This project investigates the challenge of water in the Anthropocene. Due to the accelerating human-induced climate crisis and human actions such as damming, over-extraction, and irrigation practices, the hydrological cycle has been altered, causing an increase in the intensity and frequency of its extremes: severe floods and prolonged droughts. In this Anthropogenic epoch, the world has become heavily globalized and urbanized, leading to critical territories that are exhausted, disconnected, and vulnerable as they are densely built with fixed, impermeable materials and structures. These artificial landscapes cause the detachment of the natural systems from human environments, threatening society’s existence.
Additionally, there is the intangible water challenge of social alienation from water identity: the loss of society’s (ancient) connection with water as an integral part of their way of living. These tangible and intangible water-related challenges are increasingly occurring in the territory of Emilia-Romagna, located within the Po Valley in Northern Italy. This transformation has turned a once wild, dynamic, and rich watery landscape into a humanized, artificial one, resulting in a sinking delta challenged by both sea and riverine floods. Therefore, this introduces the focus area of this thesis project.
There is an urgency to address these challenges by raising awareness and designing solutions for the changing water-related conditions of territories, systems, space, environments, processes, and human behavior. As natural water catastrophes increasingly and interscalarly threaten human daily life, this project argues for a transformative approach to living with water’s uncertainty and dynamics. It aims to answer the research question ‘How to interscalarly design a water-sensitive reality on the human dimensions of daily life in the Northern Italian southeastern Emilia-Romagna region for flood and drought protection while reintegrating water heritage as a way of living?’
The project focuses on Emilia-Romagna using the methods ‘non-linear interscalar design’ and ‘using water heritage as a transformative approach’. Additional methods include ‘critical discourse analysis’, ‘literature review’, ‘historical analysis’, ‘critical mapping of spatial systems,’ and ‘fieldwork’.
Spatial analysis and fieldwork show that Emilia-Romagna’s territory is densely urbanized, with 47% intensive agricultural land, and has lost its natural historical landscape due to land reclamation. The longue durée captures the (historical) transformation from ancient flood-dynamic settlements to completely canalized agricultural land, constantly threatened by floods from the Reno basin and Apennine rivers. Literature reviews reveal the changing societal position of water, from a worshipped living deity and landscape of care to an inconvenient object removed from the daily living environment by the introduction of the car, reflected in urban design and planning. They provide a framework for a healthy watershed by spreading, slowing, collecting, and infiltrating water in up- and downstream landscapes and providing room for the river to restore the natural balance through the various scales. This historical transformation and water identity form the water heritage used as the foundation of the design.
To conclude, the interscalar landscape-urban design uses water heritage, formulated by ancient structures and societal values, to restore the territory through water. Based on the concept of ‘water storage along various landscapes’ and guided by the Santerno River as the main connecting territorial element, Room for the River interventions, along with the interplay of artificial and natural water management through a territorial water reservoir system, demonstrate a possible interscalar framework. This framework contributes to flood and drought protection while increasing spatial quality and improving daily life. A transformative way of living with water in urban, peri-urban, and rural environments is proposed. This approach allows inhabitants to reconnect with their water identity, restore water’s position within society, and raise awareness of the crucial essence of water in providing life in various ways. This is highlighted by the water-sensitive small-scale urban design in the village of Sant’Agata sul Santerno, featuring a water storage square. This interscalar design reintroduces water as a cultural landscape where natural water dynamics freely roam within an artificial framework, ensuring water safety and reframing human daily life.

Global trends in urbanization, industrialization, and intensive agriculture are harming our (local) environment. These activities require significant mounts of resources, energy, and transportation, whilst creating increased waste streams. Poor management of these sites has led to severe soil, water, and air contamination. Currently, Europe has 2.8 million potentially soil-contaminated sites, with around 340,000 in direct need of remediation. Additionally, these activities cause land cover changes, shrinking and fragmenting the natural landscape. The decreased ecosystem connectivity is harmful to ecological processes and biodiversity. Phytoremediation and green infrastructure (GI) planning offer robust nature-based solutions to these problems. Integrating these solutions holds the potential to utilize the same vegetation for both solutions. However, integration of these solutions is challenging due to the scalar gap between the locality of phytotechnologies and the regional scale that is used for GI planning.
This thesis presents a systematic approach to integrating small-scale phytoremediation interventions within regional-scale GI planning. Using a multi-scalar, data-driven framework, this research uses computational simulations, calculations, and assessments to identify optimal design solutions, including traditional GIS mapping, graph-theoretic networks, and neural networks. This integrated approach aims to enhance environmental remediation and ecosystem connectivity and provides a comprehensive strategy for sustainable regional planning.

This research addresses the heavy metal soil pollution of the IJmond region caused by the presence of the industry for over a hundred years. Currently, Tata Steel’s steel industry is transitioning towards Green Steel production, which will decrease air pollution significantly; this does not solve the issue of soil pollution that has accumulated over the years within the region. Even though heavy metals in the soil surpass the legally allowed concentration, nothing is being done about it. Heavy metal soil pollution influences human health when interacting with the soil and can indirectly contaminate produce grown on the soil. Due to this decennia-long pollution of the steel industry, the value of the surrounding landscape (the IJmond region) has decreased, limiting the residents’ health and future potential for development. That is why this research will focus on how to return value to the IJmond region in the Green Steel future of the steel industry. This will be done by creating a strategy concentrating on the spatial impact of soil pollution and the societal impact on the residents in working towards healthy soil again.
The revaluing strategy will focus on three sub-values: the current value that should be maintained, the intended value that should be created and the process value of ensuring a just process in revaluing the landscape. The current value is the presence of the steel industry within the region and how it is engrained within the societal structure of the IJmond region. A consequence of the presence of this current value is soil pollution, which causes a conflict with the livability of the region. This is why the intended value is a healthy soil that returns livability and remediates pollution. The process value stresses the need for an inclusive process that creates agency and transparency for residents.
The strategy combines these values by integrating collaborative governance with spatial remediation, both of which are essential to realising healthy soil on a large scale. This is done in four phases that focus not only on planting, maintaining, and harvesting plants that clean the soil through phytoremediation but also on creating stakeholder interaction and engagement.

The Nitrogen Crisis has become a focal point for the global community, with the related European policy stirring uncertainty in the agricultural sector. This political unrest has been clearly manifested in the Netherlands, while natural areas remain exposed to high emission levels. Society calls for systematic solutions to the nitrogen issue that conserve the existence of farmers, the preservation of nature and the national economy.

This report focuses on the agricultural sector, as it accounts for 52 per cent of emissions (RIVM, 2022). We investigate opportunities to mitigate NH4 and NO3 surplus in soil caused by current agricultural practices and we spatially explore a systemic approach to cut emissions caused by livestock farms and inefficient use of fertilizers within field crop farming in the Eurodelta region.

Through document review and archival research, followed by spatial analysis and mapping, we investigate what changes in agricultural practice can restore balance in the nitrogen cycle. A vision for the Netherlands’ primary agricultural production future is formulated. This vision focuses on sustainable land use, alongside nature protection, research development and community engagement. We elaborate on this through a spatial
strategy, which concentrates on five strategic projects used to assess the interventions on-site and demonstrate their potential to all stakeholders.

Our proposal involves the recognition of natural protection zones in areas where agriculture borders natural habitats. Actions and policies are suggested to facilitate land conversions and support the farmers in this transition. Furthermore, we propose a network of living labs and community centres aimed at applying sustainable farming methods and connecting the city and agriculture.

We conclude that to prevent harm to human health and the environment we need to explore ways to combine the farmers’ and the environment’s interests. The systemic approach requires equitable regulations governing permissible emissions for farmers throughout the Netherlands. However, it should allow farmers to autonomously shape emission reduction initiatives locally.

Since the Industrial Revolution, fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas have provided the vast majority of energy used by our globalising civilisation. The rapid growth in energy use in the past 250 years has led to increasing fossil fuel usage, which has been the primary driver behind the ongoing climate emergency. Policy measures in the Netherlands aiming to reduce the country’s carbon emissions have so far been insufficient because of a lack of visioning and concrete strategies. A primary source of the persistent emissions is the Port of Rotterdam, which acts as Europe’s fossil fuel gateway as well as the most polluting port in the continent, due to the excessive petrochemical activities. The pollution is one of the causes of climate change, which threatens the Dutch landscape with possible extreme sea level rise and weather conditions. The main objective of this report is to imagine a carbon-neutral post-fossil fuel future where the changing water landscape is considered, and the Port-region of Rotterdam adopts a decentralised energy system by 2100.

Historical and social analysis of the ports’ position in the energy system together with the current policies of the energy transition was used to formulate goals and a conceptual framework. By using scenario building for uncertainties and their evaluation, a final vision of an inclusive energy transition was developed. To achieve the desirable systemic shift, this report outlines a set of development strategies through toolkits, new policies, and strategic sites namely in the Port of Rotterdam, Zeeland, Dordrecht, and the Green Heart. A detailed example of Port of Rotterdam is chosen to illustrate how specific actors can define the new energy-inclusive built environment.

This report aims to outline a transition pathway from the polluting and exclusive energy system towards a decentralised, sustainable, and carbon-neutral energy system that empowers communities and individuals in the Eurodelta region. A crucial element of the project is the establishment of a resilient energy system, taking in the consideration of sea level rise and worsening climate situation expected in the next decades. The integration of renewable energy, nature-based water management solutions and redevelopment of obsolete fossil-fuel scapes will transform the ports, urban centres, and peri-urban areas into a dispersed energyscape. This way, the new energyscape is inclusive and adaptive, allowing people to have a voice in their energy production while also being more in touch with nature.

The emission of CO2 is a significant contributor to global warming, with the mobility sector being a major source. The EU has set a goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, requiring substantial CO2 reduction efforts, particularly in densely populated regions like the Rhine-Delta (RDR). This region’s extensive mobility network, serving both urban and global trade needs, generates significant CO2 emissions.
To address this, a research initiative aims to make the Rhine-Delta’s mobility network CO2-neutral by 2050 through reimagining its design and operations. The focus lies on peri-urban areas, where urban and rural landscapes intersect. These areas are essential for economic and social functions but are currently reliant on polluting road transportation.
The research identifies the need to rethink connectivity to peri-urban areas for sustainability. Traditional urban-focused transportation concepts often overlook peri-urban needs. Therefore, the initiative proposes developing context-based mobility nodes tailored to peri-urban requirements. These nodes aim to promote sustainable transportation and enhance network efficiency.
The approach involves creating an interconnected network of such nodes throughout the Rhine-Delta region, addressing the specific needs of lower-density areas like peri-urban zones. By considering local contexts, these nodes can effectively serve peri-urban areas, promoting sustainable transportation practices.
To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, the research zooms in on a representative area within the Rhine-Delta region, focusing on peri-urban patches around Arnhem-Nijmegen. By showcasing how context-based mobility nodes can be implemented in such areas, the research seeks to pave the way for a broader transition towards a CO2-neutral mobility network by 2050.
In conclusion, the research aims to transform the Rhine-Delta’s mobility landscape by making it CO2-neutral through the implementation of sustainable transportation solutions tailored to peri-urban areas. By recognizing and addressing the unique challenges and opportunities presented by peri-urban zones, the initiative seeks to contribute significantly to the EU’s climate neutrality goal by 2050.

The thesis starts with the launch of two national projects in the source of yellow river, which is on top of Tibet Plateau, the most fragile and delicate ecosystem on the earth, is endangering the region. The sky river project, an external imposition that aims to turn the region into a huge landscape machine and the Nation Park plan, an internal separation that denials the indigenous relationship with their land.

My project serves as the negotiation process that gradually brings the land back to its people, respecting their traditional knowledge and engaging local cultures towards a autonomous national reserve of their own through the building of a resilient ecosystem, dynamically maintaining of its unity and actively sustaining its vibrancy that can deal with the future hydrological cycle in multi-scale.

It weaves a tale of an ambitious national environmental initiative in a century where the clarion call for sustainability rings louder than ever. It explores the intimate entanglements of indigenous communities with their ancestral lands, and grapples with the question of how they can harmoniously align with the nation’s aspirations. This narrative unfolds against the backdrop of a world in dire need of sustainable practices, as it bears witness to the profound bonds that tie indigenous peoples to their territories and deliberates on the means to synchronize these ties with the pulsating rhythm of the nation’s dreams.

The phenomena of climate change interacts with the complexity of urban system, which reflect sptially on the process of urbanization. One of the effects of climate change is an increased flooding hazards, and when floods occur this has a severe impact on human lives and comes with vast economic losses. The city of The Hague aims to achieve the goal of becoming a resilient city in 2050. However, the city is under the threat of extreme precipitation and the challenge of urbanization, which affect the liveability in the city. As an important component of achieving resilience, rainproof adaptation can be transformed as an opportunity. By taking the complexity of the social and enviromental vulnerabilities into the consideration, the project discusses the possibility of linking the water management process with the public space design to develop a conversation of the techinical, spatial and social process. The focus of the graduation project is how precipitation flood management can collaborate with public space design to become an opportunity for achieving urban resilience. Taking the case of The Hague, the Netherlands, the project proposes a re-defination of urban development process through public space design with techinical water management approach.

Infrastructure, industry and extraction have greatly reshaped the North Sea over the last five decades. These specific elements played and still play a vital role in the growth and evolution of the North Sea and its adjacent countries. Among all the fishing and oil industry have become highly governmentally influenced machines and are imposing structural injustice on those in contact with its multi scalar impact. Both industries appear seemingly very different from each other however, both take part in the imposition in terms of pollution, territorial claims and impacts on identity and culture. This role has its direct effects on people closely linked to these systems, but also to those far beyond the boundaries of the North Sea. Their lives forever changed, with a low possibility to ever act against. One of the main reasonings behind this imposing role are the detached positions of these industries in relation to their territorial specificities. The lack of integration in terms of site specific entities such as climate, flows and culture are enhanced by its alienated and detached appearance directly result in the separation of man, machine and territory. Unfortunately, these industries are currently indispensable for our present-day lives, without them we couldn’t live as freely and developed as we do now. To act against the structural injustice imposed by the industries a new type of industry must be introduced and by means of it an energy transition. Allowing for maintaining benefits, yet without the imposed disintegration known from our current state of existence. The duality imposed by these industries is clearly notable in Bergen, Norway. Being Norway’s largest centre of sea based extraction, production, transportation, research and education Bergen has greatly benefitted from the extraction of oil and fish however always correlated by strong cases of structural injustice. On the other side of the industry stands Bergen’s unique landscape and its territorial specificities unlike any other city surrounding the North Sea. Together they embody a topography of chance suitable for this new type of industry, which is set to initialise an integrated and coalesced energy transition. Its result is a new approach to an equilibrium between all related subjects and objects, while providing a bodily experience embedded in and exposed to territory, flows and machine. The new type of industry entails a series of interventions linked to a multi scalar energy transition in terms of production and utilisation by means of direct linkage between man, machine and territory. The proposition consists of three main elements: a hydrogen production facility, a fuelling station and a bath house. Each individual element plays a critical role in the integration and coalescence of production, flows and territory to create an integrated and sustainable energy transition. The hydrogen production facility as the manifestation of integrated production and service to the city by means of both product and waste. The fuelling station as the long term solution and the possibility of reterritorialization of fjordic waters by local fishermen. And lastly the bath house as a social proposition of full process exposure, tangibility and integration. These elements make various appearances ranging from: the uncovering of present-day systems to the management of site specificities, use and enhancement of cultural aspects and the utilisation of clean energy and waste. Furthermore, a moment of reflection on the self and the structural injustice imposed by the governmental machines which we currently heavily rely on. Together acting as a statement of minimal intervention to maximise territorial use and therefore the activation of structural justice by means of integration.

Globalisation and global urbanisation are reshaping our world. Life in Central Places is expanding; life in remote territories is vanishing. For centuries, subsistence agriculture sustained rural communities the world over; that raison d’être has now largely vanished. Cities mine the territory for fuel, material resources, food and even population. Simultaneously, our globalised world faces serious challenges as we try to move beyond oil and to a circular economy. The remote island of Flotta in the Orkney archipelago exemplifies these themes, and offers possible visions for a future world in which the remote territory exists in symbiosis with the centralised city. In the coming decade, the Flotta Oil Terminal will close. Flotta’s population is aging, and its vital services are gradually vanishing. There is a small but significant influx of people fleeing the city- looking for an old, but now-vanished way of life in the remote territory. Friction on Flotta is rising as these few, new romantics interact with the pragmatically-minded last generation of Flottarians. Community is not always rosy. The closure of the oil terminal will likely be the nail in the coffin of human habitation of Flotta. Orkney also has a waste management problem- shipping scrap metal to distant, central locations. Simultaneously the Orkney archipelago is ‘the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy’. It already generates much more electricity than it needs, but struggles to export the surplus via a subsea cable designed to transfer power to and not from the islands. Renewable energy is not best suited to central cities- it is Energy at the End of the World. Traversing the island, the Bruck-Mining Saga forms a connection between the point where the Flotta subsea electricity cable lands and the remote edge of a ruined, wartime landscape facing out to sea. It pragmatically mines metal bruck at infrastructural scale, creating new material for export and thus a new economy by using the locally generated renewable electricity surplus. The metal recycling plant occupies the site of an abandoned airfield from the early days of the oil terminal- which constitutes a form of spatial bruck. In time, the oil terminal will also become bruck. The creation of ‘new metal’ in turn facilitates the embellishment/ establishment of a craft metal working/ jewellery making tradition on the island. This draws Flotta into the existent Creative Orkney Trail and brings bruck metal mining to the scale of the human, and indeed even to that of the wearer. These workshops inhabit a series of wartime ruins, which are of course a form of architectural bruck. They preserve and embellish the romantic attraction of this story to visitors of Orkney. Such stories of the remote are vital to humanity: ‘Once upon a time in a land far, far away…’ Where does the community fit in- complete with all its beauty and imperfections? It occupies a point of transition between these two spheres of production, where a series of spaces house the rich tapestry of Flotta stories past, present and future. These subterranean spaces form a modern monument which both record and enable the telling of stories that are crucial to the plural identities of the evolving Flotta community, and which in turn reflect our broader humanity. In doing so, they become simultaneously a museum, community arts space and landmark. More permanent than any infrastructure can or ever should be, they cement a part of our humanity in the remote island territory. They say: ‘We’re still here.’

In the current geopolitical climate, where Arctic nations are at the brink of conflict in their pursuit for influence and resources, mining has acquired a political character, establishing a delicate equilibrium between resource claims and the protection of the territory. This equilibrium is manifested in the Svalbard Free Zone, where all nations are free to make use of its resources, yet the presence of Norwegian population, and mining as raison d’etre of inhabitation, has acted as the entity of governance and ambassador for the best interests of the region. Nonetheless, with the ongoing end of coal mining in Svalbard, and the demise of Norwegian presence in the archipelago, the ‘free zone’ will face a state of uncertainty, vulnerable to the interests and disputes amongst the Arctic nations. As the ‘free zone’s’ uncertainty threatens the stability of the entire region, mining waste becomes a glimpse of hope towards a new form of political representation. While the Arctic communities face the havocs of such waste, its potential reuse makes it a novel resource and a chance for cooperation to counterbalance both its environmental effects and the political crisis that is about to unfold. Hence, the Embassy of Waste is a political manifesto that introduces the recollection and recycling of mining waste in the decaying mining community of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in an attempt to become a novel tool towards the governance and self-sufficiency in the region.

Within the main geographical contexts of the North Sea and the Scheldt estuary, the Doelpolder area stands out for the conflictual relationships between human settlements, environmental crisis, and man-made infrastructures, which are all paradigms of the so-called Anthropocene era. The site comprises the village of Doel, the natural reserve of Saeftinghe, the nuclear power plant of Doel and the largest dock of the Port of Antwerp in a 2 km long prone-to-flooding area, which is currently facing some anthropic phenomena such as pollution, infrastructural expansion of the harbor and dismantlement of the nuclear power plant. In its process of northbound expansion at the expense of the estuarine territory and the polder-land, the Port of Antwerp has turned Doel into a ghost town by means of expropriation and economic pressure, while the flora and fauna of Saeftinghe are endangered by the alteration of their brackish habitat caused by pollution and water level rise due to both infrastructural growth and climate change. This everlasting dichotomy between natural and anthropized processes poses here the dualistic problem of extinction/preservation and if/how can architecture depict a self-healing survival scenario for this specific site in the Post-Anthropocene, attempting at climate change mitigation and nature metabolism at the same time. The project first addresses the aforementioned issues within a regional strategic and energetic plan which foresees the “de-polderization” of the area, its transformation into a controlled tidal zone for soil and water recovery and the simultaneous expansion of the natural reserve. Moreover, the thesis wants to takes a position regarding the future re-use of (parts of) the nuclear power station starting from 2025 (the date Belgium is supposed to start the phase out of nuclear energy). On the architectural scale, the building here implemented is a “knowledge ark” with laboratories and academic-related spaces, a facility which can exploit not only the world-level Port infrastructure for an optimized logistic (coldchain) but also the proximity of the natural reserve and the former agricultural vocation of the area. This repository building consists of a seed vault and a frozen zoo for the conservation of species through cryopreservation technique, but most importantly is an architectural object designed to resist or accommodate time and territorial transformations, for guaranteeing a possible rebirth of both nature and culture. To do so, the architecture imagined for the Doel site is physically linked to the water-level-rise process. When/if the level of the Scheldt rises above 2 meters (worst case scenario), the whole area will be flooded and any human survival unlikely. In these circumstances, the water will trigger the self-destruction of the facility, spreading the seeds contained in the vault all over the area and thus favouring the rebirth of nature in unpredictable climatic conditions. In the end, the Seed Vault/Frozen Zoo constitutes, like Doel, the nemesis of the Port but, also like Doel, will eventually evolve into a ruin in case of loss in the fight against, pollution and climate change.

The project I propose is not the child of its time, it rejects the lexicon of current affairs (climate change, pollution, exploitation of resources) as well as that of social issues. It does not want to solve the problem of the site in which it operates, but it embraces a horizon of analysis and observation of man in his existential dimension, completely isolated from the dynamics determined by the homo faber. The project focuses on the relationship between the homo figurans 1 and the territory in which he lives, an archaic, but never anachronistic, relationship. The project I propose focuses on architectural language, on how to act in the place rather than what to do in the place. For this reason, I believe that it has a markedly political valence. As the political valence of a work of any type - literary or architectural - is not determined only by the issues it deals with, but above all by the choice it operates. There is not a more purely political operation than an operation on language.

Homo Figurans, term used by Eugenio Turri in The landscape as a theater 2001.
Homo Figurans: Man as a figure among the figures of the world.

These are challenges we have worked on with a multidisciplinary team of students from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and several universities in Albania. Eventually, a development strategy was made for three locations in and around the capital Tirana. This report is a landscape architectural elaboration of one of these locations: the Limuthi valley. This place has great potential given the location between the port city of Durres and Tirana. By combining technical interventions, a landscape architectonic design and a strategic cooperation proposal between residents, municipality and development organizations, flood problems in this area can be tackled.