News

What does the future of the port city of Rotterdam look like? How do you maintain the identity of a city in transition, with a growing number of inhabitants, spatial, economic and political interests? For whom does the gentrification of a neighbourhood take place? These are some of the questions studied by the researchers of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus PortCityFutures programme.

The programme "Eilande(rs)n aan het Roer" has been awarded a budget from NWO. In this programme researchers and social partners from the Caribbean and Dutch parts of the kingdom work together to bring together technical, traditional and contemporary knowledge practices.

The Executive Board has appointed Professor Andy van den Dobbelsteen as TU Delft Sustainability Coordinator with effect from 1 January 2021.

Climate change has major consequences for cultural heritage: pile foundations of historic buildings are deteriorating, and structures, landscapes and archaeological sites are in danger of flooding. The time for action is now, but the Netherlands is not ready for it, says researcher Dr Sandra Fatorić.

A solar heat network has proven to be technically and financially feasible for making existing neighbourhoods more sustainable and natural gas-free, as demonstrated by a consortium led by TU Delft

Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Eric van den Ham and Tess Blom (Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment) are the winners of the 2020 edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning, with their online course “Zero-Energy Design: an approach to make your building sustainable”. Their MOOC is designed to help participants figure out which energy measures can be applied to make their buildings (more) sustainable and zero-energy consuming.

The Circular Kitchen is a kitchen that is easy to renew and lasts a lifetime. This means less resource use, emissions and waste. The kitchen consists of easily adaptable modules made of high quality, environmentally friendly material. This makes it easy to create variants that are tailored to individual preferences. The first Circular Kitchens are currently being tested in houses.

This year, three BK alumni, Aditya Parulekar (Building Technology) Iris Moons (MBE) and Ananta Vania Iswardhani (Heritage & Architecture) won the first, second and third NRP Master Prize 2020.

Philomena Bluyssen and Marco Ortiz are developing a method in the SenseLab to compare leakage rates in different non-medical face masks. Up to now the NEN standard does not contain such a test.

Machiel van Dorst has been working in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment for over twenty years. In his role as head of the Urbanism department, and more recently vice-dean, he has invested a lot of time in the faculty. But teaching and research remained his passion, and have once more become the main focus of his career. “The interaction between environment, behaviour, urban and landscape design is the main focus of my teaching and research remit.”