Essential expertise is brought together to develop a roadmap for the adaptive spatial strategy of Utrecht to transition to a circular society, ensuring that the evolving demand of the construction sector for space is met over time. The current response of Utrecht to transitioning to a circular society represents an incomplete picture. The ‘what’ and ‘how’ of an adaptive strategy for furthering the space use over time remained unaddressed. This initiative aims to provide Utrecht Province with the required insight into the spatiotemporal aspects of a transition towards a circular society, focusing on the construction sector. This is delivered via a conceptual framework that sets forth the spatial parameters for transitioning from a linear to a circular society, and a roadmap for understanding the how of reaching it. This project lays out the groundwork for such a framework, identifying the spatial parameters of a transition to a circular society for Utrecht’s construction sector, exploring the evolving spatial claims throughout this transition over time, and reflecting on the potential alignment with the current policy objectives of the province.

• Dr. Maryam Ghodsvali (Wageningen University & Research)
• Dr. Hongmei Lu (Utrecht University)
• Dr. Shahryar Ershad Sarabi (Eindhoven University of Technology)
• Province of Utrecht

How does artificial intelligence (AI) impact urban governance and the sustainability transition? By integrating insights from urban planning, political science, and computer science, this project investigates the governance challenges, ethical dilemmas, and social justice concerns arising from human-AI interactions in urban governance. Through a systematic literature review, the project will develop a conceptual framework to analyze these interactions, ensuring that AI aligns with collective human values. This framework will provide insights for cities implementing AI, fostering equitable and sustainable urban development through adaptive governance strategies.

• dr. Evanthia Dimara
• dr. Damion Bunders
• dr. S. (Shihan) Wang

Rapid urbanization has led to several sustainable challenges including the degradation of ecosystems and urban-rural inequality around the world. Climate change and grey infrastructure development also make urban areas more vulnerable to extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves that cause social, economic and ecological damage. There is a growing consensus on using nature-based solutions, especially Green Infrastructure to tackle these challenges and enable the transition to a circular society. Rain gardens, permeable pavements, green roofs, infiltration planters, trees, tree boxes, and rainwater harvesting systems are some examples. The recent development of Digital Twin and Artificial Intelligence provides new opportunities to address these problems. 

• Dr. Qi Han (TU/e)
• Dr. Hendrik Baier (TU/e)
• Prof. dr. Alexander Klippel (WUR)
• Dr. Marian Stuiver (WUR)
• Prof. dr. Pinar Yolum (UU)

The widespread use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms has increasingly influenced planning practices. Social media have been widely employed by governments as a “smart” tool for citizen engagement and participatory governance as well as for harnessing collective actions. However, there is a lack of study on what kinds of key factors influence the interactions and actions of various actors in social networking sites and how online social networks affect planning outcomes. This project aims to develop a multi-agent model to simulate online social network influence on participatory planning in the context of sustainable urban transition.This transdisciplinary study will bridge the knowledge gap between urban planning and computer science regarding online social network study. First, this study will develop a new methodology by using data collected from online social networks of selected case studies to adjust the parameters of  the multi-agent model to reflect the understanding and sentiment of online participants. The multi-agent model developed here will be implemented in a simulation environment, which will also serve as a platform for future studies. Second, it will investigate the complex role of social networking sites in contestation, empowerment and inclusion in urban sustainability transition. It will explore what extent social network sites increase the power of citizens, enhance the effectiveness of citizen participation, and facilitate social inclusion. Answering these questions will bring us one step closer to our goal of establishing social sustainability.

• prof. dr. Pinar Yolum Birbil

Collaborative planning has become an effective means to address conflicts of interest in urban renewal and environmental management in China. However, the egalitarian principles that ground collaborative planning theory call into question its validity in China. The theory emphasizes consensus building in which various stakeholders come together for dialogue to address controversial issues. It rests on three assumptions: democratic institutions, neutral power and communicative rationality. These assumptions, which are often debated in the Western context, should clearly be questioned in the Chinese context due to the specific institutions and the challenging nature of power relations. Therefore, the aim of this project is to examine the practices of collaborative planning in China and identify the challenges to the assumptions of the theory. It will develop three novel tracks for examination and reconceptualization. The first will analyze how Chinese political and planning systems, social capital and culture affect the interactive processes. The second will apply network theory and social network analysis to measure various forms of power relations between governments, planners, civil society, and citizens, generated by social networking sites. The third will identify various forms of online public spheres and how they interact with offline public spheres to affect communicative and agonistic approaches to collaborative planning. The research will employ an innovative mixed methods approach combining critical discourse analysis, data mining, computer-assisted content analysis, and social network analysis to research a wide range of case studies. It will lead to a new understanding of collaborative planning in China, and a reconceptualization of the collaborative planning theory.

• dr. Xiaomeng Zhou
• dr. J. (JunYao) He
• dr. Zhen Li

Both China and the Netherlands have experienced large and rapidly changing inflows of migrants into cities, putting a major demand on their public and private housing markets. This project will have a better understanding of the impacts of social housing programmes and market forces on urban housing of different migrant groups. It will also assess the impact of innovative social housing programmes on the social integration of migrants. This project is a Dutch-Sino collaboration, funded by Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC) in China.

• dr. Gideon Bolt
• prof. dr. Pieter Hooimeijer

• Nico Heerink (WUR)
• Eveline van Leeuwen (WUR)
• Several Chinese partners