UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD THROUGH CITIES
How countries around the Baltic Sea could change the way the world understands and develops cities. For decades, architects and urban planners from around the world have travelled to Copenhagen to study its cycling infrastructure, to Stockholm to admire its public spaces, and to Helsinki to understand its approach...
How countries around the Baltic Sea could change the way the world understands and develops cities. For decades, architects and urban planners from around the world have travelled to Copenhagen to study its cycling infrastructure, to Stockholm to admire its public spaces, and to Helsinki to understand its approach...
London is closing Oxford Street to traffic. Other cities should be asking themselves why they haven’t done the same. London has finally done it. Oxford Street, or at least...
Why global climate targets are not enough — and why adaptation must start with the places and people actually affected. We have become accustomed to discussing climate change in...
Architecture as a method for confronting complexity. This thought piece is a reflection on the Education Symposium organised by IABR and OASE on 9 October 2026, during the Rotterdam...
The giga-project created the island. The next challenge is making the archipelago work. For the past decade, Saudi Arabia’s transformation has been represented by objects: NEOM, The Line, Qiddiya,...
Berlin needs collective housing. But buying the shortage is no substitute for building its way out of it. Berlin has rediscovered one of the oldest political responses to scarcity:...
AI appears weightless. Its urban footprint is anything but. We experience artificial intelligence as a small blinking cursor. We type a question; an answer arrives. The exchange seems instantaneous,...
Every month, I experience the same small shock: I check my bank account and discover that another collection of subscriptions has been deducted: transport, newspapers, cloud storage, entertainment, software,...
Elia Zenghelis has passed away. And it does not come as a surprise that Rem Koolhaas remembers him. But what he wrote in his obituary made me think. Koolhaas...
How countries around the Baltic Sea could change the way the world understands and develops cities. For decades, architects and urban planners from around the world have travelled to...
When Noor, a 28-year-old nurse in Amsterdam, was finally offered a full-time position at the University hospital of the University of Amsterdam, she should have been thrilled. Instead, she...
Currently, I am preparing a lecture series which will look at the differences between the global north and the global south within the same continent. In Asia, you have...
I arrived in Vilnius with no particular expectations. I left wondering why so few European cities manage to do what Vilnius does with such apparent ease: create a public...
I confess, I am a cycling enthusiast and every July – and since yesterday again, the Tour de France captivates me and many millions more as it snakes through...
What Western Planning Misses About Urban Life in Africa For decades, African cities have been treated as incomplete drafts of somewhere else. They are measured against Paris, London, Singapore...
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...
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...
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...
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.
