This book addresses the question of how to design in a historical context. How to get a grip on a site? How can a designer incorporate actual qualities of the heritage in the design? In three chapters, it is described how the conservation of heritage has increasingly become an issue of planning and intervention, with the specific cultural heritage qualities of a site as the starting point for transformation.

There are several different approaches to embed the design in the site: focussing on ...

Humans perform many activities indoors and they show a growing need for indoor navigation, especially in unfamiliar buildings such as airports, museums and hospitals. Complexity of such buildings poses many challenges for building managers and visitors. Indoor navigation services play an important role in supporting these indoor activities. Indoor navigation covers extensive topics such as: 1) indoor positioning and localization; 2) indoor space representation for navigation model generation;...

While agglomerations along the Rhine are confronted with the uncertainties of an increasing flood risk due to climate change, different programs are claiming urban river front sites. Simultaneously, urban development, flood management, as well as navigation and environmental protection are negotiating the border between the river and the urban realm. This produces complex spatial constellations between the river system and the urban realm with a diverse set of interdependencies, where program...

Since 1978, urban redevelopment in China has resulted in large-scale neighbourhood demolition and forced residential relocation, which can severely disrupt established people-place interactions in the demolished neighbourhoods. This issue of A+BE conceptualises forced relocation as a process and as a specific type of residential mobility that occurs in the context of urban restructuring. It suggests a conceptual model to show the sequence of events that households experience

during urban rede...

Residential buildings account for a significant amount of the national energy consumption of all OECD countries and consequently the EU and the Netherlands. Therefore, the national targets for CO2 reduction should include provisions for a more

energy efficient building stock for all EU member states.

National and European level policies the past decades have improved the quality of the building stock by setting stricter standards on the external envelope of newly made buildings, the efficienc...

This thesis explores the ways in which landscape is relevant as a concept for designing architecture. Buildings that have been designed like landscapes have become a topic in contemporary architecture. The apparent distinction between architecture and landscape is questioned in exemplary theories and new designs.

The core of this thesis is three case studies of architectural designs that use landscape strategies. The analytical model for landscape architectural composition that Steenbergen an...

This thesis has developed alternative methods of operationalising neighbourhoods at multiple spatial scales and used them to advance our understanding of spatial inequalities and neighbourhood effects. The underlying problem that motivated this thesis is that many empirical studies use predefined administrative units, and often this does not align with the underlying theory or geography. Despite the extensive literature on neighbourhood effects and, more generally, on sociospatial inequalitie...