At the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, weekly bi-national markets exemplify (within a tense social context) the economic relevance of the goods and people metabolism along with emerging bi-national social relations. For this border territory, a temporal perspective is productive to develop a comprehensive grasp of the area; the markets, daily local and insular logistics, commuters and yearly fairs reveal this character. Moreover, inhabitants of the border engage in transmigratory practices, meaning, they pertain and participate in more than one community.

In this thesis I focus on Malpaso|se, a strategic node at the southern border connecting the main capitals of the island. At the same time, is the location of the most important border logistic check point on the island and the site of a prominent binational market. The spatial organization of this site relies on the dialectic of mobile and fixed spatial configurations given the nature of the market scheduling. However, its current configuration prioritises security -with its inherent violence- hinders the potentials for cross-border interaction, restricts the operability of the current activities of the site and reinforces pejorative socio-spatial dynamics. For this reason, I based the approach of this project on cross-border itinerant programs, infrastructure thinking and adaptable design interventions. The goal is to produce a common territory, promote multi-temporal practices, foster bi-directional social exchange and develop spatial configurations that respond to the uncertainties of use under different time frameworks; daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.

India is urbanizing at a massive rate, and predicted to have 50% of its population classified as urban by 2050. The Mumbai Metropolitan region is an urban agglomerate that represents the emancipatory qualities of urbanisation while simultaneously showing signs of urban decay that reflects a poor urban strategy. This urban decay is however blamed on the city’s rural-urban migrants who are seen to contribute to over-crowding in the city leading to a competition for urban resources. The project attempts to identify these labour migrants through various narratives and historic precedents of migration in the city to form an understanding of the shortcomings of the present Metropolitan regional plan. To understand this rural-to-urban transition in the city, the research project identifies that urbanisation neglects to consider the rural landscape that it seeks to change in present day growth models and seeks to propose an alternative strategy for urban India. Review of literature on the subject indicates that rural change occurs by land acquisition and change in land-usage, rural to urban migration (transference of poverty), reduction in the agricultural production and villages reduced to slum like conditions. The design project seeks to propose an alternative model for urbanisation that incorporates the agricultural economy to improve the edge city sub-region of Vasai-Virar with examples at various scales.

Refugees that arrive in The Netherlands to seek asylum enter a system that often takes a long time and does not adequately prepare them for life in The Netherlands. The spaces are not built for long term habitation and moving about is commonplace, meaning that no network can be established. Therefore, this graduation project researches and proposes a new way of handling asylum seekers. A system that is more humane and focuses on integrating newcomers into Dutch society. In order to do this, research was conducted into integration, current asylum seekers were interviewed and case studies were done of current asylum centres. With the findings of the research, a new typology of asylum architecture was developed: the asylum courtyard or 'het asielhofje'. The project facilitates long-term integration through several aspects such as housing for asylum seekers & statusholder as well as for the locals, a childcare facility and lastly a creative work environment. They are all organised around several courtyards (or 'hofjes') which are typical to Haarlem. Due to the (semi)public nature of the site, meaningful social interaction with the native population takes place, aiding the integration process significantly.

Designing with Tourism represents an alternative approach for the regional development in Puglia, Southern Italy, using tourism through spatial design.
The approach have been tested on the town of Altamura (BA) and it proposes a Widespread Territorial Multifunctional Park that blends the industry of tourism with the local reality aiming to its spatial and socio-economical development.
The project defines and implements in the test case the Principles of Integrated Regional Development: an instrument for the territorial management in support to the instruments of territorial management already present in the regional context.
The Principles of Integrated Regional Development are applicable to all of the territories and regions that meet its defined requirements, according to their prescriptions.

With a new scale of operating and constructing large offshore wind farms, harbours and adjacent cities are facing a transition. This transition will include an increase of work migration and temporary citizens within the area. The construction of a wind farm from the port of Vlissingen-Oost will result in a comings and goings of all kind of high- and low-skilled migrant workers and expats within the next five years. This raises new questions about the role of the city of Vlissingen and the adjacent port.

The design is an attempt to make the global factors of energy and migrant workers comprehensible and visible, while using this as a catalyst for local urban change. This book shows the idea that services for the temporary needs of migrant workers can be combined with long term improvements for the local population. The temporary citizens are seen as a window of opportunity for the
transformation of the urban area, as well as the industrial port area.

The phenomenon of migration is a fundamental concept to evolutionary biology, population studies, and life sciences. It is almost uncontestable common knowledge that migration is an indispensable factor to propel difference and change, thus ensuring genetic variation, and ultimately evolution for all life forms. For most species migration is the rule, not the exception. Yet, when referring to human migration, the discussions suddenly turn highly controversial. Underpinning the expected arguments that tie these discussions to human exceptionalism and speciesism, one encounters the deeply rooted links of sedentarism to diverse projects of State formation, the construction of society and its cultural and territorial arrangements into bounded, legible schemes and models.
Arguably, a narrowing vision, which simultaneously claims to capture and organize an otherwise complex and messy reality, is a necessary and effective frame to focus on particular forms of knowledge over and against others. Nevertheless, as is increasingly evident, such narrow frames not only simplify, but also reduce reality, offering static, fixed and schematic falsifications of it, removed as it were, from the actual phenomena to which they allude. Human migration is especially prone to the effects of such simplification, leading to a reduced understanding of the migration phenomenon itself, the multiple agents which emerge from it and that shape it, and their relationality as constitutive of a milieu, or metabolism. For migration, this has a paralyzing effect, as it limits and compartamentalizes the capacity to act in relation to it.
Other discursive schemes (of subject formation) that allow us to think and act differently, creatively and critically in relation to migration are paramount, especially if the intentionality is to physically intervene within it. In other words, migration and migrant agents, when liberated from the grasp of conventionally reductive and simplifying frames, reveal their intricate participation in an ecology that not only engenders the becoming of form, space, matter and subjectivity, but which also shapes specifically human practices and relations. In short, understanding migration as a complex assemblage driven by desire and other, previously unseen forces is to regard it as a process of becoming. Seen from this angle, concepts conventionally associated to human migration –from migrating subjects, territories, borders, to structures and systems-, become fields of latent potentiality and productive possibilities. It is at this juncture when –perhaps appropriately so- we may begin exercising different forms of nomadic thought when dealing with migration.
The proposal departs from the premise that different theoretical and discursive frameworks are necessary to rethink and act upon the very urgent problem of human migration from a metabolic, relational and systemic point of view. It will do so by introducing and explaining an unconventional approach in which three different ‘logics’ will encounter each other in an attempt to recalibrate the reach of the spatial disciplines and material practices, in particular architecture, within the phenomenon of contemporary human migration: population thinking, intensive thinking and topological thinking.