TU Delft Open Access Journals
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Border Formation: The Becoming Multiple of Space
Get PDFThis doctoral thesis examines the militarisation of the Southern border of Hungary as a process of spatial formation, expanding the debate on borders from the political to the architectural arena. Combining spatial theory with empirical research on the case study, the thesis rethinks the border as a complex spatial system, with an agency of its own. From this perspective, it contests the enforcement of spatial boundaries from the above and related ideas of fixity. It brings attention to the agency of space in the advancement of a material becoming; the role of migration in the radical redefinition of meanings and functions of space; and the action of technologies in the strategic manipulation of measures and scales. While conceptualising the border as a space in formation, this thesis builds a diagrammatic method of study and moves the research in an ontoepistemological direction. With the aim of fostering a change in those structures that control the partition and governance of space, this doctoral study calls the discipline of architecture to review its questions, methods, and practices. It invites to use architectural knowledge to engage with borders’ complexity and challenge their established meanings and makings
Tensions and opportunities at Shanghai’s waterfronts: Laboratories for Institutional Strategies toward Sustainable Urban Planning and Delta Design Transitions
Get PDFHow can the Global North oriented and welfare state rooted Sustainability Transitions theories be enriched with the Chinese and communist state rooted Ecological Civilization thinking that has been included in the Chinese constitution since 2007, to make it able to evaluate the making of the direct-controlled municipality Shanghai into an institutional frontrunner of sustainable transitions in urban planning and design with its prime waterfront as exemplary ‘urban lab’? Around this central question, this dissertation examines how Shanghai\u27s coastal and waterfront developments have changed over the past two decades under the influence of shifts in Chinese state capitalism towards what is called an Ecological Civilization. Two cases along the waterfronts of Shanghai – one on former docklands, and one on Chongming Island ¬– have been examined to test how both lines of thinking can enrich each other, and if a sustainable transition can be done more efficiently and convincingly in a centrally controlled society than in a non-autocratic (liberal) society. What lessons does the Chinese approach in Shanghai offer for elsewhere, and how can different approaches and practices reinforce each other in the field of spatial planning and strategies for a sustainable transition? This dissertation emphasizes that ecological civilization thinking can offer hopeful starting points for sustainable transitions but can only work well if \u27checks and balances’ are included. It gives suggestions to improve the accessibility, inclusivity, and vibrancy of Shanghai’s waterfronts, and mitigate ecological degradation in the context of an urban delta
Everyday Heritage: Identifying attributes of 1965-1985 residential neighbourhoods by involved stakeholders
Get PDFIn improving the sustainability of our built environment, European institutions emphasize the importance of protecting and advancing cultural values. As most of the stock is not listed, nor is its heritage significance assessed, future sustainable developments risk neglecting present attributes, causing the loss of resources and their significance. This problem applies to 1965-1985 Dutch housing, comprising over 30% of the stock, with no clarity on its heritage significance. This thesis aims to reveal significant attributes of residential neighbourhoods, built in The Netherlands between 1965-1985, as identified by involved stakeholders. A research framework integrating attributes, stakeholders and scales, is used to examine case studies in Almere Haven and Amsterdam Zuidoost. The identification of attributes results from open-ended questioning by multiple participatory methods. A process of inductive analysis, classifying and relating attributes revealed categories, chains, and networks of attributes, representing a shared neighbourhood narrative. Results show that attributes can be identified on successive scale levels in tangible and intangible categories. Participants convey significance to attributes originally intended and to attributes added or changed later, to attributes specific to 1965-1985 neighbourhoods and to more generic ones. Different stakeholder groups and individuals do not disagree in their assessments but focus on different attribute categories and scale levels. By combining a broad definition of heritage and participatory methods to identify attributes, this thesis bridges the gap between listed heritage and everyday neighbourhoods. Further developing and applying this approach can support the sustainable development of our built environment, informed by heritage significance, regardless of heritage status
Towards a circular building industry through digitalisation: Exploring how digital technologies can help narrow, slow, close, and regenerate the loops in social housing practice
Get PDFThis thesis explores the integration of Circular Economy (CE) principles of narrow, slow, close, and regenerate in the social housing practice through digital technologies. Beginning with the examination of the CE implementation in Dutch social housing organisations, the research extends its focus to the broader built environment, introducing the Circular Digital Built Environment Framework and identifying ten enabling technologies. Subsequent chapters explore realworld applications of these digital technologies in circular new built, renovation, maintenance, and demolition projects of forerunner social housing organisations. The thesis includes a comprehensive study of material passports, addressing challenges around data management and proposing a digitally-enabled framework. The thesis concludes with critical reflections on the findings and their implications and provides further recommendations for research and practical applications in advancing circularity in the building industry through digital technologies
Dwelling in the Digital Age: Imagination, Experience, and Subjectivity
Get PDFDwelling appears as a complex entanglement of dreams and realities, mental representations, and concrete practices. Here the question of its evolution in the digital age is approached at three levels. Firstly, what are the changes that it brings to the concrete experience of the built environment that have accompanied the rise of digital technologies? The Covid19 pandemic has contributed to reveal some of them, but the full picture is still far from clear. Secondly, how are these changes related to this different understanding of the human that is often dubbed as a transition towards a ‘posthuman’ condition, Thirdly, the least evident to address: will these shifts lead to the emergence of new spatial organizations and programs? Central to the argument developed here is that there is a deep relation between dwelling and the constitution of human subjectivity. Dwelling in the digital age is thus inseparable from the question of the evolution of what it means to be human in our contemporary societies
Housing Migrant Workers: The Form of the Corporate City Along the Rotterdam-Venlo Logistics Corridor
Get PDFA flexible dwelling commonly refers to housing susceptible to modification to various functions or uses. Between the 1960s and 1970s, Architectural Design magazine published studies and prototypes of flexible architectures, such as container homes and mobile homes, as alternative options to the housing market. Temporary, mobile, modular, containerised, and prefab became synonyms of flexible.These units proliferated to fulfil housing emergencies. The ordinary concept of flexibility, including, for instance, a dwelling capable of different customisations, shifts to a more restrictive meaning, revealing the intrinsic logistic nature of the containerised housing that, rather than goods, controls and distributes human beings. Through field research, the case study is the workers’ housing in the Rotterdam-Venlo corridor, a strategic trajectory of global supply chains. The logistical organisation goes beyond the thin enclosure of productive sites, regulating the mobility of workers and the flexibility of housing. Conceived by employment agencies to provide and discipline the workforce, workers’ housing is merely driven by efficiency criteria.Disclosing contexts where migrant flows are less tangible and visible, this research’s crucial questions revolve around the relationship between flexible housing and rigorous logistic regimes, the corporates’ exploitative strategies and the bottom-up workers’ tactics
Housing for a Lonely Generation: Co-Living Platforms and the Real-Estate-Media Complex
Get PDFOrganised around the advertising language for three co-living platforms—WeLive, Quarters (now Habyt), and the Collective—this essay frames the corporate housing model as inseparable from the digital media infrastructures that distribute its contents. Building, on one side, upon the existing research in the domain of housing, real estate, and media, and on the other, on the performative reading of the real estate advertisements of the contemporary co-living projects, it positions this housing typology as a genuine product of the \u27real-estate-media complex,\u27 referring to the close entanglements of speculative property markets, media infrastructures, and digital technologies in commodification of housing
Vulnerability of power distribution utility poles to tsunami bore impacts
Get PDFRecent events have demonstrated that power distribution networks located in low-lying coastal areas are susceptible to damage from tsunami. Utility poles are a critical component of distribution networks as they support overhead power lines. Damage to the poles could therefore compromise the electricity supply to emergency facilities as well as to homes and businesses over large areas. This work quantifies the component-level tsunami vulnerability of common power distribution line utility poles, considering hydro[1]dynamic wave-impact loading effects but neglecting debris impact and scour effects. First, a series of scaled flume experiments were used to identify the relationship between the tsunami wave properties and hydrodynamic loading histories. Next, nonlinear numerical distribution line utility pole models were validated using the experimental data and extended to account for soil-structure interaction effects. Finally, the loading histories from the flume tests were scaled and used in the numerical models to perform an incremental dynamic tsunami analysis on varying pole geometries and loading orientations at prototype scale. The results from this work provide valuable insight into the response of power distribution poles subjected to tsunami attack. This includes validating idealised approaches to determine the expected failure mode(s) based on pole embedment depths and soil properties and providing probabilistic tools capable of estimating damage based on expected tsunami inundation depths
On the Causes and Environmental Impact of Airborne Holdings at Major European Airports
Get PDFThis paper introduces a data-driven technique for labelling airborne holdings based on their underlying causes, specifically distinguishing between adverse weather conditions and other causes, such as airport capacity. Utilising a dataset comprised of flight trajectories arriving at 45 European airports over a nine-month period, extracted from automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast data, this paper provides valuable insights into the causes behind airborne holdings and their relative environmental impact. The proposed approach involves employing an existing neural network to identify airborne holdings. Subsequently, these holdings are cross-referenced with actual weather observations obtained from meteorological aerodrome reports. Following this, a subset of the holdings is labelled as either weather-related or attributed to other causes, based on historical air traffic flow management regulations. Finally, the cause of the majority of unlabelled holdings is determined using semi-supervised learning. The findings indicate that at least one-quarter of the 30-minute time periods with airborne holdings identified by the neural network can be attributed to weather-related factors, with reduced visibility, strong winds, and convective weather, emerging as the primary contributing events. Intriguingly, weather-related causes account for approximately 40% of the total fuel consumption associated with these procedures
Compilation of an open-source traffic and CO2 emissions dataset for commercial aviation
Get PDFThe study of the environmental transition of the aviation sector calls for prospective traffic scenarios. Detailed traffic and emissions inventories are often needed to refine the available analyses and to enable the simulation of regionalised scenarios. In the past studies, these are generally based on commercial, proprietary traffic data, making their dissemination problematic and reducing the reproducibility of the science produced. Open-source alternatives do exist, but with limited geographical coverage. This paper presents a method to aggregate different sources of flight information, in order to obtain an open-source air traffic dataset for 2019. Then, missing flight information is identified and completed using an airline route database built from Wikipedia parsing and related socio-economic data. After that, several reference datasets are used to evaluate the accuracy of the extended open-source dataset. Despite varying accuracy for different routes, major traffic flows are reasonably well estimated at the country and continental levels.Finally, the CO2 emissions are obtained using an existing aircraft performance surrogate model, and the accuracies are examined compared to the results from previous studies