Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Increasing socio-spatial resilience through temporary appropriation of urban waiting spaces for housing: a Participatory Action Research on the Solidary Mobile Housing project in Brussels" "Burak Pak" "Urban Design, Urbanism, Landscape and Planning" "This PhD research is embedded in the Solidary Mobile Housing (SMH) project, a Living Lab aimed at developing, testing, and refining a model and prototype for the co-creation of solidary living in mobile homes on un(der)used urban spaces in the Brussels-Capital Region. However, this study goes beyond the SMH project’s practical outcomes and theoretical musings. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the co-creation of temporary housing on urban waiting spaces, for and with homeless people and civil society organisations, can contribute to socio-spatial resilience. And to understand which consequences this has for the domains of architecture and urbanism. Therefore, in this PhD, we have interwoven Participatory Action Research in the SMH Living Lab with theoretical and case study reviews and a Critical Reflection on the SMH methods, experiences, and findings.The main contributions of this research are that it shows how:- resilience is both a multi-scalar and a non-linear concept,- temporary project on urban waiting spaces, by a variety of actors, including vulnerable citizens, can prefigure the ‘city as it can be’ and alter our understanding of the future,- the SMH Model is (in a preliminary way) demonstrating, in practice, what a Quadruple Helix approach to the housing system could mean,- in this context, spatial design practitioners are becoming designers of ‘infrastructures’, rather than final products,- the Community-engaged Architectural Design Learning approach, developed in the context of this PhD, can alter how architectural design knowledge is taught and learned in and through engaged practices,- the methodological approach developed in the context of this PhD can inspire and inform others engaging in similar projects.On the one hand, this PhD resulted in solid policy recommendations for operationalising transitional use of waiting spaces for housing. On the other hand, it also culminated in formulating the futuring ‘Stack’, a future perspective for increasing socio-spatial resilience through the solidary appropriation of urban waiting spaces and Networked Critical Spatial Practices.In this PhD temporary use of waiting spaces for housing is forwarded as a small step towards - in the short-term - rapidly providing more affordable housing for the most vulnerable citizens and - in the long-term - transforming the Brussels housing system to include more solidary and inclusive ways of working, and the Brussels-Capital Region’s urbanism, to adopt a more ‘transitional’ approach to the city." "Sabbatical Johan Van Den Berghe: Moratorium Space: Drawing and Writing Reflections on an Anthology of Moments and Places." "Jo Van Den Berghe" "Architecture and Design" "With this sabbatical I intend to further deepen the project Moratorium Space (3E210001): (https://www.kuleuven.be/onderzoek/portaal/#/projecten/3E210001?hl=en&lang=en). My continued research will bank on making a series of drawings of places that are interconnected by a topographic section of the landscape where I live (Fig. 1), starting from drawings and reflections I made in previous research (Van Den Berghe 2010, 2012, 2013, 2021, Van Den Berghe et al. 2020). I indivertibly adopt deeper meanings to these places, in which I either found traces of human interventions or intervened myself—as an architect—through built and fictional architectures. These places are a set of micro narratives that will appear through drawing and writing reflections. However, this ensemble of micro narratives remains too anthological until today. I need to come to a cohesive understanding, meaning and depth in order to more precisely situate myself—as an architect—in the palimpsest of histories of these places, their traditions of brickyards, field ovens, lacemaking, gardening and drawing, starting from the need to find out how these cultures of making become making culture. My assumption is that further refining and describing the stable presence of the landscape, of which I will make this/these aforementioned topograpical section(s) as a first research step, and in which I will develop these micro narratives through drawing and writing, may be crucial as the unlocker for deciphering this anthological struggle within the reflective ‘self’ of an architect. The scientific activity of this sabbatical will consist of the following components: (1) 3 Variations: revisiting 3 projects of my practice that remained unbuilt: through drawing, memo writing and scale modeling (House R, House DTR, House T-A). (2) 5 Etudes: developing 5 new projects (see Fig. 01), i.e. (1) The Brickyard, (2) WoSho, (2a) My Black Mariah, (3) The Haystack Gallery, (4) Le Tombeau de Couperin, through Critical Sequential Drawing (CSD, Van Den Berghe et al. 2020, Van Den Berghe 2021), memo writing and scale modeling. (3) Short research stays for archival research and fieldwork in/on projects in situ: fieldwork in (a) Sweden (Lewerentz, Asplund), (b) Vienna (Loos, Wagner, Czech, Hollein) and (c) Italy: Genova (Albini), Milano (Riva) and Venezia (IUAV, Rizzi)." "COST Action CA18126 WRITING URBAN PLACES. NEW NARRATIVES OF THE EUROPEAN CITY (Writingplace)" "Kris PINT" ArcK "Writing Urban Places is an innovative investigation into developing an understanding of communities, their societies and their situation, through narrative methods. In particular, it focuses on the potential of narrative methods for urban development in European medium-sized cities in Europe. By recognising the value of local urban stories -stories rich in information about citizens' socio-spatial practices, perceptions and expectations, the action aims to articulate a set of concrete literary tools within a wide range of spatial disciplines; bring together scientific research in the fields of literary studies, urban planning and architecture; and position this knowledge in relation to progressive redevelopment policies in medium-sized cities in Europe. The action defines three thematic objectives that it aims to explore both theoretically and in case studies. 1) meaningfulness: enabling local communities and professionals to improve their understanding of their built environment; 2) appropriation: empowering communities by enabling them to better project their feelings onto their built environment. 3) integration: providing concrete tools and methods for building common ground between communities, based on relationships of meaning-making and appropriation of their built environment." "Waiting and talking: interaction among unacquainted individuals in medical practices in Italy." "Lorenza Mondada, Elwys De Stefani" "Multimodality, Interaction and Discourse, Leuven" "My PhD thesis explores spontaneous interaction occurring among unacquainted people in medical practices in Italy. It is part of the binational project The First Five Words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space developed and coordinated by Elwys De Stefani (KU Leuven) and Lorenza Mondada (Universität Basel). Based on a corpus of 20 hours of naturalistic video-data collected in the regions Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Sicily (Italy), where Italian, Friulian and Sicilian are spoken, my research addresses a phenomenon that is both of sociological and linguistic interest, i.e., ‘waiting’. Individuals entering a waiting room incidentally find themselves in co-presence with other, most often unacquainted persons, with whom they may choose to talk. ‘Waiting’ is thus a social, intersubjective experience. The aim of my research is to understand how ‘waiting’ is interactionally achieved in this specific setting: How do newcomers and pre-present people collaboratively achieve co-presence in the waiting area of a medical practice? How do they find their place in a room that is populated by (mostly) unacquainted visitors? In many cases, unacquainted waiting individuals engage in conversation with each other: How do they initiate it? In bilingual regions, how do individuals negotiate the language(s) of the interaction or agree on one common language for the interaction? I will address these questions drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974; Mondada, 2018a). First, I zero in on how individuals enter the medical practice and how they establish co-presence with other ‘co-waiters’. Often, they will address a short greeting to co-present individuals, thereby incidentally offering a language sample (Mondada, 2018b). Second, I examine the practices they deploy to constitute a not overtly visible queue, establishing the order of turns to access the service. My dissertation shows that the organisation and progression of the service is not only interactionally achieved between visitors and the service personnel, but also among visitors who are engaged in a symmetrical relationship while going about similar activities (e.g., waiting). Lastly, I devote a substantial part of my thesis to the analysis of the linguistic and embodied practices individuals deploy when engaging in conversation with unacquainted ‘co-waiters’ and to the ways in which interactants establish the language(s) of the encounter. When engaging in symmetrical encounters, visitors may initiate question-answer sequences related to the order of the service, or they may engage in interaction to share a moment of sociability, engaging in ‘mundane talk’ (De Stefani & Horlacher, 2018) or offering unsolicited assistance to co-present persons. The study contributes to conversation analytic research on ‘openings’ (Schegloff, 1968, 1986), documenting a complex setting where the transition from unfocused to focused interaction (Goffman, 1963) goes hand in hand with the progressive transformation of the participation framework (Goffman, 1981; De Stefani & Mondada, 2018, in prep.)." "The RNA editing space of the neglected genome in the major livestock African trypanosome parasite, Trypanosoma congolense." "Sieglinde De Smet, Jan Van Den Abbeele, Frederik Van den Broeck" "Molecular Parasitology, Trypanosoma" "For most organisms, including humans, the whole process of protein synthesis remains remarkably faithful to the original instructions laid out in the DNA. However, unicellular flagellates of the order Kinetoplastida such as trypanosomes developed a highly complex molecular system within their mitochondrion whereby mRNA transcripts are extensively processed. While recent breakthroughs in nuclear genomics have significantly increased our knowledge on trypanosome biology, the true complexity of the mitochondrial genome remains largely uncharacterized. This knowledge gap is especially striking given the fact that key veterinary trypanocidal drugs such as Isometamidium Chloride (ISM) specifically target the mitochondrial genome. Here we hypothesize that ISM drug pressure reduces the complexity and functionality of the mitochondrial genome in drug-resistant Trypanosoma congolense, a parasite with devastating consequences to livestock health and economics in sub-Saharan Africa. This Pump Priming Project will mainly focus on the delivery of a proof-of-concept of a methodology that allows a refined study of the mitochondrial RNA editing dynamics in T. congolense. This methodology will be key for a future full-scale project investigating the impact of ISM drug pressure on small RNA regulation of mitochondrial gene expression in T. congolense, and its consequences for parasite fitness in the mammalian and tsetse fly host." "Dakar-Bamako: Waiting for a train ride back to the future" "Wenzel Geissler, Filip De Boeck" "Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology" "Charline is a PhD candidate and Early Stage Researcher (ESR), part of the multi-disciplinary research project in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa (Anthusia) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. She is interested in the anthropology of infrastructure and labour, trade unions and logistics, as well as security and borders.Her current research focuses on the past and future reconfigurations of the nearly abandoned Dakar-Bamako railway line to understand how the railway and its attendant imaginaries of connectivity and remoteness have shaped local practices and perceptions of labour, space and mobility in Senegal and Mali. Through her multi-sited fieldwork, she mapped and traced different forms of socialities, labour identities and dis/connections that endure around material railway sites across both countries. This included examining the intergenerational, translocal and affective links that the history of the railway has forged amongst the railway workers and that persist between the younger generation of workers and trade unions. Homing in on the various spaces, the project explores the railway workers' rhythms and routines of 'empty' work that also encompass strikes and practices of care amidst a situation of material abandonment and neglect by the state and capital.  " "Data-driven Passenger-seeking Recommendation System for Street-hailing Taxis" "Patrick De Causmaecker" "Computer Science, Kulak Kortrijk Campus" "Street-hailing taxis provide a primary transport service in modern cities. This service model relies on taxi drivers driving around, arbitrarily picking up passengers on the street. In this dissertation, we aim to develop a passenger-seeking recommendation system called TaxiRec, which directs vacant taxis towards predicted future passengers. The research is motivated by the challenge that passengers do not explicitly request a ride by phone or platform, but instead wait for a vacant taxi at their origin until they are picked up or change their mind. The focus is on the multi-taxi route recommendation problem, which aims to provide recommended routes for a group of taxis with different starting points to search for passengers. The proposed method needs to solve two problems: 1) to ensure the load balance between taxis and passengers across the city, and 2) to integrate the waiting strategy into route recommendations. To address these two problems, the novel supply-demand balancing measure and the novel hybrid passenger-seeking strategy are proposed, which are integrated into a single coherent framework using two different approaches.Firstly, an optimisation-based approach is proposed for TaxiRec. The multi-taxi route recommendation problem is modelled as an objective optimisation problem with the goal of maximising the potential profit of the taxi drivers. The proposed supply-demand balancing measure is introduced as an additional objective function that minimises the mismatch between taxi supply and passenger demand across the city. Using the learned passenger-seeking strategy, the method is able to make adaptive recommendations between hotspot recommendation (waiting strategy) and route recommendation (hunting strategy). The tabu search is proposed as the solution method. Experiments have demonstrated the benefits of the methodology in addressing the challenges of urban mobility: shorter waiting times for passengers, higher profits for taxi drivers, and less traffic and emissions in the city.Secondly, a reinforcement learning-based approach is proposed for TaxiRec. The multi-taxi route recommendation is modelled as a single-agent reinforcement learning, with TaxiRec as the agent. The goal is to learn a recommendation policy that provides decisions for multiple vacant taxis at each time step. The supply-demand context is encoded in the TaxiRec state, and the proposed supply-demand balancing measure is incorporated into the reward function. The TaxiRec action is defined as a recommendation matrix, which represents the probability distribution of decisions to be made for multiple vacant taxis, including both waiting and hunting strategies. Proximal Policy Optimisation is used as the solution method to address the problem of training an agent with a high-dimensional continuous action space. Experiments show the potential of the proposed reinforcement learning-based approach to the multi-taxi route recommendation problem." Opticharge "Filip Van Hulle" "VIL - Flanders Innovation Cluster for Logistics" "Loading and unloading trucks is a time-consuming process that is mostly carried out manually. Truck drivers spend a significant amount of time every year waiting at warehouses to load and unload. For shippers these processes are seen as a necessary evil. VIL is working out the project ‘OptiCharge’ to see how automation can make loading and unloading more efficient.The project ‘OptiCharge’ looks for more efficient loading and unloading processes through automation for both shippers and transporters. The complete process of loading and unloading will be analyzed at the participating companies (including related processes like pre-sorting, checks, storage,…).The different kinds of automation available today and state-of-the-art solutions in the pipeline will be examined. Furthermore, a tool will be developed to calculate the advantages and feasability (ROI) of the existing solutions and cases, in order to match supply and demand. A selection of positive business cases will lead to a practice test.OPPORTUNITIES·         lower transportation costs (fewer waiting lines)·         optimal deployment of manpower and assets·         lower personnel expenses·         optimal use of warehouse space·         fewer damagesRESULTSVIL conducted a market study into the state-of-the-art loading and unloading solutions that can further automate the logistics chain.The systems can be categorized into three types:Automated Guided Vehicle or AGV based systems: industrial robots that can move around independently .One-shot based systems that can load and unload a full load in and out of the trailer in one go.Semi-automated systems where human interaction cannot fully be eliminated.VIL developed a successful business case and Proof of Concept at the chocolate manufacturer Barry Callebaut. A shot-shot based skate system was able to unload 26 pallets in 10 minutes, without hitch or damage. This provides a clear time saving compared to the 45 minutes that manual unloading currently takes.This project shows that there is an automation solution for every type of load and warehouse." "Between Arts, Politics and Spirituality: Young adults and their everyday politics in post-apartheid Windhoek" "Michael Eilenberg, Steven Van Wolputte" "Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology" "This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the everyday politics of young adults in post-apartheid Windhoek, Namibia. Starting from three particular ethnographic encounters I show how young Namibians, through everyday politics, sets the future in motion by challenging the current state of the country. In doing so they create alternative channels for political and social engagement and expression. Throughout I challenge portrayals of young Africans stuck in liminal positions, waiting to obtain socially acknowledged adulthood. I show how young people instead act as catalysing agents of novelty, carving out the future from the (past-in-the-)present.  In the first three chapters we encounter Frans, a freelance journalist, consultant and political activist; Decolonising Space, an art and activist collective working on spatial issues of unfinished decolonisation in urban Namibia; and the Mountain Iyahs, a group of alternative spiritual practitioners who has found sanctuary in the rugged hand of the Namibian bush. These three (very) different accounts all illustrate how young Namibians, far from waiting for the world to change, constantly carve out their ways through life with a lens clearly pointed towards the future.The following three chapter takes a broader thematic perspective. I start by addressing issues of mistrust, warring imaginaries and persistent racial and ethnic antagonism more than 30 years after apartheid’s demolition, and how these issues continues to cause tensions in young peoples’ everyday lives. After this I delve deeper into how young Namibians redefine notions of race and spirituality through everyday negotiations that find expression in exchanges with peers. I also reflect on how I became part of these ontological and epistemological (re)negotiations. In the last chapter before my conclusion I deal with intergenerational negotiations between young adult Namibians and a political elite and elderly population with liberation struggle credentials. I suggest that these liberation struggle credentials are mobilised as an exclusionary mechanism meant to keep young Namibians from obtaining a position to amplify their voices and concerns. Yet, rather than passively watching by while being denied a voice, the young people I encountered all sought to create an alternative political order to the one they feel increasingly excluded from. They do this through various forms of everyday politics." "Proof of Concept for the Solidary Mobile Housing Co-Creation Model and the Realized Housing Prototype (PoC SMH)" "Burak Pak" "Urban Design, Urbanism, Landscape and Planning" "In 2016, with the support of the INNOVIRIS Co-create Fund, the Department of Architecture of the KU Leuven and the NGO’s Samenlevingsopbouw Brussel (SOB) and CAW Brussel started up the ‘Solidary Mobile Housing’ (SMH) applied research project. From 2017 until today, a group of eight future inhabitants have been working together with employees of SOB and CAW, students, teachers and researchers of the Faculty/Department of Architecture of the KU Leuven to develop, test and refine a Model (SMH/M) for the co-creation of solidary living in mobile homes on Waiting Spaces in the Brussels-Capital Region. As a result, a housing co-creation model (SMH/M) have been developed which incorporates:empowering design solutions and technologies, embodied in a design prototype (cluster of 8 housing units and a collective space), a social guidance approach and process,preliminary strategies for operation in the legal framework and codes of the Brussels Capital-Regionconcepts for a framework for integration into urban planning and governancea financial balance sheet for the prototype (not yet a financial plan for the upscaling and production)continuous university collaboration (service learning and applied design research).This INNOVIRIS Proof of Concept (PoC) project aims to make a demonstration of the feasibility and viability of the technologies, methods and innovative ideas incorporated in the SMH/M, developed in the INNOVIRIS Solidary Mobile Housing Co-create project (2017-2019). The objectives of the PoC are:proof of concept of the results of the INNOVIRIS Co-create project ‘Solidary Mobile Housing’proof of socio-economic and spatial practice interest showing the potential for valorization and transfer of the resultsThe project will integrate: in-depth study on technical, economic, legal, organizational and socio-spatial aspects, the findings from the on-site demonstration relating to all of these aspects and the results of exchanges with key experts and actors on all of these aspect, in order to evaluate and prove the socio-economic interest and the feasibility and viability of the SMH/M."