The European Union (EU) and the United States of America (US) are currently negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP was launched in 2013. TTIP aims at developing trade rules under investment protection that encompasses arbitration as the method to resolve disputes …

Existing unreinforced masonry buildings in seismically active regions are in urgent need of consolidation and preservation against seismic action to prevent damage and loss of financial resources. In this research, an experimental study of externally confined brick masonry piers, which are frequently …

Triggered by recent flood catastrophes and increasing concerns about climate change, scientists as well as policy-makers increasingly call for making long-term water policies to enable a transformation towards flood resilience. A key question is how to make these long-term policies adaptive so that they …

Martijn de Waal is a senior researcher at the lectorate of Play and Civic Media and a member of the Citizen Data Lab at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Het is the author of The City as Interface. How Digital Media Are Changing the City (2014), and the project leader of The Hackable City …

Background In 2015, Amsterdam became part of the WHO Age Friendly City community, thereby accepting the responsibility to work towards a more age friendly Amsterdam. To study senior citizens’ needs and wishes concerning the age friendliness of their neighbourhood, the municipality asked the Amsterdam …

The target article describes an interesting study, which provides some challenging findings regarding athletes' pathway to excellence. The suggested links between critical life events, need for success, personal characteristics, and eventual performance level make sense from a psychodynamic perspective. …

The realization of one’s musical ideas at the keyboard is dependent on the ability to transform sound into movement, a process called audiomotor transformation. Using fMRI, we investigated cerebral activations while classically-trained improvising and non-improvising musicians imagined playing along …

Progetto Ustica is an experiment in "civically-engaged game design" and addresses the Ustica Massacre ("Strage di Ustica"), where 81 people lost their lives as an air-to-air missile hit a civilian aircraft in 1980. Progetto Ustica has been developed as part of an Action Research effort with the objective …

Does our knowledge about city and urban planning have solid ground? Can historical research promote creative thinking? How can we theorise about urban design and architecture in our age of the media? These questions have guided the creation of this multi-layered, richly documented and illustrated triptych, …