Cities and their making understood and sometimes imagined .
How drones are redrawing our cities, our industries and our understanding of resilience. I am in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh and the city feels different today. The drone alerts that punctuated daily life only a short while ago have disappeared, and on the surface the city has returned to...
How drones are redrawing our cities, our industries and our understanding of resilience. I am in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh and the city feels different today. The drone alerts that punctuated daily life only a short while ago have disappeared, and on the surface the city has returned to...
The year is almost over. No time to conclude but to reflect and a time to state where we stand. One of the most striking things to me was,...
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...
Covid-19 makes it evidently clear: What happens in Wuhan affects what happens in New York, and what happens in Milan has an impact on what happens in Shanghai. This...
by a European Urban Planner Practicing on the Arab Peninsula I arrived in Saudi Arabia with a well-worn European planner’s toolkit—deep respect for history, a belief in incremental progress,...
It all sounds so smart and its vision is seductive: the smart city. Imagine a place where traffic flows seamlessly, waste disappears efficiently, energy is optimized, and safety is...
Rediscovering urban China after Covid Since more than 20 years I have been travelling to China several times a year. In this time I have seen the country developing...
Saudi Arabia is building at a pace and scale the world has rarely seen. Across its deserts and coastlines, extraordinary visions rise: NEOM’s The Line, a 170-kilometer-long city of...
This week, Vinkham Mansharani, a Harvard researcher, published a book, titled “Think for yourself”. It emphasizes the need for generalists – people that know a lot about many things...
How drones are redrawing our cities, our industries and our understanding of resilience. I am in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh and the city feels different today. The drone alerts...
‘Modern Architecture, a planetary warming story’ is the title of a book by architecture historian Hans Ibelings published recently. In his text, Ibelings builds evidence that modernist architecture is...
This week, I had the pleasure of attending the opening of this year’s serpentine pavilion by Korean Architect Minsuk Cho of Mass Studies. It was a beautiful event with...
Recently, world leaders have engaged in a competition of who makes the bigger pledges when it comes to reaching climate neutrality for the respective country or world region they...
In the vast circus of urban marketing, nothing says exclusivity quite like a definite article. Forget affordability, forget inclusivity — all you need is The. “The Edge.” – “The...
Quantum computing promises a revolution in data processing, not simply by accelerating calculation, but by introducing a fundamentally different logic of reasoning. Quantum systems do not proceed step by...
I have to confess – I am a big lover of Japanese Metabolism. It was a movement in the 1960s and 1970s that imagined a better future and firmly...
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...
World climate is a complex system – a system whose behaviour we can only grasp to the extent that we can make short term qualitative forecasts. Predicting the weather...
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.
