This thesis explores the potential of sustainable cruise tourism to inspire regional and urban strategies aimed at maximizing benefits for secondary port cities. In recent years, there has been a growing concern about the impact of tourism on urban environments, especially on the effects of cruise ship tourism. This form of tourism brings immediate mass impact and minimal contributions to local economies. As a result, it causes spatial disruptions, alterations to public spaces, and protests in cities such as Venice and Barcelona. To face these challenges, some ports have implemented bans and restrictions. However, despite these measures, the cruise industry has continued to expand. This disparity will increase the number of cruise ship visits to secondary ports.

By using literature reviews, stakeholder analysis, and scenario building, this research explores how a change in the cruise industry in terms of the use of smaller vessels and regional cooperation, can impact an entire region. The study highlights that maintaining a solid connection between the sea and land is important for sustaining a maritime mindset, boosting the economy, and preserving local culture, thereby fostering residents’ stewardship.

Additionally, secondary cities can benefit economically from cooperation with larger urban centres, as outlined in the Agglomeration Shadow/Borrowed Size theory. Despite the potential benefits, the implementation of sustainable cruise tourism faces challenges, including resistance from established cruise companies and the need for significant public support. Empowering local governments to lead the transition is crucial, particularly in overcoming the dominance of major cruise operators. Cooperation among regions is also essential to ensure equitable distribution of tourism and economic benefits.

The master thesis "Risveglio Marittimo - Awakening Maritime Identity in Messina" answers the question of how the concept of maritime identity facilitates the understanding of existing assets and offers opportunities for the design of Messina as a port city. Through the collection of micro-narratives and their organization into categories, Messina's maritime identity was (re)discovered in following topics: heritage and culture, water and environment, threshold and transition, transformation and production, quoditiantity and symbols.

The quadrilatero site, between the Ex-Granai and the maritime station, was chosen to design a new maritime space, with the aim of fertilizing the perception and value of Messina's maritime identity. The renovation of the abandoned silos and the fish market allows to offer spaces for culinary products of the sea and the hinterland and their consumption on the edge between land and sea, creating a vibrant public space for exchange and transition at the most important traffic node bridging land and sea transportation.

This study sets out to assess the material based consequences of changes in future oil demand. In doing so, this study aims to quantify the physical, industrial petroleumscape. To achieve this, the evolution of the world’s petroleum infrastructures are modelled based on two SSP2 scenarios; a baseline scenario and a 1.5-degree scenario. This study estimates dynamic embedded materials from 1971 towards 2050, as well as the associated in- and outflow. Based on the end-of-life characteristics of the sector, the model assesses the potential for material circularity within the sector. This study finds that storage and pipelines are the driving stages of material use in the petroleum industry, and that steel and concrete are the most used materials. Furthermore, it shows that changes in  oil demand have an immediate effect on the material stock and inflow, but only effect the outflow of material after 2040. To reach material circularity within the petroleum sector a decrease demand is needed to lower the inflow, and end-of-life practices need to be improved, especially the recovery of pipelines after decommissioning and the recycling rate of concrete. 

The constant manipulation of the Dutch delta system and the resulting creation of hard borders between the natural river landscape, the harbor and the city has led to a destabilized delta system(Hein, 2021; Meyer et al., 2015). The spatial and ecological challenges resulting from population growth and the resulting urban growth, as well as climate change, are becoming increasingly urgent. To densify already urban areas, municipalities are transforming more and more inner-city port areas, which as a result of the relocation of the port to the North Sea are increasingly becoming available. However, this trend presents increasingly apparent challenges as these areas are outside of dike protection and exposed to natural influences (Breś & Krosnicka, 2021). On the one hand, they offer the opportunity for housing, which is urgently needed in Rotterdam, but on the other hand are highly vulnerable due to the enhanced risk of flooding resulting from sea-level rise and higher river discharge. 
The research project "Accepting the current(s) - A porous approach for the revitalization of a former port area in the Rhine-Meuse Delta" explores a new nature-based approach for these areas. The resulting design aims to combine the natural and urban processes in an adaptive and urban tidal landscape, working with and benefiting from the natural processes of the Nieuwe Maas and the Delta. It seeks to balance the various entities by enhancing the natural environment in the urban delta.
The permeable approach enables the provision of a collaborative zones for different flows and connections. This facilitates a transition from water to land and from port to city, where people, resources and ideas can move smoothly (Höller, 2021). Leading to better exploitation of potential and a better activation and integration of the previously segregated outer dike areas into the urban context. An adaptive hotspot is created within the dynamic landscape that is continuously evolving and able to accommodate future changes. In addition, the creation of tidal habitats provides an important natural habitat for different species of animals and plants that have been displaced by the previous water management of the region, thus creating a place of migration. For both humans and animals.
The work includes a design catalog for the creation of an urban tidal landscape to show decision-makers the various options available to create an adaptive wetland neighborhood. It allows the project to be more comprehensible and regionally transferable. In the end the suggested design strategies are applied to the study area of the waterfront of Nieuw Mathenesse/Merwe-Vierhavens to give a more specific outlook and to better demonstrate the potentials the design is intended to offer.

Building an oil fairy-tale investigates oil’s potency as a socio-cultural force and its role in shaping civic spaces in Stavanger, Norway. It posits that the Nordic city represents an exemplary case study on the complex and co-dependent interaction between petroleum and architecture. Since the discovery of oil in Norway in the late 1960s, the historically peripheral Nordic nation has experienced a remarkable economic, social, cultural, and architectural transformation. The rapid and comprehensive transition towards a petroleumscape has given rise to the term ‘oljeevntyret’ or the oil fairy-tale in the Norwegian lexicon. The oil fairy-tale has functioned as a reflection of changing socio-cultural conditions and a potent device to perpetuate an energy culture reflected in Stavanger’s architecture, cultural practices, economic developments, governmental policies, and visual expressions over the past decades. Following a general analysis of the national and local historical context, the thesis uses four architectural case studies in Stavanger, supported by archival and contemporary writings and media, to demonstrate how the city’s oil fairy-tale and civic spaces have developed in a feedback loop. Oil actors’ political and economic sway has created a new class of oil-civic spaces in Stavanger. In turn, these oil spaces’ narrative potentials contribute to an ever-expanding petroleumscape and celebration of oil as a heroic and Norwegian product. As the end of the oil age looms closer and cities around the world, including Stavanger, strive to imagine a post-oil future, we must appreciate the power and extent of oil in shaping our everyday spaces. Only then may we engage meaningfully in imagining a post-oil city future for cities that have become deeply drenched in oil.

This research investigates the case of Kirkenes, Norway. The region with its 10.000 inhabitants is located around 400 km above the Arctic Circle within the municipality of Sør-Varanger, Finmark, and is known as the capital of the Barents Region and the gateway to the east. Located around 15km away from the Norwegian-Russian border, Kirkenes has strategic importance, being one of the main areas expected to change due to increased navigability as well as new reachability of resources benefited by a changing climate and melting Arctic sea-ice extent. The region is foreseen to become Europe’s gate and new logistic node towards the soon-to-be ice-free Northern Sea-Route, creating a 40% faster trading-route between Asia and Europe. Founded in 1905 as a harbor-town for the trans-shipment of iron ore extracted from the Sydvaranger Mine, around 8 km inland in Bjørnevatn, new port development is planned, serving as a potential strategic part for China´s “Polar Silk Road” Initiative. Despite the efforts for reinventing Kirkenes and changing its face from industrial development towards a future-proof, sustainable, and resilient Capital of the Barents Region, mining, as well as manufacturing and industrial development, never stopped being an essential factor. The municipality envisions a new and massive extra-urban port development along the neighbouring Tømmerneset Peninsula, transforming the small port into one of Scandinavia´s biggest container ports, equivalent to the current capacity of the Port of Gothenburg. The thesis focuses on the need for rethinking, adapting, and complementing current approaches on port-cities, thus spatial planning, and design as a holistic and interdisciplinary profession can gain operative power to become a mediator between the different institutional and non-institutional actors and their values to emerge a new port-city paradigm within Kirkenes. The complexity and diversity of the project-area depict the necessity to shift the perception of the port-city relationship away from a static, line-like interface of management between (in the meaning of separating) port and city towards dynamic and pluralistic “scapes” betwixt of in-between (in the meaning of belonging to both) port and city. The goal of the project is to imagine an alternative design of the new port-development driven by a place-specific, actors- and values-based approach, which aims for the in-between scapes, where port and city become intertwined and embedded within each other. The multiple of port and city and therefore the emergence of an additional dimension in-between the territorial economic force of the port and the local urbanity and culture helped to define the new Port-City Scapes as one synergistic adaptive ecosystem, in which needs of the port, city and ecology are united.

The story of Port Cities and their regions and why they are important as an example of resilience and innovation.@en

Exhibition 23 October - 26 November 2018, TU Dresden@en

Exhibition 16 March - 18 April 2018, Faculty of Architecture (Delft University of Technology), Oostserre@en

Exhibition 17 December 2018 - 11 January 2019, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (Delft University of Technology), BK Expo@en

Curator of exhibition “Or Noir: Ruée, Marée, Virage” at the Learning Center Halle au sucre, Dunkirk, 18 October - June 2019@en

Exhibtion at BK-Expo, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Techology, 18 May - 2 June 2017. Petroleum – its extraction, refining, transformation, and consumption – has shaped our built environment in visible and invisible interconnected ways around the world over the last 150 years. Industrial structures, buildings, monuments, urban forms, and infrastructure stand as material witnesses to the ubiquity and power of petroleum. Many people orient themselves in space referring to gas stations, others point to oil headquarters as local urban icons, and a select few are aware of local oil industry facilities or the educational, housing or leisure facilities of the petroleum industry employees. But while observers recognize the connection to oil in select buildings, they do not picture the enormous collective presence of oil in the built environment, its impact on production processes, financial flows, and associated social and cultural patterns in our everyday environment, or the long history of oil’s impact on our lives. Expanding on the show “Oliedam: Rotterdam in the Oil Era from 1862-today,” this augmented exhibition on “The Global Petroleumscape” analyses the impact of oil in shaping architecture and the urban landscape at a larger global scale.@en

Exhibition at Groningen University, 18-10-2017 till 19-11-2017@en

Co-curator (with Mohamad Sedighi), based on research by Carola Hein, 18 July 2016 - 15 January 2017, Museum Rotterdam, The Netherlands@en