumption. Therefore, the question should be addressed: What is an effective intervention?

Urban blue space is increasingly used to refer to an urban waterbody and its waterfront, implying that the waterfront should be a shared public space. Unsurprisingly, increasing competition over the benefits of urban blue space has resulted in issues of justice. While spatial justice is rapidly becoming one of the main planning goals in the global North, in the global South, where central states are often pursuing neoliberal agendas to keep up with developed countries, empirical studies remain few. This thesis evaluates urban blue space regeneration from a spatial justice perspective in Istanbul, a typical example of such a context. An evaluative spatial justice framework is applied to the policy plans for ‘Haliç Marina and Complex Project’, a recent regeneration initiative and hot discussion topic in local and national politics. Using interviews, site observations, and two local Masterplans, a qualitative content analysis (QCA) shows that the plan prioritizes commercial development before spatial justice. The plan seems to be an iteration of developmentalist politics of the national government, and so Istanbul’s blue space is subject to the will of a powerful, entrepreneurial government. While this poses many challenges to spatial justice, a strong resistance movement and a slowly changing political climate stem hopeful. Future studies should extent the empirical database to more different contexts, to identify how the transition from profit-based regeneration towards spatial justice can be achieved.

The construction industry's substantial consumption of materials, CO2 emissions, and construction and demolition waste underscore the pressing need for change. One promising solution is the reuse of secondary building components, which has the potential to signifi-cantly mitigate these environmental impacts. Circular Building Hubs (CBHs) have emerged as a novel business concept that could facili-tate the collection and processing of these components, thereby promoting their reuse. However, effectively scaling up their operation-al secondary building component supply processes (supply processes) requires changes in the practices embedded in these processes. Therefore, this exploratory research aimed to identify the extend to which constraining and enabling factors influence the scalability of core practices embedded in supply processes of these CBHs. The core practices are those considered to be essential for the CBH concept. As such, it intended at contributing to new and more comprehensive understanding on the effects of these factors and thereby contrib-ute to the development and scaling up of these processes. Hence, the main research question is as follow: ‘What are core practices em-bedded within the secondary supply processes for circular building hubs, and to what extent are involved constraining and enabling factors influencing the scalability of these practices?’ This research adopts a qualitative case study research approach, centered around a conceptual framework based upon Social Practice Theory (SPT) and hypothesized supply processes. This study incorporates semi-structured interviews with seven experts, four observations, and one focus group discussion (FGD), all conducted in the Netherlands. The results conclude that throughout 10 different supply processes, 37 different core practices are performed that contribute to the supply of secondary building components for CBHs. Furthermore, the research revealed that these core practices are affected by at least 29 constraining and 26 enabling factors. The research categorizes the influence of factors on core practices as low, medium, or high impact based on quantitative data from CBH supply process experts. The FGD emphasized that constraining and enabling factors affecting core practices in CBHs are highly complex and context-dependent. These factors are influenced by various contextual aspects, business strategies, and specific project conditions. In conclusion, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, highlighting the importance of customized strategies to address constraining factorsand enhance enabling factors for scaling core practices within the supply process-es of CBHs. Further research is required on exploring CBHs with diverse historical backgrounds to identify new constraining and ena-bling factors specific to their context.

This research examines the multifaceted challenges posed by urbanization in the Netherlands, specifically focusing on the intricate relationships between modes of mobility and societal well-being. Central to this exploration is studying the modal split and understanding how shifts in this split can have profound implications for urban areas. The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management’s (Min IenW) Well-being Monitor is the foundation for this study, aiming to chart the interplay of living environment, safety, health, and accessibility. It illuminates the potential consequences of changing transportation choices (modal split) on broader environmental concerns such as the Urban Heat Island effect, noise disturbance, air quality, and climate resilience. While cars due to their ubiquity, cars play a central role in the research. However, the importance of Non-Motorized Transport (NMT) and Public Transport (PT) is also highlighted, given their significant roles in urban mobility and their potential to redefine the modal split. Using Rotterdam as a case study, the research delves into the spatial constraints of one of the Netherlands’ largest cities, emphasizing the need for effective urban planning that prioritizes sustainable transportation solutions and envisions future shifts in transportation preferences. The goal is to offer valuable insights that can influence urban strategies, ensuring sustainable and livable cities.

This research aims to understand the local governance capacity of Amsterdam Oud-Noord and discover how this area, together with its stakeholders, can improve its climate resilience through transformative climate adaptation governance. This was done by first understanding the research area, its challenges and needed climate adaptation, and by identifying the present climate adaptation stakeholders. Secondly, the governance climate adaptation governance capacity was analysed, according to the redevelopment and extension of an existing framework. Transformative governance climate adaptation governance capacity was analysed through four governance capacities; Stewarding, Unlocking, Transformative and Orchestrating capacity, and related indicators. This led to the identification of governance capacity gaps, followed by recommendations for improvement.
The findings indicate that climate adaptation governance capacity is perceived as promising, but all identified indicators show that there is a need for improvement. The most pressing gaps identified are insufficient smart monitoring and insufficient stakeholder synergies. These are suggested to be improved by increasing the awareness and recognition of the value of monitoring. Next to that, accessible general methods should be developed, enabling all types of stakeholders to monitor their climate adaptation. Lastly, our results suggest that a platform should be created where stakeholders can share and coordinate their activities and possible concerns regarding climate adaptation.

The municipality of Stockholm is currently working on one of Stockholm’s most extensive and complex urban areas: The Stockholm Royal Seaport (se: Norra Djurgårdsstaden). The area is an example of how a former industrial port area is being transformed into a sustainable urban district. Because of the transformation of the area, the identity of the place is slowly changing to something different. Place identity is a two-way relationship in which a place influences people and where people tend to change and create the place in a way that represents them. This research wants to get insights on the place identities of the municipality of Stockholm and the residents of the Stockholm Royal Seaport, to see how synergies can be created between them. The four elements of Amundsen (2001) are used to assess and define the place identities and allow to understand what makes the areas distinctive compared to other places. With these insights, the aim of the research is to provide the municipality with recommendations for the further place branding and development of the Stockholm Royal Seaport, as many scholars argue that the identity of a place should be the base of a place branding strategy. This is important to consider as the place brand should be representative to all segments of the area, especially as it has the potential to affect the place identity over time.

The results of the interviews with the residents of the Stockholm Royal Seaport imply that they mainly define their place identities on spatial qualities that distinguish the place from others. Also, the characteristics or qualities of the inhabitants indicated to be important, as most responses were about the many children in the area. This element also raised awareness on the inclusivity of areas such as the Stockholm Royal Seaport. The comparison of the place identities of the municipality of Stockholm and the residents of the Stockholm Royal Seaport led to the insights that the social needs of residents without children should be considered, more efforts should be made on the socio-economic level of the area, there should be more attention to the unique location of the area and the knowledge on the sustainability of the residents needs to be improved. The element of culture and history is underrepresented in the place identities of the residents, but both the municipality and residents expect that the further development of the area might bring more awareness to this. This shows that it is important to keep monitoring and managing the place identities in transformative port-city areas. It also implies that the local unique elements are defining for the area and should be the driver of the place branding strategies of the municipality, especially as more cities are developing their former industrial port areas into urban districts.

The evolution of global maritime trade in the twentieth century dramatically reshaped the functional reality of port cities and pushed operational port areas away from historic urban centres. The docklands vacated by port operations have been identified as strategic zones for redevelopment, and their redevelopment has given rise to a global typology - the port-urban waterfont regeneration project. The manner in which redevelopment of these port-urban waterfront areas has occurred has been linked to numerous urban challenges, including the destruction of cultural heritage. This thesis utilises the Policy Arrangement Approach to analyse to what extent socio-spatial justice has been considered in the redevelopment process of one such port-urban waterfront zone - the North Shore, Liverpool (UK). The research finds that applying a socio-spatial justice lens to the Policy Arrangement Approach creates an effective tool for the interrogation of redevelopment processes, and makes specific recommendations to improve the ongoing redevelopment process at the North Shore.

Feelings of unsafety limits a person’s accessibility and usage of public spaces, especially for women as they experience higher levels of fear compared to men. Hence, gender differences in safety perceptions in public spaces have been widely studied among scholars. However, in such research women, and men, are often seen as a homogenous group, whilst there may be significant differences in in safety perceptions among them. Hence, this research aims to explore the differences in individual safety perception among women in public spaces of Holendrecht, in the south-eastern part of Amsterdam, using qualitative research methods like interviewing and mental mapping. Two identities explicitly come forward, women with a large social network, who are older, live longer in the neighbourhood and have a Surinam or Ghanese ethnicity, tend to report lower levels of feelings unsafe. And those with a small social network in the neighbourhood, who are younger, live there for a shorter period and have a Dutch ethnicity, are more in need of additional factors to enhance their feelings of safety. Such factors are familiarity and physical factors influencing visibility. These results indicate the importance of taking an intersectional approach, to see how social categorization intervene with different perceptions of safety. This way, decisions on maintenance and improving public spaces can be better informed to create more equal access of public spaces.