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...
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...
Gaza, Reimagined as an Asset Class Gaza’s rubble isn’t a tragedy in this plan—it’s a business opportunity. The GREAT Trust masterplan treats the destruction of an entire society as...
Judging the words of pretty much every company, every city mayor and every architect and urbanist, dealing with climate change is at the heart of each and every decision...
I came across a recent UN-Habitat post on LinkedIn while scrolling past the usual mix of conference photos, policy announcements, and well-meaning advocacy graphics. This one stopped me. A...
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...
It took a while to finally conclude who will be President of the United States from January 20th on. The outcome in the end is what was predicted. But...
There is a peculiar ritual that plays out with remarkable consistency across the world’s capital cities. A government, freshly energised by a new administration or a once-in-a-generation development mandate,...
How migration politics is drifting away from urban reality—and what that means for policy and design Cities are being asked to solve problems they did not create—and are denied...
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...
Eight years ago Saudi Arabia embarked on a highly ambitious process to profoundly change the country within a short 15 years. They called it Vision 2030. With its three...
Until a couple of weeks ago, Italy was dominating the news as one of the countries hit hardest by Covid19. We all saw dreadful pictures of overcrowded hospitals and...
Yesterday I stumbled across a post of Nico Rosberg on Linkedin. There for former formula 1 world champion announced the starting of Rosberg Xtreme Racing. With his team he...
There has been an interesting debate going on in Dutch newspapers in the last couple of weeks. The government plans of building up to 1 million new homes were...
Het maakt niet uit waar je tegenwoordig heen gaat, Amsterdam, Parijs, Berlijn of Lissabon, overal staat het gebrek aan woningen en de onbetaalbaarheid daarvan hoog op de agenda. In...
‘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...
Germany’s housing market has long stood at the intersection of economic stability and social equity. In recent years, however, a growing crisis—marked by soaring rents, a stagnating construction sector,...
Time and time again, after returning from Hong Kong, Tokyo, Copenhagen, New York or Tallinn, I am appalled by the dirt and waste one is confronted with across the...
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.
