Research

The Urbanism research programme is shaped by our understanding that the quality of the urban environment is crucial for societies’ social, economic and environmental performance and a more sustainable and fairer urban environment. Urbanism has a world-class international reputation for its academic research, scholarship and education for space and society, built on the Delft Approach to Urbanism. This approach is knowledge-based, design-oriented and multiscale, with disciplines such as landscape architecture, urban design and planning closely collaborating with engineers, data scientists, sociologists, geographers and ecologists. The Delft Approach to Urbanism is socially and ecologically inclusive, with a strong link between spatial research and design across all scales, based on inter- and transdisciplinary working, and employing state-of-the-art digital technology. We take this approach to the international arena in partnership with some of the world’s leading universities. Our four research themes:

Delta Urbanism

Sustainable urbanisation, loss of biodiversity and climate change are key challenges for deltas around the world. These highly dynamic geographies are characterised by fragility, criticality and risk: transitional landscapes between land and water, altered by the effects of urbanisation, industrialisation and extractivism. The department’s research on Delta Urbanism covers the most important scales of the relationship between land and water, focussing specifically on the development and application of design-oriented, systemic, and inter- and transdisciplinary approaches sensitive to social-cultural and ecological conditions on-site. Adaptive multiscale design strategies, nature-based solutions for coastal and riverine flood protection, water-sensitive urban design and vernacular water practices are some of the themes that are elaborated on in research and teaching.

Inclusive Urbanism

Growing urban inequality is an increasingly urgent concern for citizens, urban practitioners and policymakers around the world. Inequality is not only unacceptable from an ethical and normative standpoint; it also generates high costs for society, hampering the performance of cities, with impacts on the health, social cohesion and living standards of cities, where people and economy can flourish. The department’s research on Inclusive urbanism addresses those urgent challenges from an integrated and cross-disciplinary perspective, emphasising the spatial dimension of inequality and how spatial planning and urban design can be mobilised to make cities more just and inclusive. What makes our approach to researching those topics unique is how we combine insights and methods from the disciplines of urban design, spatial planning, urban geography and urban sociology. At the same time, we seek to engage a diversity of stakeholders and, in particular, representatives of vulnerable and marginalised groups in the co-design of and co-decision on sustainable urban futures.

Green Urbanism

This theme aggregates, on the one hand, the department’s research that deals with the urgent and intertwined societal challenges of climate change, energy transition, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and food and material security, and, on the other hand, the more explorative and conceptual research that reframes the contemporary urban territory as landscape metropolis. The focus is on advancing human and ecological well-being through understanding and employing nature, space and place conditions for socio-ecologically inclusive design from the building to the regional scale. But also the development of design-oriented landscape approaches that base spatial development on the natural system along with exploring and employing the cultural, spatial and perceptive characteristics of landscapes in planning and design. Research on urban climate and energy, regional landscape approaches, urban biodiversity and regenerative and circular urban landscapes are connected to systemic design, adaptive design principles and regenerative strategies that lead to healthy and inclusive green-blue cities. The development of metropolitan landscape and nature networks, heat stress mitigation concerning urban morphology and increasing the sponge capacity and biodiversity in the urban context through greening cities are important topics for research and applications, along with circular approaches to address improvement or restoration, renewal or revitalisation of energy and materials sources in the built environment.

Data-supported Urbanism

In the field of data-supported urbanism, the department’s impacts are manifold, covering the whole lifespan of data (i.e. generation and reconstruction, standardisation, management, usage) as well as the different possibilities that modern open/big-data approaches offer to urban landscape planning and design in the context of Digital Twinning. The department is strongly committed to generating and using innovative, sustainable and open data ecosystems where researchers and practitioners can interact in different ways: by retrieving and using the data, adding new data, and delivering improved data and new insights back into the ecosystem. The impact encompasses both theory development as well as implementation. It focuses on how buildings, cities and landscapes can be automatically and semantically modelled in 3D/4D to be used for urban planning and design, which new legal, economic, societal and ethical challenges and opportunities that new big/open urban data brings to urbanism and how data-supported approaches foster the development of new methodologies and products that support all stages of co-creative urban planning and design with a particular focus on sustainability, circularity and inclusiveness challenges.

We are dedicated to open science, disseminating research through publications and datasets in open formats. Strengthening a safe and productive academic culture, in which research integrity and inclusivity are key elements, is part of our ongoing effort to enhance the conditions for a thriving urbanism community and a strong PhD culture. Through our HR policy, we are continuously working on the talent management of existing staff, developing leadership, increasing cultural diversity, and improving female representation among senior staff.