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The future of major cities has been in the spotlight for years now. After all, an ever-increasing share of the world population lives in metropolises. However, less attention is being paid to the question of how non-metropolitan areas might decline. As holder of the Bonnema chair at TU Delft and the University of Groningen, urban planner Zef Hemel's work focuses on the potential of regional towns and the surrounding landscapes.

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.

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.

Throughout the world, people have transformed natural water flows into ingenious and controlled water systems, creating impressive cultural and urban landscapes. Traditional water systems are comprehensive systems that are closely linked to the existing landscape, the people -who inhabit and work the landscape-, the animals and plants.

Obtaining 3D models of buildings is crucial to many urban applications (such as urban planning, solar potential analysis, urban flow simulation), which is still an open problem in remote sensing and the related fields. Existing techniques require high-quality laser scans as input, which imposes challenges to data acquisition. Besides, the building models in the existing platforms (such as Google Earth) are represented by millions of triangles. Such a representation is not friendly for the subsequent processing and application.

How to make stations still interesting places ‘to go’ and ‘to be’ for all in the post-covid situation? And how can we improve the mobility transition so that it fits seamlessly and creates public space for more inviting and attractive stations for people and with fewer cars? That is the research question of Project WALK-IN for which dr. Manuela Triggianese received a KIEM Grant.

The campus is an excellent advertisement for TU Delft, says researcher and landscape architect Nico Tillie (Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and Urban Ecology Lab), and should serve as a living lab for the cities of the future.

In August 2021, the open access book appeared with an extensive introduction with a comprehensive introduction to space syntax method and theory for graduate students and researchers. It provides a step-by-step approach for its application in urban planning and design. This textbook aims to increase the accessibility of the space syntax method for the first time to all graduate students and researchers who are dealing with the built environment.

Cities must adapt to cope with climate change impacts such as higher temperatures and periods of heat stress. Trees are widely accepted as natural 'aircon' for our cities, but precise data on how much they cool - and in particular over their life cycle - is lacking. In the project i-Tree 2.0-NL, accurate metrics for urban trees in Dutch cities will be developed and translated into databases, application software and 'orgware'.

The Zuiderwaterlinie (Southern Water Line) is one of the oldest and longest water defence lines in The Netherlands. The line connects Bergen op Zoom to Grave. The line has a long history with specific stories of war and peace from the past until now. In the past academic year, students made plans to develop this military heritage for the future. The purpose of the student plans is to show what possibilities the Zuiderwaterlinie offers for the future of Noord-Brabant.