Projects
Women's fortunes. Female agency, property and investment in the urban space of late medieval Brabant. University of Antwerp
The City is my Church. Constraints and opportunities of urban and rural environments for social capital in contemporary society Ghent University
Traditionally, rural environments have been celibrated as fertile grounds for social solidarity, while urban places were accused of being obstacles for building close and helpful ties. These traditional views have been challenged by authors emphasizing the positive aspects of large settlements and others denying the relevance of the rural-urban divide. The central concern of this dissertation is to find out to what extent rural and urban ...
Spatial analysis of urban mobility in sub-Saharan Africa KU Leuven
The proposed research deals with GIS-mapping and spatial analysis of space-time paths in an urban context. Cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are expanding at unprecedented rates. Because of poor urbanplanning the expansion often occurs in the form of uncontrolled urban sprawl. These developments treat urban mobility, slow down the economic growth and lower the quality of life of many urban dwellers that are often strongly dependent on cheap ...
Urban Diversity beyond 'Social Mix': alternative concepts and methods to design micropublic spaces of encounter in Flanders' midsized cities. Ghent University
Today 'social mix' is the dominant concept in urban planning (policy) to tackle issues of diversity, also in Flanders. The key assumption is that the propinquity of well-off and poor residents will lead to an upward social mobility of the poor and an increased social interaction and thus can bring a solution to urban inequality and segregation. Yet, there is little evidence of any real effect of ‘social mix’ to those supposed to benefit ...
Growing Utopias: Social Innovation and Transformation through Urban Gardening KU Leuven
With a growing share of the population living in urban areas, there is a growing need for sustainable urbanization with consideration extending beyond the market to both the environment and socially inclusive institutions. Socially innovative citizen led urban gardening contributes to societal transformations by the introduction of alternative utopian visions on the city. This project aims to examine the nature of these socio-political ...
The early modern city as literary domain: A systematic study of the city encomium and its transformations (ca. 1403–1585), with special reference to multilingual representations of urban spaces. KU Leuven
In the early modern period, laudations of cities became a popular literary genre that developed from a Latin prose genre to a multilingual poetical genre. These ‘city encomia’ have attracted some attention in the last decades, but only on a case study basis, without considering its broader transformations. This project will perform a large-scale, data-driven analysis of the forms and contents of the genre. Firstly, I will build a database of ...
Defining and Designing Executive Discretion in Urban Planning Law: 'Aesthetic value' as a Material Consideration. University of Antwerp
Numerical and experimental analysis of smart urban wind turbines KU Leuven
The EU’s climate goals necessitate all the EU countries to have at least a 32% share of renewable energy consumption by 2030. Achieving this requires energy harvesting from all the renewables in potential locations. Wind energy is the largest contributor among the renewables throughout the EU with a share of 44.2%. Among the potential locations for wind energy harvesting, urban areas, although very promising in terms of providing a local ...
Urban design and narrative cronotopes in the postwar novel Ghent University
comparative research on the congruencies between the discourse of architects and urbanists on the one hand and in fictional texts on the other. The research focuses on fictional architects and urbanists in Postwar Western Literature.