Cities and their making understood and sometimes imagined .
When ArchDaily published “What Is Metamodern Architecture? Between Postmodern Irony and a New Sincerity” on 24 July 2025, it offered an elegant reading of contemporary architecture. Drawing on the work of Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, the article argues that we have entered a metamodern condition –...
When ArchDaily published “What Is Metamodern Architecture? Between Postmodern Irony and a New Sincerity” on 24 July 2025, it offered an elegant reading of contemporary architecture. Drawing on the work of Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, the article argues that we have entered a metamodern condition –...
Riyadh has never been a city at rest. From tribal camp to oil capital, from desert silence to the roar of six-lane highways, it has lived many lives. Today,...
If you ask ordinary people but also many architects or urbanists what measures should be taken to make cities ‘greener’ there is a 99% chance that they will say:...
In the world of architecture, the colour green is no longer just a design choice — it’s a branding strategy, a virtue signal, and occasionally, a very expensive lie....
Urban planners arrive in cities with a quiet sense of professional optimism. We believe that if we look carefully enough, systems will reveal themselves. Traffic will follow logic. Streets...
At city planning offices around the world, weary urban planners turn to AI tools to help draft a zoning report. They feed it background documents and ask for a...
About every second book about cities starts with the announcement that we are now living in an urban age with more than 50 percent of the world population calling...
Over Christmas the architectural world was rocked by the plans to demolish Louis Kahn’s dormitories of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. How is it possible that even making...
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...
When ArchDaily published “What Is Metamodern Architecture? Between Postmodern Irony and a New Sincerity” on 24 July 2025, it offered an elegant reading of contemporary architecture. Drawing on the...
On September 10, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman openly admitted that Saudi Arabia’s housing prices had risen to “unacceptable levels.” It was a strikingly candid statement from a leader...
According to a felt 99% of all scientists the impact of humans on the global climate is a fact. An inconvenient truth that is responsible for the climate change...
Last week I stumbled across a headline in Dutch media. The ‘Partij voor de Dieren’ (Animal rights party) proposed to reduce agricultural land for farming to build 75.000 new...
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...
Recently the New York Times reported that there is a flight from the cities to suburbian locations in the wake of Covid19. This reverses a trend that has been...
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...
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...
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...
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.
