Ertuğrul Akdemir MAAI · Master in AI for Architecture and Business Innovation 25/26 Advisor: Shajay Bhooshan An AI tool that reads how streets behave through the day and tests where the curb could change use, then shows how that change spreads across the city before anything is built. Streets are designed once and rarely questioned. The … Read more
Infrastructure doesn’t just move people. It shapes who they are, where they go, and what kinds of lives are possible. At the northern edge of Barcelona — at the junction of Nou Barris, Sant Andreu, and Santa Coloma de Gramenet — Avinguda Meridiana does all three. It connects the city to its northern territories efficiently. … Read more
Applying CLIP vector embeddings to defensibly evaluate the architectural value of heritage-listed buildings Project Summary Project Presentation
Turning pollution data into planning decisions. TEAM: Martina Simoni , Rim Choufani, Rashi Desadla, Bhavana Priya B INTRODUCTION Kraków’s air quality problem isn’t abstract. It’s measurable, and it’s bad. Over six sessions, our team (Rim, Martina, Rashi, and Bhavana) used the CRISP-DM framework to ask a focused question: can urban form (building density, road networks, … Read more
Mapping out Spatial Intelligence Program: Master in AI for Architecture and the Built Environment (MaAI)Supervisor: Wassim Jabi Motion Pixels is a research project that explores how pedestrian movement can be transformed into spatial intelligence. By combining computer vision, trajectory analysis, behavioral mapping, and machine learning, the project converts video recordings of public spaces into spatial … Read more
A street-level method for predicting and explaining urban heat from surface composition and configuration
Barcelona Built a Road to the Port. Someone Else Paid for It. In 1992, the city tore down a wall. The old industrial waterfront that had cut Barcelona off from the Mediterranean for over a century was demolished to make way for the Olympic Village. For the first time in living memory, residents could walk … Read more
Vulnerability-adjusted carbon sequestration for more [actionable land]. Current climate mitigation treats carbon sequestration as a static stock: it counts the biomass a landscape holds and rewards storing more. Yet under fire and drought, the densest biomass is lost first, turning a carbon sink into a source. This thesis develops vulnerability-adjusted carbon sequestration. Working across a … Read more
Ecological Renewal of Ghats Website Link: https://aria-final.vercel.app/ Statement “While industrial and sewage pollution receive significant attention in river conservation efforts. Ritual pollution stemming from religious and cultural practices remains largely unaddressed due to its sensitive nature. But it contributes substantially to river degradation and requires culturally respectful solutions.” Sacred Sites Across every continent and culture, rivers … Read more
atlas of vacant spaces Urban vacant land in dense, post-industrial cities remains spatially invisible: absent from open datasets despite its potential to address chronic green space deficits. This thesis “vo:id” is a pipeline detecting, classifying, and prioritizing urban voids using only globally covered open data. Combining OSM-based negative masking, vision-language model classification, and human-in-the-loop validation, … Read more
Can Street Geometry Predict Urban Safety Risk? A machine-learning pipeline that classifies street morphology into risk typologies — from OpenStreetMap features to multi-city deployment, dead ends included. This post documents the full arc of our Urban Safety project — not just the results, but the reasoning, the wrong turns, and what we learned from them. … Read more
This project frames coastal landscapes as systems for circular regeneration, transforming local waste streams into functional ecological infrastructure. Through layered wetland and dune strategies, it explores how material reuse can enhance sediment stability, water quality, and biodiversity while addressing erosion as part of a broader global pattern of coastal and deltaic vulnerability under climate change.
Our cities have long been shaped around cars — wide roads, narrow sidewalks, and green spaces replaced by parking lots. Cars have quietly become the measure of how we design our streets. But what if cities were designed for people instead? As Fred Polak wrote in Images of the Future, the act of visualizing possible … Read more
Introduction Noise is one of the most pervasive environmental stressors in cities. Long-term exposure has been linked to sleep disturbance, cardiovascular disease, reduced cognitive performance, and lower overall quality of life. Yet despite its importance, detailed noise maps are surprisingly difficult to obtain. Producing official noise maps requires measurements, traffic models, and considerable technical effort. … Read more
Mobility when Tourism outgrows the City Barcelona is the 10th most visited city in the world. In 2024, it received approximately 15.6 million tourists – nearly nine times its resident population of 1.7 million. The issue is not tourism itself. Barcelona’s economy depends on it, and the city’s cultural richness is inseparable from its global … Read more
