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...
Many urban planners have developed a habit they rarely question: the reflex to load every project with every possible virtue. Sustainability, resilience, inclusivity, net zero, circularity, walkability, car-free living,...
A public space is generally open and accessible to people is how Wikipedia defines public space. Based on this basic definition, different societies have developed their own understanding of...
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,...
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...
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...
Jürgen Habermas has died, and with him one of the last great figures of a generation of philosophers who still believed that thinking could help society understand itself. For...
Tallinn does not announce itself. It does not rehearse its virtues or choreograph your admiration. You discover it slowly, almost accidentally, and then—somewhere between the sea and the forest,...
The World Urban Forum is holding its 13th session in Baku this week. Every time I travel to one of these mega conferences, I find myself questioning their purpose....
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...
Anyone who has spent enough time in architecture, urban planning, development, or local government will recognize the genre immediately: A project team is “excited to announce” that it has...
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...
Carbon Confessions The architectural profession has recently discovered a new genre: the public apology. Not an apology in the sense of actually changing behavior, of course. That would be...
Recently I have been on an excursion in the center of the Netherlands in an area that is famous for its natural beauty and even features one of the...
The day Donald Trump was elected, I was attending the World Urban Forum in Cairo. Contrary to what many of us believed, it wasn’t just the white, aged countryside...
I love Hong Kong and to me, it has always felt like a place that accidentally time-traveled ahead of the rest of us. While other cities were still arguing...
For decades, European planners looked at Gulf cities with quiet superiority. They saw places that were too hot, too dependent on air conditioning, too dominated by cars, shopping malls...
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...
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.
