Amsterdam faces the challenge of accommodating 50,000 to 90,000 new homes in the next five to ten years. That is equivalent to 10% of the city’s current total housing stock. The new homes have to be built within the existing urban fabric. This will entail high densities and the construction of new ‘un-Dutch’ typologies with high-rise residential buildings. Densification is currently accelerating in many Western cities and high-rise living environments are gaining ground as today’s typology. Yet these new typologies come with potentially serious risks to the liveability of cities in general and those new environments in particular (Asgarzadeh et al. 2012; Lindal and Hartig 2013; Gifford 2007). Urban designers and (landscape) architects are challenged to prevent and soften the negative impact that is often associated with extremely densified environments. This entails mitigating contradictive demands: to create high-density capacity andshape streetscapes that relate to a human scale. Designers might resort to the large body of applied design solutions and theories, yet these tend to be derived from more traditional urban fabrics of low-density developments (for example: e.g. Sennett 2018; Haas 2008; Jacobs 1993; Banerjee and Southworth 1990; Alexander et.al. 1977; Jacobs 1961).Therefore, the question of the research project Sensing Streetscape is if the classical design solutions are without any alterations, applicable in these new high density settings and able to create streetscapes with a human scale. A combination of emerging technologies and principles from both worlds; neuroscience and architecture offer the opportunity to investigate this question in-depth as a relation between the designed and the visually perceived streetscape.
Distribution centres are becoming more and more relevant for spatial planning, due to their rapidly increasing size and number. There is little literature, however, that provides a generalized analysis of the size and functional attributes of distribution centres, and none that discusses the relationships between these attributes. Our aim is to fill this gap by providing new evidence and analysis to understand this relationship. We make use of an extensive database of 2888 DCs in the Netherlands to develop a new typology of DCs based on the geographical location of DCs, their functional attributes and client sector characteristics. The analysis shows that the context in which medium sized DCs are operating is more heterogeneous than in the case of very large and small size DCs. This study is a first attempt to analyse this relationship between facility size and functions based on a rich and extensive dataset of large population of DCs. The results can serve as input for further quantitative statistical analysis and international comparison.
The world of electric mobility and charging infrastructure has accelerated in recent years: from a start-up to a mature market. During the last decade, researchers at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences have contributed to making the rollout and use of charging infrastructure smarter. By analysing data, simulating future scenarios, testing in practice and developing the necessary hardware, a step towards a mature market has been taken.In this book, we give you insight into this research, focusing on the last five years in which the Future Charging research project took place. We wish you a lot of reading pleasure and inspiration in order to jointly take the next step towards a zero-impact world through mobility.
