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...
BEYOND PEAK INDIFFERENCE #3 – Water is the currency of climate change. Increasing global temperatures heavily affect the global water circulation cycles. More heat means more evaporation, leading to...
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...
A bit more than a year ago, the German term ‘Zeitenwende’ – watershed moment – was frequently used to describe the Russian attack and the war unfolding in Ukraine....
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...
Recently a new book was published, showing the “radical architecture of the future”. Architects seem to love the word radical. If we look at the less prosaic reality of...
Future life in extremely hot climate Four degrees are what scientists predict the temperature will rise in the Middle East by mid-century[i] – twice the global average. Record temperatures...
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...
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...
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...
Greetings from Riyadh! It is 47°C outside, the asphalt shimmers, bus stops empty, and even a short trip on foot feels unreasonable. It’s tempting to declare the walkability debate...
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...
It is odd: Whenever architects show pictures of climate adapted buildings they first tend to pick the igloo, the mountain hut in Switzerland or the wind catchers and the...
The 61st ISOCARP World Planning Congress has come to a close. Time to reflect. What lingered with me was not the polished diagrams or the neat vocabulary of resilience...
If Hong Kong is the city that invented tomorrow, Shenzhen is the one that looked at tomorrow’s blueprints, said “Hold my tea,” and went ahead to build it by...
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...
When in 1910 Adolf Loos gave his lecture and subsequently published his essay “Ornament and Crime” it was a reaction to the Arts and Crafts movement with its overly...
In 2018 I organized a study trip to Moscow with students from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. They all felt it was an adventure and all of them had...
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.
