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Port cities are where people, cargo, and ideas venture into the world, where economic development and liveability may clash or go hand in hand. This is the background against which the new LDE minor PortCityFutures offers third year bachelor students of all backgrounds an introduction in observing, design and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Articles regularly appear in the media about citizens protesting against the felling of large numbers of trees along road sites. The reason for felling is often to make the road more safe for traffic, because they stand too close to the road. But that is not the entire story: trees and roads have been inseparably linked for centuries.

Many of the outdated typical Dutch tenement flats are large consumers of energy and therefore often end up on the demolition list. However, these typical flats do not have to disappear from the city scene. Symbiotic Urban Movement (SUM) - a team of students from Delft University of Technology - has developed a plan to sustainably transform all 847,000 tenement flats in the Netherlands and create more housing.

Master's student Joep Bastiaans made an inventory of recently developed collaborative housing concepts for seniors and investigated to what extent these meet their needs and wishes. His Master's thesis 'Professional collaborative housing concepts for seniors' won the Jeroen van der Veer Thesis Award 2021.

Two recent MSc graduated from our faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment became third in the finale of the DAIDA Foundation Global Thesis award 2021. The annual event, acknowledges master graduates who come up with ideas to improve the lives of vulnerable groups living in rapidly growing cities in the context of the Global South. Ramona Scheffer and Zhuo-ming Shia were shortlisted with their graduation work amongst 10 other nominees and ended up sharing third place.

According to researcher Willemijn Wilms Floet the concept Hofje (charity courtyard) is likely to succeed in cities that face renewal and densification challenges: they bring security, tranquillity and a nice green communal environment. Hofjes contribute to the urban variety that makes dwelling and living in cities attractive. In her book and open access publication ‘Urban Oases, Dutch Hofjes as Hidden Architectural Gems’ she explains the sustainable design principles, the development, the social impact and why architects, urbanists and real estate developers in the 21st century could benefit. Every era deserves a hofje of its own.

Landscape architecture is more than the designing of parks and squares. It is an engineering tradition, argues Adriaan Geuze, landscape architect and founder of West 8. As the new Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at the Delft University of Technology, he sees opportunities for using landscape architecture in a crossover with the other domains in Delft. That is how we could work on complex and urgent long-term tasks, such as climate adaptation, housing construction, energy transition, and agriculture realignment.

Insufficient supply of new and existing owner-occupied homes is the main reason for the once again enormous rise in house prices in the fourth quarter of 2021. A declining number of house sales and increasing numbers of first-time buyers and middle-income households being sidelined were the first signals of a change in the housing market. The threat of a further rise in mortgage interest rates has now been added to this.

Jacques Van Marken was the founder of the Delft factories Calvé, Gist-Brocades and DSM. He was the first industrialist to build a green factory district for the employees, the Agnetapark. Van Marken was an extremely social entrepreneur who also arranged accident and health insurance for his staff, which was almost unheard of at the time. 30 students submitted models of their vision of an imaginary museum for someone who was of great importance to the city of Delft.

Teachers, students and construction practitioners experience a gap between the architect at the desk and the craftsman/woman on the construction site. The novice architect has a great gap between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge that is applied on the construction site, and therefore finds it difficult to maintain himself in contact with contractors and foremen.