News

On 20 June 2018, BK Bouwkunde and the University of Strathclyde celebrated the launch of the policy research foundation EPRC Delft. EPRC Delft will reinforce the existing research and teaching cooperation between the universities and open up new opportunities for the institutions to carry out shared research after the UK leaves the European Union.

Jeroen Meijler pitched his thesis at CoreNet Global Benelux, winning the MSc Student Award. Meijler graduated cum laude in Management in the Built Environment in October 2017. He developed a new approach, a framework that helps make real estate decisions for a longer term.

Brownfield park project are important laboratories and catalysts for developments in landscape architecture. In these projects, contextual, process, and formal-aesthetic aspects form central and inter-related themes. That is why a major theoretical and methodological expansion of the notion of composition can be distilled from brownfield park projects, as René van der Velde concludes in his dissertation.

On 15 June, 2018, the exhibition Coder le monde [Coding the world] opened to the public at Centre Pompidou in Paris. The show takes stock of contemporary digital creation in different disciplines and includes a display of several PoroCity towers, created by the researchers and students of The Why Factory.

For several decades now, old urban communities in China have been demolished to make way for new-build residential dwellings. It is only since the last decade that the well-being of residents has been taken into consideration by the Chinese government. Xin Li concludes in her PhD thesis that there is still a world to win here.

The goal of housing corporations and the Dutch government to ensure an average quality at label B level for the non-profit housing sector by 2020 is far from being reached. More extensive measures and better plans are needed to somehow catch up on the backlog. Faidra Filippidou reached this conclusion in her doctoral thesis.

The job of the architect has changed significantly through the years. Marina Bos-de Vos has examined the role of architectural firms in the chain and how they create and capture value on the basis of different professional roles. She concludes in her doctoral dissertation that awareness of different values is necessary for better project strategies at architectural firms.

The majority of the residents in Rotterdam’s Zuidwijk district value the changes that the restructuring of recent years has achieved. Newcomers to the neighbourhood are positive about their move to Zuidwijk. However, all residents are critical about the large influx of residents with a migration background to rented social housing, concludes André Ouwehand in his dissertation.

A canal lined with trees sounds slightly more attractive if you call it a ‘green tunnel’. Neologisms help urban planners to sell designs, but also offer retrospective insight into failures, as MaartenJan Hoekstra discovered in his PhD research. He also reveals how the meaning of urban concepts tends to change over the years.

In the field of architecture, urbanism, and building sciences, many questions are still unanswered. The research programmes at BK City are devoted to answering those questions with ground-breaking projects. This month, no less than seven PhD-candidates defend the results of their work.