Courses I manage
Over twenty years of teaching and developing curricula at the Department of Urbanism, TU Delft, across planning theory, governance, spatial justice and design-led studios.
My philosophy
What runs through two decades of curriculum design, from planning theory to design-led studios.
My teaching and research practice covers six interlocking areas:
- Planning theory
- Urban and regional planning tools and practice-based, design-led studios
- Governance
- Spatial justice and socio-spatial justice
- Sustainability, with a focus on environmental and social sustainability, including democracy, citizenship and political economy
- Informal urbanisation and sustainable urban development in the Global South
At TU Delft, teaching is organised around problem-led, real-world issues, most often within a studio setting where students confront actual planning problems rather than abstracted exercises.
My approach to education builds new knowledge from people’s own knowledge. Following Paulo Freire’s ideas on education, I hold that knowledge is built more effectively when people’s own lexicon and world views are brought into conversation with other kinds of knowledge: teaching works best when it starts from what people already know, in their own words and practices. This responds to the need to incorporate different kinds of knowledge into planning discourse, not only expert knowledge, in order to move beyond established technocratic canons. The underlying argument draws on Foucault’s account of knowledge that established institutions treat as “non-expert”, and therefore ignore. This renders the knowledge of vulnerable groups invisible and their voices unheard: women, children, older people, people with physical disabilities, people living with mental illness, people with additional needs. It raises an acute problem for planners and designers: how can healthy, fair and inclusive cities be planned and designed without access to the knowledge held by the people who live in them? Two further “silent stakeholders” complicate the picture: future generations and the planet itself. The planet speaks with a very loud voice, but policy-makers seem unable to hear it; future generations are not yet here to speak at all.
Urbanism is widely agreed to be a trans-disciplinary activity, yet professionals often feel threatened when other disciplines enter the discussion. This is not only an obstacle to spatial planning as a field; it is a threat to the sustainability and justice of the solutions planning produces.
In practice, this means I avoid lecturing students more than necessary, working instead through interactive activities where knowledge is co-produced. Lectures come once students’ own knowledge has been explored, surfaced and organised, which shapes how each course is structured.
I have supervised more than eighty graduation projects at master’s level and two PhD dissertations. The full list of graduation research and design projects I have supervised is available here.
Courses and studios
The main courses, studios and summer schools developed over the years for the Department of Urbanism, TU Delft, and its partner institutions.
Metropolitan Innovators
Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions Institute
Contemporary metropolitan regions face complex challenges involving large numbers of stakeholders with competing claims rooted in different world views. One of the major challenges facing advanced metropolitan regions such as the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area is how to manage transitions towards sustainability against the high cost of breaking free from path-dependency lock-ins. The Dutch government has pursued this transition since its first Environmental Action Plan of 1989, which focused on closing production and consumption loops, preventing the degradation and exhaustion of resources, and curbing harmful emissions, while assigning responsibility across public, private and civic actors. Because the transition involves whole chains of production, consumption and behaviour changing over long periods, it draws in a large number of stakeholders with competing claims and conflicting world views. This course equips Metropolitan Innovators to identify and evaluate those claims from three perspectives: socio-technical, ecosystems, and spatial justice.
Course coordinators: Dr.ir. Clemens Driessen (WUR) and Dr. Roberto Rocco (TU Delft). Lecturers: Dr.ir. Clemens Driessen, Dr. Roberto Rocco, Prof.dr. E.M. van Bueren (TU Delft), Aksel Ersoy (TU Delft), and guests.
The course complements the Metropolitan Challenges course taught in the programme’s first quarter and lays the ground for the later Metropolitan Solutions course. It introduces tools and theoretical frameworks for unravelling complex metropolitan challenges, drawing on design, planning, engineering and urban studies — the disciplines that deal with the three objects of a metropolitan innovator: space, society and technology.
Managing systems transition towards sustainability has cultural, political, technical and aesthetic dimensions, because sustainability only happens when its social, economic and environmental dimensions occur simultaneously (Larsen, 2012). No single discipline can address this alone: it requires engagement with a multiplicity of actors holding different perspectives. AMS draws on approaches ranging from engineering to entrepreneurship, from urban design to human geography, from environmental science to the sociology of innovation, combined into interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways of working. For any actor seeking to contribute to metropolitan solutions, the ability to translate metropolitan challenges into researchable questions, and to communicate and cooperate across conflicting objectives, becomes essential. Awareness of socio-economic context and the implicit and explicit values and cultural norms operating in a specific place is equally essential to reaching suitable solutions.
Three perspectives structure the course. Socio-technical: understanding metropolitan innovation through debates on the relationship between technology and society, and competing ideas on the role of science and knowledge in sociotechnical innovation. Ecosystems: framing urban areas as ecosystems, making it possible to model them and distinguish their constituent subsystems. Spatial justice: understanding metropolitan innovation from a political standpoint that foregrounds governance and social sustainability, situating action within ideas of democracy and participation. All three perspectives also examine the ethical dimensions of their own assumptions and frameworks.
- L1Describe different logics of enquiry and the suitability of methods derived from the natural sciences, applied sciences, social sciences and design activities.
- L2Describe and interpret knowledge claims across the socio-technical, ecosystemic and spatial-justice axes — the connection between research question, method, expected outcome and deliverable within different research traditions.
- L3Describe the merits of different modes of organising, governing and discussing metropolitan innovation: living labs, transition towns, systems innovation.
- L4Identify and critically discuss the implicit values of specific interventions against the three frameworks, including the interests at stake, the stakeholders involved, and the subjects, groups and behaviours produced.
- L5Identify and discuss strategies for transition towards sustainability from an ecosystems standpoint, including how metropolitan systems interact with one another.
- L6Explain spatial justice as a framework and its implications for the governance of metropolitan systems, including governance, citizenship, participation and democracy.
- L7Articulate the values underpinning decisions and reflect on the ethical and professional roles connected to research and design activity, including how different world views shape problem identification, knowledge formation and design intervention.
Methodology for Urbanism
Establishing academic rigour in planning and design education
From 2008 to 2010 I worked as a research assistant with the Research into Practice cluster at the University of Hertfordshire, then led by Professor Michael Biggs, a centre of excellence investigating the fundamental nature of research in the creative and performing arts. That work fed directly into two methodology courses in the Urbanism master’s programme at TU Delft, which address education in planning and design and seek a meaningful connection between traditional academic research and practice-oriented disciplines such as urban design, landscape architecture and spatial planning, with the aim of raising the academic value of the education on offer.
Complex Cities Graduation Studio
2008–2011
For four years I developed the content of and managed Complex Cities, a research and design studio in which students of the Department of Urbanism — spatial planning, urban design and environmental technology — produced their graduation work. The studio, now called Complex Cities and Regions in Transformation, is led today by Marcin Dąbrowski and tackles strategic regional planning, with an emphasis on regional development, governance and strategy. Students develop a strategic plan for a region of their choosing; because cohorts come from across the world, the range of cases is wide, but all are held to a common methodological and theoretical framework grounded in regional analysis of physical, demographic, governance and socio-economic conditions.
That analysis feeds into a regional strategic development plan: a detailed map of stakeholder positions and roles, alongside a plan of policies and physical interventions through which students test their assumptions and develop their visual, oral and written communication. Other studios I have led with colleagues in the department have addressed mobility and infrastructure planning, and the idea of the “knowledge city”.
Summer School Planning and Design for the Just City
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft — every July
Since 2014 I have organised and led this summer school, originally titled Planning and Designing with Water and built around the challenges of contemporary water management in urban design and planning. Since 2022 Caroline Newton has co-managed the school alongside me, and it now carries the name Summer School Planning and Design for the Just City, reflecting an expanded brief in which spatial justice, rather than water alone, organises the curriculum.
The school is run by the Centre for the Just City and the Chair of Spatial Planning and Strategy, in partnership with the faculties of Architecture and the Built Environment and of Technology, Policy and Management, the Delft Design for Values Institute and the TU Delft Global Platform, together with national and international partners including the City of The Hague, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, the Dutch Delta Programme, Arcadis, Deltares and the City of Delft.
Participants spend two weeks on site visits, talks with practitioners and academics, and a studio-based exercise, producing a spatial vision, strategy and design intervention for an area in Delft or The Hague — both sited within one of the world’s most significant urbanised delta regions. The programme continues to draw on the Dutch tradition of planning and designing with water, now read through the lens of spatial justice and the just transition to sustainability, alongside the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda and the European Green Deal. The school runs every July, generally in its second and third weeks; applications open each November and close in February.
Sustainable Infrastructures
Smart Infrastructure and Mobility (SIM), 2014
In 2014 I helped develop and teach Smart Infrastructure and Mobility, an elective with Taneha Bacchin and Denise Piccinini spanning the Department of Urbanism’s three chairs of Environmental Technology and Design, Spatial Planning, and Landscape Architecture, each responsible for a specific dimension of the project. The elective produced a critical analysis of metropolitan mobility, working through the interconnections between mobility, water management and urban design in a developing-economy context: a spatial design for a sub-system of the High Tietê river basin in São Paulo, Brazil, organised around the Rodoanel Mário Covas road ring and the proposed Hidroanel fluvial waterway for freight.
São Paulo’s metropolitan area is comparable to the Randstad in scale and economic output but carries twice its population, which sharpens three questions the course set out to answer: how planning and design of urban and landscape infrastructure can improve the social, economic and ecological conditions of densely occupied areas; how mobility and water governance can support the transition to liveable, resilient territories; and how understanding metropolitan governance structures helps designers and planners act with greater sensitivity to the stakeholders whose concerns and objectives are actually at stake.
European Master of Urbanism: Planning & Design Studio
TU Delft, KU Leuven, Università IUAV di Venezia, UPC Barcelona
The European Master in Urbanism (EMU) was an accredited consortium between the Urbanism departments of TU Delft, the Catholic University of Leuven, Università IUAV di Venezia and UPC Barcelona — a two-year, full-time postgraduate programme worth 120 credits, structured around three core semesters and a final semester for a written or design thesis, with the design studio as the backbone of each core semester. I helped develop the content of the studio centred on regional planning and design, which tackled the strategic transformation of complex polycentric regions where mobility and infrastructure play a defining role, and taught on EMU since its inception, first with Remon Rooij, then with Daan Zandbelt, Alexander Wandl, Luiz Carvalho and Victor Muñoz Sanz.
For supervision enquiries or collaboration on teaching, see the Contact page.
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