The Syrian conflict, beginning in 2011, has escalated into a complex crisis marked by the aggressive response of the Assad regime and geopolitical power struggles. Humanitarian consequences, including mass displacement, neoliberal reconstruction policies, and environmental degradation, pose substantial risks. The 2023 earthquake has made the humanitarian situation severely worse. Oversimplification, selective compassion, and a business-oriented research approach hinder comprehensive academic engagement. This multifaceted problem manifests as the appropriation, oversight, and commodification of the Syrian narrative, evoking a sense of a stolen story among Syrians. The thesis will reclaim the Syrian narrative by researching the procedural urban practices that have contributed to the conflict and have led to the worsening of the violations. It will investigate how spatial planning can be a narrative tool to provoke change, provide alternative realities, and bring war-torn societies back together. That is, by first analyzing and mapping the unjust spatial consequences of the authoritarian practices before and after the uprising and, second, embracing the current grassroots movements. As a result, the thesis will provide a framework for change that deals with the political complexity of the context and provides a conciliation tool toward social-political reconciliation. Those different outcomes contribute to bringing justice, freedom, and co-existence back to Syrians.

With the current emissions and disasters due to climate change, the energy transition towards a sustainable and climate resilient future of Northwest Europe is now more important than ever. The fi rst steps have been made, but this transition is happening too slow and in an insufficient and uncollaborative manner. This research studies the spatial implications of the energy transition and aims to construct a framework that helps to accelerate the process and make it more efficient and socially just. The methods used for this are data analysis and research by design, combined with scenario building, by investigating and designing the case study of the province of South-Holland within the context frame of Northwest Europe. The results of this report show an integrated spatial vision on the energy transition on multiple scales. Additionally, it provides a strategic framework that consists of policies, organizational structures and physical interventions, both in space and time, that are structured in a catalog. This proposal helps accelerate the process of the energy transition, to be able to build on a sustainable future for energy production and distribution