News

A canal lined with trees sounds slightly more attractive if you call it a ‘green tunnel’. Neologisms help urban planners to sell designs, but also offer retrospective insight into failures, as MaartenJan Hoekstra discovered in his PhD research. He also reveals how the meaning of urban concepts tends to change over the years.

In the field of architecture, urbanism, and building sciences, many questions are still unanswered. The research programmes at BK City are devoted to answering those questions with ground-breaking projects. This month, no less than seven PhD-candidates defend the results of their work.

From 9 to 24 June, the ZigZagPavilion will serve as an urban marker at the architecture festival ZigZagCity in Rotterdam. Master students of the Chair of Interiors Buildings Cities designed and built the two-part pavilion.

The Housing 4.0 Energy consortium will build pilot projects of affordable low energy dwellings. Researchers from OTB will be working on the research part of the project, exploring possibilities for upscaling of the pilots. This includes the development of an open source platform, in which regional stakeholders work together to make low energy housing solutions a reality.

On 2 June, the jury announced this year’s national Archiprix winners. The second prize was awarded to BK alumna Barbara Prezelj for her project Unfamiliar Territory. This design proposal focusses on a landscape near Paris, aiming to find ways of dealing with places of friction without reducing their complexity.

The first ‘Cities Report’ from research project Cities of Making is now available. The report offers an insight into urban manufacturing in three European regions: Brussels, London, and Rotterdam-The Hague.

René van der Velde (Landscape Architecture) has been appointed as Research Fellow Urban Forestry, cementing a new collaboration between the BK City and the Dutch association for green-space professionals VHG.

The just released book ‘Smart campus tools 2.0- an international comparison’ illustrates the wide array of functionalities of smart campus tools. Bart Valks, Monique Arkesteijn, and Alexandra den Heijer (MBE) show how smart campus tools can help improve both user experience and real estate management.

In many places in Ghana, the management of housing stocks is associated with chronically poor maintenance. Research conducted by doctoral candidate Samson Aziabah reveals that the way in which the Dutch housing associations operate could provide some useful guidance.

Guest researcher Nancy Couling set out to investigate the unseen urbanisation processes in the North Sea. At the halfway mark of her research, she has found several challenges for the North Sea: “We need to leave space for culture, heritage, and environmental values in order to make the North Sea a common space.”