Pendrecht is characterized by a great richness in cultural diversity and local initiatives, but these different worlds are spatially separated from one another and invisible for the passerby. They are not articulated in the public domain but instead remain confined to private domains. Left without activity or liveliness, the streets and squares are degraded to meaningless transition zones. This anonymity stands in the way of social cohesion and any sense of belonging or attachment to the neighbourhood. In order to break this downward spiral, an impulse into the public domain is needed that facilitates social and cultural exchange.

Since the introduction of neoliberalism in the 1980s, housing has transformed from a social good to a market commodity, resulting in housing policies’ focus shifting from resilience to efficiency. The shift greatly affected the Global South, where an overwhelming amount of housing was, and still is, required (Syllabus Intro). Several initiatives aimed to counter the issue through approaches solely focused on resilience. These projects were, however, unable to produce the amount of housing needed. Subsequently, several housing experts recently argued that a trade-off between efficiency and resilience is required to challenge this global phenomenon.

The project investigates the balance between resilience and efficiency through a social housing development in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Despite São Paulo not being a poor city, it has one of the world’s most inequitable distributions of wealth. One of the main symptoms of this inequality is a lack of sufficient housing. The project is in Grajau, one of the city’s periphery neighbourhoods. Heterogenous neighbourhoods, called favelas or irregular settlements, populate the district(Marques and Saraiva 2017, 21). Favelas often consist of dwellings that do not meet adequate housing standards according to Brazilian law. Still, these neighbourhoods provide an opportunity for impoverished families to have a house, presenting somewhat of a solution towards the Brazilian housing crisis.

The research concluded that Brazil’s large socio-economic gap and complicated political history are two of the primary catalyst for the country’s significant housing crisis. The Estatuto da Cidade (City Statute), developed after the fall of the dictatorship, acts as a legal framework to manage and improve the urban development of periphery neighbourhoods. The City Statute includes the Zones Especias de Interesse Social’ (ZEIS, Special Zones of Social Interest). ZEIS identifies areas where infrastructure and degraded properties can be improved, allocates space for public amenities and dedicates unused land for Social Interest Housing (HIS) and Low-Income Market Housing (HMP).

The central concern of the project is the lack of urban integration between Social Housing developments and their surrounding heterogeneous neighbourhoods (favelas and irregular settlements). A combination of fieldwork, theoretical research and comparative analysis, discussed throughout the report, was used to identify the problem. The project challenges the urban segregation between favelas and Social Housing through porous thresholds and careful boundaries. The approach is derived mainly from the work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck and Brazilian architect Hector Viglecca. The design applies porous thresholds and careful boundaries throughout all design scales, continuously considering the project’s socio-economic, managerial, and environmental impact.

Children are the future. Providing a fostering living environment for the next generation in the favelas of Sao Paulo might enable them to break negative patterns of behaviour, so energy towards crime an violence is redirected towards productive ends for them and their communities. Gaining insight from the field of developmental psychology, this project makes a material parallel to the distinct developmental stages of children, as described by Erik Erikson. The neighbourhood consists of clustered dwelling groups, starting small and protective, but while the development of the child goes on, the further clustering of the dwelling groups provide a more dynamic environment for the child to grow further. A balance between protection and engagement, between order and chaos, will help the child grow up and develop the virtues of; Hope, Will, Purpose, Competency and Fidelity.

In São Paulo, Brazil, the urbanization of workers without education or a steady income has caused a large demand for social housing, with 800,000 families forced to live in settlements and slums without a legal basis. At the same time, the crime rates of the past decades brought forth a standard of ‘enclavement’ of urban blocks, with fences protecting shared outdoor spaces. These add to the segregation of a city that already has immense inequality. Although many have written about creating a safe living environment with architecture in the Western world, applications in the global south are lagging behind. This thesis explores how architectural design can positively influence safety in the periphery of São Paulo, taking into account socioeconomic segregation, local building practices, and social equity. For this, a literature review, a comparative analysis of precedents, a contextual analysis, and research by design are used. The design is made for Parque Cocaía, a greenfield site with environmental restrictions on the outskirts of the city, in Grajaú. It shows how the design of building types that foster the creation of communities, public space that invites life into the streets, and dwelling types that allow watching over the public realm and shared spaces can all contribute to a safer living environment. The design combines lessons learned from Western theory, social housing precedents, and the local context and thereby offers an alternative to enclavement as a means to assure safe living. Future research and design can build on this to prevent further segregation of Brazilian society.

In the ever-evolving world of architecture and construction, there is a growing recognition of the urgent need to embrace sustainable and circular practices. As the challenges of climate change and resource depletion become increasingly apparent, architects and designers have a unique opportunity and responsibility to shape the future of our built environment. It is within this context that I followed the Urban Architecture Graduation Studio, leading to my project called "Re:Generation Liège", in wich I aim to reimagine local building culture as a showcase for a circular generation of architecture, while revitalizing an abandoned industrial site.
At its core, "Re:Generation Liège" seeks to challenge the prevailing linear model of resource consumption in our field of Architecture, while trying to create architecture that is culturally fitting, encouraging social life and in symbiosis with nature. By harnessing the principles of circularity and sustainability, this project strives to create a harmonious interplay between human habitation, natural resources, and the surrounding environment.
The city of Liège, with its rich architectural heritage and vibrant cultural identity, serves as the backdrop for this project. By leveraging the unique physical, economic and socio-cultural characteristics of the local context, "Re:Generation Liège" aims to demonstrate how a circular economy can be boosted in this specific context, through showcasing the potential of adaptive reuse, component reuse and reuse-focused public program.

The Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art is a proposition developed in response to the brief released by the board of MHKA in order to expand their institution’s scale and reach.

Located between the most historic part of the city and the newly developed New South it is in relation with both, just as it is in relation with the history of the institution and the unknown future of the world of art. Finding the balance between the publicness of such an institution and the necessity to protect valuable pieces of art was the driving point for multiple design decisions.

My proposition takes advantage of the existing building located on the site and the spatial qualities it offers. The smaller in-scale spaces are supplemented with larger galleries. The old and new parts are combined in a coherent way under a seamless façade. Its monolithic and shiny face stands out in the city becoming a new icon for art and knowledge.

Sao Paulo, Brazil, a megacity home to 22.4 million inhabitants as of 2022 has “one of the most inequitable distributions of wealth in the world” (Caldeira 1996, 303). In the various districts, the inequality either shouts or whispers its presence. An open city, where the street-scape is the backdrop for social convergence, segregates itself in Sao Paulo as a space of clear definition of the haves and have-nots. Within the urban condition “…the physical distances separating rich and poor have decreased at the same time that the mechanism to keep them apart have become more obvious and more complex” (Caldeira 1996, 304). As Brazil’s economic and political conditions exponentially shifted so did the reshaping of the built landscape – with that, the right to the city for the urban poor became intangible. Through the process of ‘autoconstruction’ even the poorest of citizens could gain access to the city. However, due to economic restructuring, new generations are even more at a disadvantage to precarious living conditions.

On the opposite spectrum, for the well-off, the current city skyline is arrayed with inward turned urban enclaves; congruently polarizing amenities once connected to the public street (i.e., parks, residential complexes, schools). These vertical communities retain all that is necessary within a private and autonomous space and can be positioned almost anywhere, independent of their context. In many cases, they are placed at the periphery directly neighboring auto-constructed settlements. As Caldeira coins it, “…Sao Paulo is today a city of walls” as the disparity between classes became something quite defined and accepted with the fear of crime fueling changes to all forms of public exchange (Caldeira 1996, 307). Within this, emerges a dynamic, one of codependence. The poor rely on the city for financial prosperity; the wealthy rely on the labor of the poor.

As the government begins to address housing for the city’s most marginalized through large-scale residential blocks – as a means to domesticate the transient realities of Sao Paulo’s contemporary urban condition - the notions of social segregation are still wide and apparent. As the favela is stigmatized with housing a certain social class, so is the governmental housing, and so is the urban enclave. Each environment has become categorical; of separate and unequal atmospheres devoid of connection. However, is there a way for these atmospheres to communicate? In his book, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Richard Sennett refers to three types of repair: restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration. In the case of Grajau – a peripheral district of Sao Paulo constituting for a majority of the city’s urban poor – Sennett’s ideas of repair can be disseminated within its changing context. Restoration, looking to accept the exiting approaches to marginalized housing. The second, remediation, looking to build upon existing solutions, interchanging and exchanging certain elements for an improved whole. Lastly, reconfiguration giving space for new typologies with the use of existing forms. This brings into question:

How could a kit-of-parts approach marry the efficiency of a top-down approach & the resilience of a bottom-up approach to enable place-making in self-built settlements of Grajau?
a. How can participatory process be a part of the planning process for social housing?
b. What spatial structures help create/enable the development of social cohesion in self-built settlements?
c. How can a catalogue of dwelling types adapt and meet community needs over time?

Synanthropic Habitats originates from the interdisciplinary quest on ‘how will we live together’ and the personal fascination to critically question the deeply-rooted anthropocentric binary of human (us) and nature (them). The thesis aims to establish an innovative domestic environment that deals with the heterogeneity of people of different backgrounds while reflecting upon the global urgency of the Anthropocene by interacting with nature in a blended game of cohabitation.

The project forms its wider problématique from an amalgam of constituent problems deriving from Rotterdam and specifically Blijdorp as the site under investigation. The high traffic lane that dichotomizes the site, the noise and pollution of the nearby railway station, the large undefined spaces in tandem with the prevailing social degradation, and the need for affordable housing provision are a few of the identified issues of the project’s location. As a response, the Synanthropic Habitats attempts to develop a new paradigm for Dutch housing design, based on the triptych of hofjes as a type, thresholds as interfaces, and cooperatives as nomos.

The project draws from the long tradition of Dutch hofjes as an archetypical sustainable domestic milieu, the epistemologies and multiscalarity of threshold as a key tool to create zones of encounter, and the non-speculative forward-thinking model of cooperatives to shape a framework within which a multi-storey building with integrated nature, a variety of households and common spaces will flourish. Towards that direction, literature research on the topics, typo-morphological analyses of relevant precedents as well as in-situ observations are employed as methodological tools to conclude in spatial and theoretical aspects contributing to an ecology of inclusion in the design.

Utilizing and revisiting the pre-existing type of the hofje, inflected with the threshold character of commons creation and the pragmatic scenario of devising cooperative tenure generate an evidenced-based dwelling design that is as much of a site-specific architectonic product as a universal proposition to be adopted across contexts.

Ethiopia is a flourishing country with a rapidly growing economy and population. This is one of the reasons why the capital Addis Ababa is increasingly urbanizing. Due to the free market only providing housing for high incomes, many households live in poor conditions. In addition, these private developments are often built as gated communities out of fear of insecurity and resulting in segregation. This segregation is further enhanced by the government's Integrated Housing Development Program (IHDP), which realizes subsidized housing for middle and low incomes, but by doing so it also segregates these groups. While Addis Ababa has traditionally been an integrated city with an inclusive society, which is still of great importance for the living standard of especially low-income people. This research offers an alternative design for the current scheme of the IHDP and proposes a mixed-income neighborhood whereby stimulating mutual trust between residents through the built environment is central to the project.

Neighbourhood, Community, Meantal Health and the Built Environment

Ethiopia is going through rapid urbanization and population growth in the recent two decades with lots of migrants from the rural areas, resulting in a dramatic housing shortage. The same situation happens also in many other developing countries in the Global South, where affordable houses are demanded. By exploring an affordable housing scheme for mixed-income groups, this project is trying to find a way to create an inclusive community where different income groups can cohabit and have equal rights to participation, diversity, and appropriation. At the mean time exploring affordable housing scheme strategy in the context of Addis Ababa with the guideline of the studio. Residents could feel significant connections to their communities, and residents can shape outcomes for the communities and a sense of belonging by participating. The design will research how different income groups define places as home and to what degree private and public realm could be mixed to create coherent living quality for all income groups. World widely, mixed neighborhoods which involve complicated social ties and special combination of different income groups, are damaged by the standard, rigid planning methods, resulting in larger social segregation as well. This project can contribute to rebuilding an inclusive and resilient urban form.

This project seeks for an alternative low-cost housing strategy for the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Currently, the condominium housing scheme is implemented everywhere throughout the city. Despite the impressive amount of newly constructed dwelling units, shortcomings of this housing strategy have drastic consequences within the social and environmental domain. It disperses communities, is not inclusive for the very poor and does not respond to environmental issues. This while the natural environment, and in particular the waterbodies of the city, is already under great pressure after years of uncontrolled urban sprawl. It has led to massive decline of urban green spaces and extremely polluted rivers having a huge negative impact on the liveability of the city. Therefore, this graduation report presents a design proposal that tries to reconnect the inhabitants with the waterbodies of the city in order to create a river culture. The vision of a river culture is the guiding principle throughout the whole design and emerges on all different scales. It connects the water linked ecosystem with the urban fabric and ensures that the waterbodies once again play a vital role within the environmental, social, economic and technical domain. In this way it is interwoven in the daily patterns of life of Addis Ababa’s inhabitants. Blurring the boundaries between people and nature, and thereby contributing to a synergetic environment between the urban dwellers and the rivers of the city.

The goal of the graduation studio is to research and design housing solutions that improve the livelihood of Addis Ababa’s urban dwellers. Combining analysis, planning and design, the participants of this graduation studio were challenged to use multidisciplinary research methods and tools to elaborate design proposals for the development of a pilot housing project in Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia is following the urbanization trend which can be seen across Africa. This is reflected in the population growth in Addis Ababa which has doubled from 2.3million in 2000, to 4.5million in 2020. The primary reasons for this rural-to-urban migration are education and work. We find that unmonitored overcrowded households, long commuting distances and high urban expenses pose obstacles to the progress of all Ethiopian students. This project places due importance on arriving students, as I believe that acknowledging this group as critical to the future development of Addis Ababa and Ethiopia as a whole.”

Ethiopia is both one of the fastest-growing economies and one of the poorest countries in the world. As its population grows exorbitantly, waves of migrants are flowing endlessly into the capital city. Such a fast pace of development brings about a hallucinated future constituted by processes driven by economic and political forces pursuing efficient outcomes. Addis Ababa wants to deliver quickly, in great quantities and as cheap as possible: there is little time for thinking! Against this background, it seems a matter of great urgency to provide the city with alternative visions. This is particularly relevant if we consider that being a federal city, Addis Ababa is geographically limited, and, therefore, it cannot expand outside of its boundaries. As a result, such a self-destructive spiral tends to move forward while erasing its traces, threatening the most consolidated neighbourhoods that struggle to coexist with the explosive growth of the city. The inner city represents, indeed, a land of high value and the inhabitants who have been living there for more than a hundred years are now under threat of eviction. It appears that the old city and its style of life could be swept away at any moment by a masterplan that does not take into consideration its value. Alongside such a tangible heritage comprised of streets, alleyways and historical architecture composing material narratives, there are human ones moulded through the structures of the longue durée. The question the intervention poses is how can we densify and reconfigure delipidated historical districts without erasing their traces, interpret their styles of life while providing a dynamic structure that can cater for the dreams of their inhabitants? Is it possible to decode decentralized morphogenetic processes and learn from self-organizing systems to design modern cities? Can architecture be something other than the imposition of a demiurge that shapes inert matter, in such a way that it turns into the acceptance of every event of life, constantly balancing freedom and control like a funambulist, not pursuing chaos but rather by being open and not reacting to it. In short, paraphrasing Charles Correa, how can we open new doors to new aspirations while drawing on existing values? Through the exploration of the current situation, complemented with oral fragments of memories and historical footages, I began to familiarize with the processes of becoming of the patterns of everyday life in the neighbourhood. The aim of the project is twofold: on the one hand, it intends to draw on the existing values and collective memory to reconfigure the narratives of historical districts; on the other hand, the ambition is to provide a structure that can adapt through time and be open to change. If the model is neither entirely taken from the current configuration nor imposed as an external solution, but rather one derived from the internal morphogenetic capabilities, a new one, then, could bridge the apparent opposition between local and universal.

As Sennett states, vernacular urbanism is looking for ways in which new forms can emerge from the old ones but still being related to them. in the same way this thesis work tries to combine today's necessities of an expanding city like Addis Ababa with the identity and the historical values of its historical city center.

Ethiopia is forecast to be the fastest growing economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. Partly due to this economic growth, the urban population is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades. In the group of urban migrants, more than half comes from rural areas, indicating a large sum of poorly educated, low skilled workers as major part of the migrant group. The main reasons to migrate to urban areas is the increased job opportunities and education. These influxes of low skilled workers to the urban areas intensify the informal sector in cities like the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. This informal sector comprises those working in informal business, as well as a huge group of domestic workers, apprentices and unpaid family workers. Being able to participate in productive commercial activity is the first step to alleviate oneself from poverty. The problem is that the formal, governmental institutions reject the idea of informality in areas where government is in managerial position. Informal economies are banished from government-controlled housing areas. This is out of fear for the unbound nature of informality, while the formal intuitions main drive is to control everything. The lack of informality, be it informal housing or informal economy, creates order, stability and the ease for the government to exert oversight. However, this lack of informality would also create a vacuum of opportunities to make a living for people, as the informal ways of generating income would also be the only way of generating income for people lacking education and skills. The goal should therefore be to incorporate the informal lifestyle and usage of the low-income households into the formal planning so the informal is not only seen as a problem anymore but as a part of the solution. Through this project I hope to show the possibility that formal and informal is not just two ways of life that stand in contrast with each other, but that it can coexist and, in which low income people can make a better living for themselves.

This research will examine a design for an off-grid safari park in Iran. During this research different passive techniques from the vernacular architecture will be discussed. These principles will be used to reduce the energy demand of the safari park, since it should be an off-grid park, in order to deliver a design proposal with an achievable energy balance. One of the buildings, the entrance building, will be used as a case study to test the design principles. The courtyard, the increase of mass and the windcatcher are the most important principles to be implemented in the building. The energy reduction achievable with these techniques is weighted against the increase in cost of the building. In the design of the entrance building, a combination of windcatchers and underground ducts is used to cool the building, reducing the energy demand for cooling with 90%. Other principles, like an increase in mass and a courtyard also reduce the energy demand of the building significantly. The use of vernacular principles in the design will increase the cost of the building. However, it will decrease the cost needed for generating energy on site and, therefore, it is still beneficial. Future research, should focus on the exact amount of energy needed compared to the additional cost for the construction of the buildings. However, this research concludes that the use of vernacular principles in the park is beneficial.

Though the perils of climate change on our environment are common knowledge its mitigation through informed planning is widely absent. This research project aims to aid the architect in developing a design which has a comparatively lower ecological footprint and focuses on opportunistic utilization of renewable resources readily available in the context. Within the preview of this thesis the potential of developing a sustainable water management scheme for the Negin safari park located in the Fars province of Iran is studied.
Iran is facing a situation of drought for the past few years which has had an adverse impact on the region. One of the communities to have been affected by this are the Qashqai nomads of Iran, who have been threatened with deprivation of their freedom due to the economic woes brought by drought. The Negin safari park being developed in the region aims to uplift this community and provide a platform for them to be able to share their work and culture. However, the influx of tourists due to the development of a Safari park further increases the stress on the depleting water resources in the region. In turn development of water technologies facilitating the reclamation of waste water, conservation of water and mitigation of extreme withdrawal of resources needs to be studied and implemented.
In order to create a design which consciously uses the water resources and facilitates re-use of waste water, different water technologies have been identified and studied to understand its feasibility for installation in Iran. Once the ideal technologies were identified, a water management scheme was developed which facilitated water autarky in the park. Further on the relation of the built form with the technology was explored. The technologies which were shortlisted entailed requirements which had a direct impact on the design of the built form and its spatial organization. The final product of this thesis entails a customized set of design guidelines for the development of a Safari park in Iran. These guidelines have stemmed from the optimization strategy used in designing the Negin safari park with the intended water technologies.
Adhering to the concept of developing the park as an eco-tourist destination attention has been placed to propose sustainable technologies with lower energy requirement and maintenance. It is believed that through implementation of these technologies the added stress on water demand caused by the erection of a Negin safari park in a drought hit region can be reduced. The implementation of these technologies can also further help in educating the local community and lead to encouragement of widespread implementation of these systems. This graduation project is an attempt to develop an informed relation between resource flows and spatial design in order to enable an uninterrupted functioning of the Safari park leading to prosperity of the region and its people.
 

Increasing urbanization and climate change are encouraging architects and engineers to use water as building land, adopting floating structures as a favorable solution. Floating architecture not only could help coastline cities to develop through seas and face sea level rise, but presents many other positive aspects among which particular interest has been developed in the concept of dynamic and energy self-sufficient cities.
The main object of the research is to define whether or not floating cities can realistically be energy self-sustained and in which capacity, by the use of today’s renewable energy production systems and by maintaining the positive aspects of a dynamic urbanism allowed by the presence of water.