Cities and their making understood and sometimes imagined .
The next phase of climate planning is not simply about cooling cities. It is about redistributing growth, resources and opportunity before crisis does it for us. The familiar climate map is beginning to move. As the recent Financieele Dagblad article “Grote delen van de wereld krijgen nieuw klimaattype” describes,...
The next phase of climate planning is not simply about cooling cities. It is about redistributing growth, resources and opportunity before crisis does it for us. The familiar climate map is beginning to move. As the recent Financieele Dagblad article “Grote delen van de wereld krijgen nieuw klimaattype” describes,...
Geneva’s conference halls fell silent last week as the United Nations’ much-anticipated negotiations for a global plastics treaty collapsed in disarray. Three years of painstaking diplomacy unravelled in a...
BEYOND PEAK INDIFFERENCE #3 – Water is the currency of climate change. Increasing global temperatures heavily affect the global water circulation cycles. More heat means more evaporation, leading to...
In 2018 I organized a study trip to Moscow with students from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. They all felt it was an adventure and all of them had...
There it stands: brick by brick, half-finished, oddly proportioned, unmistakably itself — the ugly Belgian house. Its façade is a patchwork of mismatched bricks, a balcony added as an...
What Happens When Your Car Isn’t Under Your Bedroom I own cars in several cities where I live. That is a confession many urbanists are expected to preface with...
BEYOND PEAK INDIFFERENCE #2 – In the last 250 years since the start of the industrial revolution, mankind has doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. More than...
Beyond Peak Indifference #4 – Our time is often dubbed the Anthropocene – the earth age influenced by mankind in such a way that it profoundly changes our natural...
Why Friction Matters in the Future of Urban Life The modern city is obsessed with comfort. Climate-controlled interiors, frictionless mobility, seamless services, ever more space per person, and an...
The next phase of climate planning is not simply about cooling cities. It is about redistributing growth, resources and opportunity before crisis does it for us. The familiar climate...
If Hong Kong is the city that invented tomorrow, Shenzhen is the one that looked at tomorrow’s blueprints, said “Hold my tea,” and went ahead to build it by...
Next to being a practising architect and urbanist, I am also an educator. One of the things I love when dealing with students is, that you get a preview...
When discussing climate change, we – Architects and Urbanists – most of the time talk about materials that should be less carbon intensive, and we talk about processes that...
In the vast desert sands of Saudi Arabia, an audacious experiment captured the imagination of urbanists, technologists, and futurists worldwide. NEOM’s “The Line” — a proposed 170-kilometer-long linear city...
The world is part baffled, part outright dismissive of the projects that are all over the media. They present an urban vision that starkly contrasts with conventional expectations, challenging...
It is odd: Whenever architects show pictures of climate adapted buildings they first tend to pick the igloo, the mountain hut in Switzerland or the wind catchers and the...
Yesterday the results of the international ideas competition for Berlin and Brandenburg 2070 was announced. The competition was explicitly branded as a tool to develop a future vision of...
Recently, Germany has been discussing new standards for the size of parking spaces. The reason: the old ones do not leave enough space for the most popular products of...
I had the honour to be invited to the What is the Future of Cities Podcast. “Are you interested in finding the real problem of the urban fabric? What do you think about robustness vs antifragility? How can we improve our feedback loops in the building industry?” and many more questions we covered in this […]
I had the honour to be invited to the What is the Future of Cities Podcast. “Are you interested in finding the real problem of the urban fabric? What...
On 05 October 2023 I bid farewell to the role of Head of Urbanism at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. In my speech, I looked back on six years in that role and what has been achieved, but I also looked forward to what the future of urbanism and urbanism education holds. After that my […]
On 05 October 2023 I bid farewell to the role of Head of Urbanism at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. In my speech, I looked back on six years...
I have spent my career moving along the boundaries of architecture, landscape, and urban planning—spaces where disciplines overlap, cities evolve, and new ideas emerge. From London to Shenzhen, Semarang to Accra, my work is driven by a fascination with how places grow, adapt, and shape the lives of the people who inhabit them.
Writing, speaking, and teaching are essential parts of that journey. They allow me to question assumptions, share what I’ve learned, and learn from others in return. I write to make sense of the forces shaping our cities, to communicate ideas clearly, and to provoke thoughtful debate. I teach because every new generation of urbanists brings perspectives that push the field forward. And I speak publicly to connect practice and policy, bridging the gap between technical expertise and the broader conversations cities need.
Today, alongside my work with MLA+, I serve as Chief Technical Adviser to a nationwide spatial planning reform in Saudi Arabia with UNDP and UN-Habitat. When time and context allows, I am also teaching and have been heading the Urbanism Department at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and at the Shenzhen International School of Design.
Cities are constantly changing; my motivation is to help steer that change – in words and deeds – toward more resilient, thoughtful, and inspiring futures.
