Recently, the implementation of prefabricated housing (PH) has become prevalent in China to achieve sustainability while ensuring green construction, innovative products, and higher quality. However, numerous challenges arise, such as the overrun costs, inexperienced workers, and the inefficient management process. High transaction costs (TCs) occur in the PH project supply chain since additional efforts are consumed for overcoming these challenges. This study aims to seek insights into TCs o...

Against the backdrop of an increasing need for healthcare, staff shortages and relatively high rates of sick leave, understanding of wellbeing (comfort and health) of hospital workers is important. This research aims to provide a contribution, through a mixed-methods approach, with broad and in-depth insights into comfort and health. Therefore, data have been collected from questionnaires, building inspections, interviews, and photos, and analysed with several techniques.

Personal, work, and...

This dissertation puts together planning documents and multiple archival sources to demonstrate how urban planning and the role of planners have evolved in an ever-changing transnational context of Iran. It challenges the prevailing approach in the literature of Tehran urban studies that simply flattens the complexity of local-foreign collaboration and labels transnational planning of Tehran a top-down “Westernization” project. To depict a more nuanced picture of Tehran master planning at...

Provision of daylight without the risk of discomfort glare is one of the aspects that determine the quality of the classroom environment. Although discomfort glare from daylight is under investigation for a long time, a knowledge gap concerning the applicability of the existing metrics to the spatial conditions of the classroom is identified in this work. An investigation on the applicability of existing metrics to the prediction of discomfort glare in classrooms has been carried out based on...

In the context of rapid urban transformations, this thesis explores the possible preservation strategies for historic military systems that used to be embedded in extra-urban settings, but that now are absorbed in the development dynamics of complex metropolitan areas. The research stems from the main peculiarity of these heritage systems: namely, the coexistence of cultural and natural values, and their being at the crossroads of the architecture and landscape domains. Although the need to a...

Hospitals are known as functionally complex buildings in various ways, namely due to their non-trivial spatial connectivity requirements. A spatial configuration has an impact on human behavior, human movement patterns and should match with the operational logic of the buildings. In hospitals, there are several typical problems that can be attributed to the configuration of the building, namely the inefficient circulation of medical staff, difficult way-finding for visitors, lengthy and compl...

This PhD thesis aims to move beyond the standard treatments of neighbourhoods in research on spatially transmitted inequality. The research questions explored in the four empirical chapters of the thesis delve into under-researched elements of sociospatial inequality transmission in neighbourhoods. The thesis uses statistical models to analyse register and survey data, and relies on different operationalisations of neighbourhoods: administrative and bespoke. Chapter 2 finds that controlling f...

As far as a historic city is concerned, a city is a dynamic complex which consists of many different interrelated and interactive elements. It is unreasonable to assess urban heritage by using a single value category. The evaluation of urban heritage values needs to develop a theoretical framework to represent the relationships between different elements. In view of the above issues, there is so far still a lack of systematic study on urban heritage values in Chinese academic circles. Therefo...

In the past few years the image of tender procedures in which Dutch public clients selected an architect has been dominated by distressing newspaper headlines. Architects fear that the current tender culture will harm the quality of our built environment due to a potential lack of diversity, creativity and innovation in architectural design. Clients often allow legal requirements to overrule their actual wishes. The current practice of architect selection by European public clients has its ro...