Four decades at the university, an overview of graduation projects

Editie: 32 - Inner City Restructuring

Published on: 12 juni 2025

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By the late 1980s, I gradually got involved in supervising graduate students, and from the mid-90s onward, the number of students I supervised grew steadily. In this article, I will give an overview of most of the graduation projects I have been involved in. Although my background is in urban planning and transportation, I have also co-supervised graduation projects related to adjacent fields. Hence, this article gives a broad yet incomplete insight into our educational and research activities.  

Our graduation projects are research oriented and contribute to the unit’s academic output. In most cases, the projects aim at finding out what people prefer or how people behave in the built environment, and how they would behave if things changed in the built environment or in their personal situation. These insights are particularly useful to support informed decision making in our field.  

In the following three sections, I will shortly briefly summarize the topics of over 200 graduation projects, the majority of which were conducted by USRE students. The first of these three sections deals with retail and shopping behavior, particularly in inner city shopping areas. In the second section, planning and design related topics will be discussed, as well as some other topics. Subsequently, topics related to transportation will be addressed in the third section. After these three sections, I will touch upon data collection and the research methods used in the projects. Finally, I will draw some conclusions. 

 

Retail and inner cities

The inner city plays a crucial role in the economic and social-cultural system of a city and its  surrounding region. Inner cities attract many people to work, to shop, or for leisure activities. Maintaining the vibrancy of inner cities is increasingly challenging due to the competition from other cities, changes in shopping behavior, ongoing digitization, the growing number of stakeholders in decision making processes, and ongoing construction works.  

Downtown shopping has been a popular subject of research. These graduation projects deal with how shoppers come to the inner city, where they enter the shopping area, how they navigate through the shopping streets, and which stores, food and beverage (F&B) establishments, and other services they visit. Quite some students contributed to developing models predicting these behaviors, while other students focused on the factors influencing the attractiveness of downtown shopping streets. Due to the financial crisis around 2010 and the rise of online  shopping, vacant stores and the increase of F&B establishments received attention of students as well.  

In addition to the downtown shopping areas, students explored other types of shopping centers as well, such as district and neighborhood centers. They investigated how to make such shopping centers more appealing by adding facilities like F&B or a cinema, by redesigning the shopping center, or by improving the layout and interior of stores. On a larger scale, retail planning is relevant in order to support a good balance between demand and supply. Graduation projects examined the emergence of large peripheral shopping centers, regional shopping orientation, and foreign retail markets.  

With the rise of online shopping, preferences regarding online versus offline shopping became a relevant research topic, moving away from catalogue- and teleshopping, which had been the subject of research before. Multiple students investigated how the online channels affected shopping behavior and how online shoppers prefer to have the ordered parcels delivered. Also, the advent of social media and mobile phones affected shopping behavior, which was investigated in some graduation projects, both from consumer and retailer perspectives.  

 

Planning and design 

Some students dived into the more theoretical or process- related aspects of spatial planning. Other students explored urbanization strategies for different regions of the Netherlands or abroad. Also, more general problems regarding segregation, housing, and livability in small towns and villages were studied. With respect to urban planning and design, most of the projects dealt with (sustainable) urban (re)development of, for example, station districts, industrial parks, military bases, or traffic zones, and in some cases, villages.  

Leisure and entertainment received attention as well, ranging from the local level up to the international level, from a single facility offering multiple leisure activities under one roof to a holiday park, upscale hotels, and foreign tourism planning. A few other projects concerned the inconvenience tourists may bring to the people living in regions blessed with attractive landscapes or water bodies.  

Urban environments affect citizens’ health in multiple ways. Students investigated how parks and other urban facilities may stimulate active lifestyles and social interaction or prevent obesity and loneliness. Students also explored ways to encourage park visitation by analyzing user preferences. 

Other research topics concerned the relation between street network structures and the location of public functions within the urban environment, and how the network structure influences wayfinding and cognitive mapping of individuals in the area, and even crime rates in the neighborhoods of a big city.  

Over time, digital maps replaced analogue maps, boosting the development of geographical information systems (GIS). Initially, these systems used to be the main subject in graduation projects but nowadays, GIS – often in combination with multi criteria evaluation – has become a standard tool for most students. The advent of digital maps also stimulated the development all over the world of dedicated systems supporting planning and design. Some of these systems have been applied and assessed in our graduation projects. One step further, some students wrote their own codes or compiled sets of applications to support urban planning, management or design.  

In response to climate change, the research on energy use in the built environment increased. The focus of graduation topics in the field of real estate I co-supervised shifted from housing preferences to the energy transition, to energy reduction and also to local energy production. Furthermore, climate change triggered some students to investigate how the effects and risks of floods, urban heat, and hurricanes can be reduced; or whether residents are willing to pay an added (insurance) premium for living in hazard-prone areas.  

 

Transportation 

Over the years, the national policy has been to reduce (the growth in) private car use. This explains why the majority of the transportation related graduation projects dealt with transportation mode choice behavior. The potential effects of changes in personal circumstances, of promoting and improving public and active transportation modes, introducing new transportation modes, realizing mobility hubs and transit-oriented developments have been investigated. Other projects aimed to enhance traffic safety and comfort, especially for bicyclists. Also, decision making concerning traffic issues in VINEX residential areas and policy measures like introducing car free neighborhoods or zero emission zones have been subjects of research.  

Students also investigated the feasibility of railway options, including metro lines. Innovative technologies have gained attention as well such as in car navigation, the floating car data it generates, smart parking systems and sustainable parking garages. The introduction of electric vehicles stimulated projects on charging facilities and potential follow-up developments like solar cars.  

Furthermore, a few students focused on urban logistics or transport– related issues in developing countries. Finally, some students dedicated their graduation project to testing or extending new internally developed model systems predicting traffic flows, such as the activity-based Albatross model and the Super Network model.  

 

Measuring preferences and analysis techniques

A key objective of our research group is to understand people’s preferences regarding various aspects of the built environment. Preferences can be measured by looking at or asking  what people do in reality, e.g., which shopping center they visit to buy daily products. This revealed data is usually collected by means of surveys, but over time, innovative technologies such as GPS-tracking have become available as well. In contrast to collecting revealed data, we can ask people what they would do under experimental circumstances, e.g., ‘suppose you can choose from two hypothetical elementary schools with specific characteristics, which one would you choose for your child?’ (stated choice/experimental data). Advantages of stated choice experiments are that preferences on new characteristics or new alternatives can be investigated. So, this method enables us to assess the acceptance or success of new alternatives.  

Under experimental conditions, the hypothetical choice alternatives must be presented to the participants in the research project (the respondents). The most straightforward way is to  describe the alternatives by means of words. However, graphical presentations can be created as well with the help of virtual reality software. For example, students used computer-generated ‘photographs’ of public squares, videos of public spaces, panoramas of shopping streets, virtual walks through a park, or flights over rural areas with solar parks and wind turbines. The next level is to have respondents more or less immerged in VR-environments: respondents composed their preferred shopping center, drove in a virtual car through a virtual street at a perceived safe speed, drove on a highway to assess the cluttering of the landscape by business/industrial developments, and pairs of respondents co-designed a public space by moving objects in that space. These latter projects do not present respondents with choices, but the data can still be used to get insight into preferences. VR was also used to measure the influence of optical effects on space perception.  

Having obtained choice data, discrete choice models are used to determine the importance of the characteristics describing the alternatives. This enables us to predict choice probabilities and assess likely effects of policy measures. Other techniques have also been used to investigate relations between dependent and explanatory variables; examples are descriptive analyses, several types of regression analyses, trend analysis, factor analysis, structural equation modeling, cluster analysis, tree analysis, and random forest models. Furthermore, geographical information systems, multi criteria analysis, network analysis, space syntax analysis, computer aided design and other methods have been applied. 

 

Conclusion 

In this article, I shortly discussed the bulk of graduation projects I have been involved in. The projects cover most of the specialisms within the Urban Systems and Real Estate unit of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Of course, as students may select projects of their liking (or their potential supervisors’ likings), this article does not fully represent the real-world developments in our field. Still, some trends in the past 30 to 40 years can be identified. Digitization and the rise of the Internet brought GIS, online shopping, navigation, and big data. Climate change has prompted research on sustainable  and resilient cities and how the field can contribute to the energy transition. Furthermore, obesity and loneliness underscore the importance of healthy cities. In addition, advances in research techniques enabled more sophisticated research. 

With a few exceptions, USRE-graduation projects are conducted by individual students, supervised by three supervisors with varying roles depending on their field of expertise. I acted as a first, second, and third supervisor. Whatever my role, I learned something from each project thanks to the contribution of students and co-supervisors. 

 

 

Over de auteur: Aloys Borgers

Aloys Borgers (MSc) was associate professor of urban planning at the Eindhoven University of Technology. His main research theme was modelling individuals’ preferences and behavior in urban contexts. February 2025, he retired.

 

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