This publication offers an overview of the latest cross-disciplinary developments in the field of Building with Nature (BwN) for the protection of coastal regions. The key philosophy of BwN is the employment of natural processes to serve societal goals, such as flood safety. The starting point is a systems-based approach, making interventions that employ the shaping forces of the natural system to perform measures by self-regulation. Initial pilots of this innovative approach originate from coastal engineering, with the Sand Motor along the coast of South Holland as one of the prime examples. From here, the BwN approach has evolved into a new generation of nature-based hydraulic solutions, such as mangrove forests, coastal reefs, and green dikes.

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Publisher TU Delft Open // Book Editors Janneke van Bergen, Steffen Nijhuis, Nikki Brand, Marcel Hertogh // Publication date February 2021 // Pages 296 // Full colour // ISBN 978-94-6366-379-3

Responding to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal No. 11 to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’, Inclusive Urbanism reveals a wide variety of approaches to promoting social inclusion. Questions of architecture and urbanism are considered alongside those of landscape design, urban geography and city planning.

As the title suggests, the content is divided into three parts: research, education and practice. A conceptual framework is offered in the opening part along with a theoretical embedding of the term ‘inclusiveness’. Here the discussion also encompasses the latest results of urban planning research. In the second part, the focus turns to university teaching. Do we need new teaching formats, and if so, how can these be designed to ease students into the topic of ‘inclusive urbanism’? The third part of the book offers diverse examples of spatial design, urban laboratories, planning and co-production processes, all presented with their respective possibilities for boosting inclusion. Consciously international in outlook, the book identifies practices in both the Global North and Global South.

Inclusive Urbanism brings together selected contributions presented at an international conference on ‘Urban Studies’ held at the TU Dresden in November 2018. The conference was jointly organized by the TU Dresden, the TU Delft, the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development in Dresden, the Czech Technical University of Prague and the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology.

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Publisher TU Delft Open // Book Editors Wolfgang Wende, Steffen Nijhuis, Angela Mensing-de Jong, Melanie Humann // Publication date September 2020 // Pages 328 // Full colour // ISBN  978-9463663175

This publication is a joint project between the Department of Management in the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology, and the School of Architecture at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, which seeks to reflect on alternative housing production models that have arisen in response to social, economic and political changes in both contexts. Although the experiences have followed different paths and therefore, have had different results, they share a common goal: the search for alternative housing models that are collaborative, affordable and have the potential for regenerating urban neighborhoods. The first milestone of the cooperation between both institutions was an academic experience in a workshop format carried out at Santiago in November 2017. The workshop titled: “Imagining housing renewal in deprived areas” became an opportunity to discuss among scholars, students, civil society organizations, and the community. As a result of this debate, a number of topics and questions were identified, which form the basis of the conceptual framework of this publication. Through a compendium of short articles, this book presents an academic debate regarding collaborative housing processes in urban regeneration, stemming both from local experiences and from the identification of north-south and south-north perspectives.

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Publisher TU Delft Open // Book Editors  Luz María Vergara, Cristián Robertson, Darinka Czischke, Elke Schlack, Rodrigo Tapia // Publication date November 2019 // Pages 176 // Full color// ISBN 978-94-6366-222-2

Geo-Design. Advances in bridging geo-information technology and design bring together a wide variety of contributions from authors with backgrounds in urban planning, landscape architecture, education and geo-information technology presenting the latest insights and applications of geo-design. Geo-Design is here understood as a hybridization of the concepts "Geo" – representing the modeling, analytical and visualization capacities of GIS, and "Design" – representing spatial planning and design, turning existing situations into preferred ones. Through focusing on interdisciplinary design-related concepts and applications of GIS international experts share their recent findings and provide clues for the further development of geo-design. This is important since there is still much to do. Not only in the development of geo-information technology, but especially in bridging the gap with the design-disciplines.

The uptake on using GIS is still remarkably slow among landscape architects, urban designers and planners, and when utilized it is often restricted to the basic tasks of mapmaking and data access. Knowledge development and dissemination of applications of geodesign through research, publications, and education, therefore, remain key factors. This publication draws upon the insights shared at the Geodesign Summit Europe held at Delft University of Technology in 2014. All contributions in the book are double-blind reviewed by experts in the field.

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Publisher TU Delft Open // Book Editors Steffen Nijhuis, Sisi Zlatanova, Eduardo Dias, Frank van der Hoeven, Stefan van der Spek // Publication date December 2016 // Pages 284 // Full colour // ISBN 978-9492516428

Flowscapes explores infrastructure as a type of landscape and landscape as a type of infrastructure. The hybridization of the two concepts seeks to redefine infrastructure beyond its strictly utilitarian definition, while allowing spatial design to gain operative force in territorial transformation processes. The publication provides perspectives on the subject from design-related disciplines such as architecture, urban design, urban planning, landscape architecture and civil engineering. The book builds upon the multidisciplinary colloquium on landscape infrastructures, that is part of the Flowscapes graduation design studio of Landscape Architecture at the TU Delft. 

The authors explore concepts, methods and techniques for design-related research on landscape infrastructures. Their main objective is to engage environmental and societal issues by means of integrative and design oriented approaches. Through focusing on interdisciplinary design-related research of landscape infrastructures they provide important clues for the development of spatial armatures that can guide urban and rural development and have cultural and civic significance. The geographical context of the papers covers Europe, Africa, Asia and Northern America. All contributions in the book are double blind reviewed by experts in the field.

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Publisher TU Delft // Book Editors Steffen Nijhuis, Daniel Jauslin, Frank van der Hoeven // Publication date April 2015 // Pages 324 // Full colour // ISBN 978-9461864727 // Price €37 / $40

Exploring the Visual Landscape is about the combination of landscape research and planning, visual perception and Geographic Information Science. It showcases possible ways of getting a grip on themes like: landscape openness, cluttering of the rural landscape, high-rise buildings in relation to cityscape, historic landscapes and motorway panoramas. It offers clues for visual landscape assessment of spaces in cities, parks and rural areas. In that respect, it extends the long tradition in the Netherlands on physiognomic landscape research and shows the state of the art at this moment.

Exploring the Visual Landscape offers important clues for theory, methodology and application in research and development of landscapes all over the world, from a specifically Dutch academic context. It provides a wide range of insights into the psychological background of landscape perception, the technical considerations of geomatics and methodology in landscape architecture, urban planning and design. Furthermore, there are some experiences worthwhile considering, which demonstrate how this research can be applied in the practice of landscape policy making.

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Publisher IOS Press // Book Editors Steffen Nijhuis, Ron van Lammeren, Frank van der Hoeven // Publication date September 2011 // Pages 336 // Duo-colour // ISBN 978-1607508328 // Price €80 / $116 Excl. VAT

Tracking technologies such as GPS, mobile phone tracking, video and RFID monitoring are rapidly becoming part of daily life. Technological progress offers huge possibilities for studying human activity patterns in time and space in new ways. Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) held an international expert meeting in early 2007 to investigate the current and future possibilities and limitations of the application of tracking technologies in urban design and spatial planning. This book is the result of that expert meeting.

Urbanism on Track introduces the reader to the basics of tracking research and provides insight into its advantages above other research techniques. But it also shows the bottlenecks in gathering and processing data and applying research results to real-life problems. Urbanism on Track showcases tracking experiments in urban studies, planning and design – from pedestrian navigation in Austria to Danish field tests, from TU Delft's Spatial Metro project to MIT's Real Time Rome and last but not least the Sense of the City project realised in Eindhoven.

Urbanism on Track discusses the relevance of tracking for policy making, the possibilities of a new cartography and the implementation of tracking technologies in urban design and planning. This makes Urbanism on Track a unique book, setting the agenda for the structural embedment of research using tracking technologies in urbanism.

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Publisher IOS Press // Book Editors Jeroen van Schaick, Stefan van der Spek, Frank van der Hoeven // Publication date December 2008 // Pages 200 // Duo-colour // ISBN 978-1586038175 // Price €70 / $99 Excl. VAT