ARCHITECTURE
CITIES
LANSCAPES
ARCHITECTURE
CITIES
LANDSCAPES
Research Projects.
Our research projects investigate the complex relationships between architecture, cities, landscapes, and heritage. Combining historical insight, critical analysis, and interdisciplinary methods, these projects address pressing societal challenges such as climate adaptation, sustainability, urban transformation, and cultural preservation. Students and staff collaborate closely, connecting academic research with real-world contexts, generating new knowledge, and contributing to public debate and policy. Through these projects, the programme cultivates innovative thinking and equips students to engage with the built environment in socially relevant and transformative ways.
Collateral Spaces
This project introduces the concept of collateral space to describe how housing is conceived not only as homes but also as assets backing debt. It redefines residential landscapes by showing how large-scale mortgage schemes shaped architectural forms, layouts, and urban expansion. Focusing on Amsterdam’s postwar expansion neighbourhoods, the project links building permits with mortgage registrations in a digital database, enabling systematic analysis...
Atlas of the Dutch Urban Landscape
The Netherlands are an urbanized country. Over the last ten centuries a dense pattern of small, large, old and new towns emerged. How did this pattern develop and why do our towns look as they do? From Friesland to Limburg, and from Groningen to Zeeland, dozens of towns were built during the Middle Ages, most of them along rivers and main waterways. When the Dutch Republic ...
Post 65
In de late jaren 1950 en de jaren 1960 viel een periode van snelle economische groei en de opkomst van de welvaartsstaat samen met aan paniek grenzende bezorgdheid over demografische en stedelijke groei en ruimtenood. Die bezorgdheid gold in mindere mate het leefmilieu; het Rapport van de Club van Rome verscheen pas in 1972. Het is niet toevallig dat juist in die tijd van ongekende mogelijkheden...
The Architecture of Gas
This project explores how gas has shaped the Dutch built environment over more than two centuries. The project examines the spatial and architectural consequences of successive energy transitions to gas, from nineteenth-century urban gasworks and domestic gas use to the post–World War II shift to natural gas following the discovery of the Slochteren gas field in 1959. Focusing on gas production ...
HERILAND
HERILAND is a pan-European research and training network on cultural heritage in relation to Spatial Planning and Design. It is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813883. HERILAND is coordinated by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Other participating universities...
Muro Tenente
Since 1995 Burgers is scientific director of the Archaeological excavations of the fortified site of Muro tenente, in the Italian region of Apulia. He is also scientific director of the heritage planning project of the site, called Valorizzazione e fruizione dell’insediamento messapico di Muro Tenente, financed by the Accordo di Programma Quadro “Beni ed attività culturali”, financed by the VU University...
DELOS
On the island of Delos, Boulouki is restoring a nineteenth-century farmhouse using traditional building techniques and natural materials. Known as the “Farmhouse of Markos”, after the last farmer to inhabit the island, this vernacular complex will be adapted to accommodate the archaeological teams, staff, and researchers who work on one of Greece’s most significant heritage sites. The restoration also serves...
Making the Archipelago
This study travels to four archipelagoes—the Wadden Islands in the Netherlands, the Cyclades in Greece, Shetland in Scotland, and the Aeolian islands in Italy—to examine links between collective pasts and imagined futures as expressed in energy and sustainability projects. It is the result of a four-year PhD research, funded by the European project HERILAND that explored the relationships between heritage and spatial planning...
A Planning History of Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age
After the Fall of Antwerp in 1585, Amsterdam took over its position as the central trade hub in northwestern Europe and grew rapidly to become one of Europe’s largest port cities. The surge in trade and industry went hand in hand with an explosive growth of Amsterdam’s population. This resulted in two huge extensions, in 1613 and 1663 respectively, which ...