In a society where food poverty is affecting more and more people. The presence of social food initiatives, such as community kitchens, is of growing importance. This paper investigates London’s high streets in search of tools to achieve the acknowledgement of social food provision in the everyday life of society. Something which is still not widely accepted but necessary. The high street is the chosen vibrant multicultural context that can assist and make use of this necessary transition. To provide transition is to consider transition and there the transitional moments of the high street social experience are investigated. After setting out the different meanings and scales of transition and thresholds, a socio-spatial urban and microanalysis of several London high streets is performed. The changing daily activities and rhythms of the high street experience point out that it is important to consider the high street as a social space which holds a great variety of social transitional factors but could benefit from a broader reservoir of possibilities. I further conclude that the material and sensory experience influences the degree of intimacy of the lived experience. The possibility to choose from different intimacies grants people the opportunity to control their degree of anonymity and inclusivity. After years of underinvestment, the high streets could consider a reciprocating program such as a community kitchen among other possibilities. A place which gives to society and the society that gives back to the high street.

Water is the elixir of life for London, the river Thames is the heart powering its growth. Although it has created the existence of London, it has mainly been the city that influenced the river in route, form and function aligning with their needs. There always has been a changing tension between city and river, a battle between the forces of nature and the power of the anthropogenic. The combined impact of rapid urbanization and climate change has resulted in numerous shortcomings in the control-focused approach to urban river engineering and planning. Repeated flooding, environmental deterioration, biodiversity loss, declining livability, and increased environmental stress are all indicators of the diminished harmony between rivers and cities. These unintended side effects are a product of neglect, denial, and arrogance of not recognizing the river and its ecology. Therefore, there is an urgent need to rethink the Thames waterfront towards a justification for its existence and help regenerate both the river and the urban collective towards a coexisting future.

This thesis explores the changing meaning of water and the riverfront in London today, accompanied by an overview and understanding of the various waterfront conditions along the Thames. Based upon that knowledge a strategy was made to (re-) connect humans and rivers through the use of architecture as a riparian mediator. The combination of the “third generation city” theory by Marco Casagrande and the “oligopticon” theory by Bruno Latour provided a powerful framework for developing an architectural typology that focuses on connecting humans and the non-human, while simultaneously regenerating the ecosystem. As the architecture had to be further defined the strategy continued upon the idea of negotiating boundaries. Not only between humans and non-humans, as already established, but also between form and fluidity, between architecture and landscape, and between program and regeneration for humans and non-humans. This not only strengthens the concept of architecture as a mediator but also takes on the role of being an interdependent system. Therewith it becomes a much-needed and long-lasting protagonist in the re-establishment of the relationship between the water and the city. That has resulted in the architectural design of the five river rooms along the Thames.

In the face of rapid urbanisation, population growth, and environmental degradation, there is an urgent need to rethink the design and construction of urban spaces. The thesis investigates the potential of architecture as a catalyst for the regeneration of the area surrounding the Abbey Mills Pumping Station in London, UK. The process is symbolically viewed through the lens of cyclical agricultural fallowing as a method of urban renewal. This perspective positively interprets the dormant state of the site, perceiving the temporary cessation of capitalistic activities as an opportunity for other ecosystems to thrive. Drawing from cultural landscape theory and incorporating the idea of architecture as an accelerator in urban ecosystems, the thesis culminates with the notion of "the incomplete". It suggests a framework for progressive change and eventual occupation of the post-industrial site over time. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this research aims to uncover the potential and challenges of urban transformation as part of a more socially and environmentally conscious architectural practice.

This study explores the role of community food initiatives in addressing social cohesion and structural issues in London and other cities outside of the United Kingdom. The study examines the relationship between food and social cohesion, current community food initiatives, and how thoroughly they align with the concept proposed by Levkoe and Wakefield to enhance social cohesion. Understanding the impact of food on social cohesion, analysing current community food initiatives, and examining their alignment with the concept of enhancing social cohesion comprise the three sections of the research. Through case studies and analysis, the study aims to establish a position and concept for a community food hub that can serve as a foundation for the design process. The findings emphasise the significance of community involvement, cooperation, and the design of physical spaces in promoting social cohesion and sustainable food practises. Community food initiatives can play a crucial role in enhancing social cohesion and addressing the underlying structural issues in urban areas by addressing social challenges and utilising food as a tool for interaction and participation.

Street Food markets have been a key ingredient of the urban life for centuries. In many cases the direction and intensity of urban expansion was strongly reliant on the emergence of the street food market and vice-versa. These link between the two has been inevitable historically until now and will probably continue as such in the future. However, the city changes on daily basis and, being a reflection of it, so does the market. While the former speeds up, becomes more erratic and stressful, the latter slows down, transforms into a space of gather and pleasure, exceeding beyond its food trade function. Therefore, their relationship also changes, with the market becoming an instrument of healing for both the city and the individual. London, being a distinct example of the contemporary megapolis and having a key role in the historic evolution of street food markets, was chosen as a test bed for the research to untangle what is the situation of the street food market today as an urban and experiential entity and question its future potentials.

The ecological question is symptomatic of our time and a multi-disciplinary problem. The material manipulations produced by the architectural and urban design disciplines interfere with essential ecosystemic processes by introducing disruptive materialities and machinery. This work aimed to participate in shaping a solid foundation for the discursive and constructive nature of the practice.
After preliminary definitions, this essay investigates the fundamental ecological dysfunctions caused by the current urban and architectural design model and the construction industry. This preliminary part exposes the leading causes in terms of design semiotics, urban architecture and materiality.
At the urban scale, I then introduce an elementary framework intended for the urban developers, designers and authorities. I propose to establish the 'universal commons', such as air, water and soil, as the elementary infrastructure of the sustainable urban condition and implement, develop and protect them as such.
The final part is dedicated to architectural interventions and develops the previously established principles through the two scales of the site: local and remote.
My research focused on the soil condition, and the design showcases a possible application in terms of urban infrastructure, construction techniques, materiality and architectural principles, to the location of Three Mills Island, in the Lea Valley of London, UK.

In a fast moving metropolitan city like London, urban pockets that alter the rhythm and synchrony of life can be described as heterotopias. Cemeteries are such sites that slow down and collect time. They sediment memories of the lived past and the potential future and are therefore regarded as spaces of another realm that operate between the spatial and the temporal. Historically, these sites were found entangled with the living city’s core where people gathered to exchange shared experiences. Today, the speed of the city, along with its rapid expansion, no longer allows for such spaces to occur within the living realm. Spaces that hold memory are detached from other urban systems, and therefore, appear as isolated memory islands. The problem is, without the interaction of people and their use as collective public ground, these spaces are threatened by the loss of memory and can no longer facilitate experiential memories. While the creation and disappearance of new layers of memory can be regarded as a natural cycle of any city, the continuous expansion of funerary spaces outwards means that there is no room in the contemporary city for new memory spaces to be formed.

This research examines the role of the cemetery as a memory space that can act as an interface between such dead and living memory making practices, and challenges society’s changing attitudes towards death that, over time, transformed funerary sites from collective public space to secluded necropoli. In an effort to disrupt the pattern of exclusion of death and memory from the urban fabric, and to accept death as a part of everyday life, this research is guided by the following main question:

How can the contemporary city accommodate new memory spaces within the programs of everyday life without compromising their inherent heterotopic nature?

By exploring the intersections between the layers of individual, collective, and experiential memory, this research defines what a new memory space in the contemporary city entails.

When the British arrived in the colonial countries, they had the opportunity to adapt the architecture of the local culture to their needs, but centuries later, when the ethnic groups arrived in “postcolonial” London, they did not have the opportunity to have a manifest effect on the built environment and neither the development of the city consider this situation as a problem to tackle. Today, years into the process of decolonization, the situation is still not much different. This occidental acceptance of people separated from their way of living, their culture reflected in the urban structure, creates the hybrid urban environment that hides the existence of different cultures. This oxymoronic thinking concerning diversity creates the complex mechanism of merging cultures, backgrounds, and customs and hides everything different or other. As a result of this situation, it is possible to point toward placeless cultures in the city of London. People or locations that are culturally significant without any material or immaterial connection to their urban surroundings. They maybe are located in the cartesian urban space of London, but they are placeless in the imaginary and mental view of the city. We need to abandon the occidental approach in architecture as we develop our neighborhoods to create a city that belongs to everybody and nobody, to create a city where everything is placeless and placeness.

The design is composed of 3 connected layers of togetherness with different levels of publicness which I categorize as communality, commensality, and conviviality. While communality of the project is completely public, the publicness of the building decreases with commensality and conviviality but still keeps the aspect of togetherness. They are not completely separated, on the contrary, they feed on each other. The layers of the project bridge with each other in different ways. This connection happens, either by the literal circulation of people and goods or by other means such as the visual connection or change in temporality. Hence the design pushes people to gather not only through planned encounters with the program it offers but also through incidental encounters that happen along the connections of different functions.

This research aims to develop en apply a new approach towards dealing with heritage in the built environment. By taking the Royal London Hospital area and the Former Outpatient Department within this domain as a case study, tools to connect to specific layers of the context that were found in the research are implied. This is in contrast to the regular approaches to look at heritage from the object itself. In the end, the building and area are connected through all levels of context to the layers of the palimpsest, which is mostly visible in the interventions in the main atrium and the additional roof structure. The building and area become an integrated part of the urban fabric and in this way their existence is prolonged.

Het Museum van Rotterdam moest eind vorig jaar zijn deuren sluiten, omdat het te weinig bezoekers trok en het gebouw niet meer voldeed aan zijn functie. De Raad voor Kunst en Cultuur stelde daarom een alternatief voor; een Nieuwe stadsmuseale functie (NSF) die wellicht niet in één gebouw gefaciliteerd zou moeten worden, maar op meerdere locaties verspreid over verschillende wijken. Deze gefragmenteerde musea vragen om een uitgebreid onderzoek van het programma met een focus op de bewoners. Het achterhalen van de identiteit van de gebruiker en de buurt op basis van verhalen uit de wijk en van bewoners zal inspiratie leveren voor het programma van een gefragmenteerd museum. Met dit onderzoek wordt inspiratie gezocht om zo dichter bij de verhalen van de wijk te komen. Het onderzoek start bij het achterhalen van de NSF en de visie van het Museum Rotterdam. Vervolgens worden de verhalen van de wijk in kaart gebracht en geanalyseerd, door
middel van het programma Atlas.ti. Daarna zijn de verhalen geanalyseerd op sociale en culturele kenmerken om de identiteit van de bewoner, wijk, stadsgedeelte en de stad te ontdekken. Door de verhalen te analyseren op de naar voren gekomen kernthema’s en te luisteren naar wat de bewoners
zelf vertellen over de identiteit, is er grip verkregen op de identiteit van de bewoners, de wijk, het stadsgedeelte en de stad. Tot slot is er onderzoek gedaan naar drie bestaande projecten om zo ook inspiratie op te doen voor het ruimtelijke programma voor het museum. Vanuit het tweede deel van
het onderzoek is er inspiratie verkregen aan de hand van een referentieonderzoek die variëren in schaal, programma, context en de manier van tentoonstellen. Deze analyse is omgezet in ruimtelijke tools die zijn weergegeven in de
schema’s. Het resultaat van het onderzoek is inspiratie voor het
programma. Het ontwerp voor het museum zal de verhalen respecteren en kan bestaan uit een wisselende expositie. Een groot deel van de bewoners geven aan dat de toegankelijkheid een grote
rol speelt in het deelnemen. Het museum zal dus toegankelijk zijn voor iedereen en laagdrempelig. De verschillende kernthema’s die zijn bestudeerd laten de identiteit van het stadsgedeelte zien. Daarbij staat de verbinding van bewoners bovenaan en zal dus kunnen dienen als hoofdthema
voor het nieuwe museum. Dit onderzoek heeft dus inspiratie geleverd voor het programma op het gebied van de identiteit, de formaliteit, de toegankelijkheid en de verbinding.

The Afrikaanderwijk is one of the ‘disadvantaged’ neighborhoods in Rotterdam South. 9,3 percent of the inhabitants of the Afrikaanderwijk is without work. The Afrikaander Coorparation started projects to create new jobs. Partly through the "Right to Challenge" initiative, it has its responsibility to make the Afrikaanderwijk more sustainable implemented with a raw materials station on the Afrikaanderwijk. This pilot project focuses on sorting waste during market days (Wednesday and Saturday). The project provides not only employment, but also greatly reduce the amount of residual solid waste and therefore creates a better streetscape. It also sends out a signal that waste can be seen as a raw material. According to the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative, however, the goal of this project has not been achieved. Therefore the goal of this research is to investigate how the station needs to be changed to contribute to circularity of the market. This station could be self-sufficient and would also act as a meeting place for people of various backgrounds where there is room to exchange knowledge, social contacts, information, products.

The shopping mall the Molenpoort (Nijmegen) was constructed in 1972 and is creating this hyperreality; an indoor world without rain, wind or snow. The invention of Victor Gruen, a foreign typology from America occupies all the negative space within the building block. Victor Gruen’s idea for the mall was a building where the community would gather, but at the end the mall evolved to a function with only a commercial purpose. This introverted architectural typology makes the visitor wander and tries to keep them inside for as long as possible. In the beginning the mall was a popular destination to shop, meet and greet, but after time went by it began to decay. Two major renovations (1985 and 2000) tried to save the mall, but it has become outdated again. There are multiple reasons why shopping malls have fallen into disuse, for instance the economic crisis in 2008 and a rapid change of our culture in social and in technical sense. The growth of online shopping is immense, with its peek during the Corona crisis, this virtual world is competing with the shopping centres in the real cities.

The new urban proposal contains outdoor streets, intimate public spaces, a large square for events and a rooftop park. The Molenpoort is divided into smaller building blocks which locate multiple functions, among which a public building. This public building has a central position in the urban proposal and locates creative companies from the Honigcomplex. The building is based on the concept of bricolage, which is about the act of improvisation. The building is reusing the existing concrete structure of the Molenpoort and besides that reusing the existing steel structure of the Honigcomplex. The building will be a place in the city were people are making, baking, dancing, cooking, playing and presenting. This makers industry (factory) is visible in the architectural expression of the building. By introducing an alternative function to housing, the makers industry and the community will be reengaged and the Honigpoort can function as a catalysator to the city centre of Nijmegen.

The project gave me the chance to start from a personal fascination regarding the role of architecture in favoring humans wellbeing. Since the group research, the interviews with homeless people till the imagination, materialization, and perception of spaces of the project the initial question remained always as the stable background of my design thinking. The issue of homelessness has not merely an architectural answer, but the problem resides in a deeper economic, social, political and systemic failure. Therefore, the project does not have the ambition to provide for a solution to it. Yet it is a medium to bring awareness to the different topics , such as the rethinking of the typology of the “shelter”, the importance of the materialization of a building in favoring the wellbeing of its inhabitants and rethinking the relation human-nature in the built urban context.

Relocation of the Honig Complex (the place) into the Molenpoort (the non-place and the given site of the studio).

The virtual world, existing in parallel with the physical one, has reshaped our life. Nowadays as people rely increasingly on social media for mutal interactions, ‘the virtual community actually becomes the real form of community today’ (Clark, A.). Such reliance owes to the ‘customizing system with hirarchy’ of virtual community to a large extent. This situation is especially dominant on the site of Morgestond, Den Haag: a generic post war city where most migrants lives. Having rarely any leading culture or shared memory, the community struggled to establish a commen sense of belonging. However, if taking the architecture as a ‘system’, it has the capability to learn from virtual community. With a translational process, the ‘customizing system’ of virtual community was first diagrammized, then spatialized and materialized as an architecture. The building is expected to guide its various users layer by layer, to their own favorite ‘channel’, and help them establish a sense of belonging to their community.

Designing a public condenser in the district of Vesterbro in Copenhagen. As the theme of the project 'movement' increases the group of various people of different ages and cultures. Bringing back sport facilities and greenery improves both healthy living and reducing gentrification.

The neighborhood of Morgenstond is accounted as one of the 50 problem neighborhoods in the Netherlands. The social development is similar to many post-war urban plannings outside of city centers. After the moving out of the first very homogenic young family population in the course of a suburbanization trend in the late 60s’ and 70s’, the district lived through a process of urban decay. Spatial aspects as a vast amount of unused green space, the generic public realm and a mostly monofunctional structure are influencing the attractivity of the district. Multiculturalism but also relatively high unemployment, poverty and low education are lived reality in Morgenstond. The social structure is characterized by low social cohesion, low life satisfaction and minor engagement with the immediate surrounding. These conditions result into a passive lifestyle of inhabitants, which feel worthless, lonely and depressed. They don’t see the necessity to engage with the public life. Plans for gentrification and densification with new social classes could increase social segregation and frustration in the existing social environment. The new vision of the municipality ‘bestemming Zuidwest gebiedverkenning’ is aiming for an intense densification of the neighborhood with new dwellings and with this ‘diversify’ Zuid-West economically. Without any interventions for social cohesion in this process, social tensions will intensify. One answer addressing these problems is creating a new identity through empowerment of the inhabitants. Empowerment, which is created through a deep inner motivation and a new self-confidence, can build bridges and form a base for a resilient social structure. I believe that the ‘public condenser’ for Morgenstond is a chance to contribute to the establishment of a diverse and stabile society and functions as incubator for empowerment.

The public condenser tends to stress the importance of non-commercial architecture within the context of Copenhagen as an opposition to the concept of consumerism. According to Leslie Sklair (2010): “Consumerism - or more accurately, the culture-ideology of consumerism - refers to a set of beliefs and values, integral but not exclusive to the system of capitalist globalization, intended to make people believe that human worth is best ensured and happiness is best achieved in terms of our consumption and possessions.”In addition to that, according to ‘The Harvard Guide to Shopping’ by Rem Koolhaas, “Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity”, and “perhaps the beginning of the 21st century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping.” Nowadays shopping is taking over every program imaginable. As a parasite it attaches itself to different programs, finding ways to survive and dominate, invading almost all human activity (Leong, 2001). Through psychoanalysis and psychogramming, people are being manipulatively forced to consume even more for the sake of making economic profit (Hosoya & Schaefer, 2001).The fact that one of nowadays most common public activity in gathering people is been led by manipulative strategies is shocking and urges to consider a place for the public that does not intend to manipulate for the sake of making economic profit. Therefore the public condenser in Copenhagen provides a place in which multiple activities can take place for different target audiences, not for the sake of making profit, but for the sake of providing valuable and unique experiences to the public in complete honesty, trustworthiness and transparency. Here, value refers to the immaterial profit as a counter reaction on consumerism while uniqueness refers to the extraordinary activities that can be achieved without the need of extravagancy. Honesty and trustworthiness refer to the anti-manipulative character of the building, while transparency refers to its straightforwardness and (visual) permeability.

The field of architecture is extensively faced with densification and gentrification. In pre-war neighbourhoods there is a dilemma between adding housing stock and simultaneously improving the existing stock in terms of sustainability. In the contemporary society these neighbourhoods are distinguished as troubled areas with unilateral demographical social class, poverty, below-average health issues and poor quality of public space. Gentrification aims on one hand to introduce a new diversity in these neighbourhoods and on the other improve the quality of the public space. Without municipal interference, repression and displacement of current inhabitants becomes inevitable and the opposite of diversification occurs. Consequently, municipalities recognizes the phenomena and introduce new regulation to cope with the issue and prevent the displacement of inhabitants. By replacing the old stock of building they set the condition that social housing can’t be reduced and by densifying the already existing social housing should be rebuild. These visions result in a new social cohesion wherein different contradictory groups co-exist in the neighbourhood with more contrasts in society. Public buildings have to deal with tensions and contrasts of the site-specific condition in order to guide the process of gentrification and should offer an act of interchangeability in which groups can benefit from each other socially, culturally and personally. The negative connotation of gentrification can turned around with public building to function as precursor that emphasizes a new rich layer of exchange between all present groups. An interchangeability that is able, within the converging multiple purposes of the building, to lift contrast between the ‘gentrified’ and the ‘gentrifier’ and emphasise the notion of generic properties of human behaviour and stressing the interaction of cultural activities of exchange and equality.