Projects
Resilience of urban food system in the rapidly urbanizing cities of Sub-Saharan Africa: The case of Dar es Salaam city KU Leuven
The global population is anticipated to reach approximately 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion by 2050 (UN, 2023). Sub-Saharan African (SSA) nations are projected to contribute over half of this increase up to 2050. Moreover, while urban areas housed only 55% of the world's population in 2018, this figure is estimated to rise to about 70% by 2050. This shift towards urbanization, notably in SSA, fundamentally alters food systems by reshaping ...
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 KU Leuven
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 ...
The Resilience of Urban Agriculture in Industrialising Societies: a social-agrosystemic approach applied on 19th-century Belgium. University of Antwerp
Remote Sensing for Urban and Rural Development & Resilience (ReSiDeR) KU Leuven
The impact of climate change is being felt more and more in both rural and urban environments, which each rely on natural resources under pressure from multiple demands for food security, livelihoods and development. The water crisis in Cape Town got global attention. Adaptation is needed in several domains. Better data – especially spatial- are needed for local planners to map changes in natural resources and the urban climate. High ...
Building resilience in Urban Food Systems. The challenge of scaling-up alternative food distribution networks. An exploration through comparative case-study analysis. KU Leuven
This dissertation focuses on the governance of alternative food networks (AFNs). The aim is to identify, conceptualize and empirically investigate the critical governance tensions conditioning the genesis and the life-course of alternative food initiatives. To this purpose this dissertation develops a Hybrid Governance Approach (HGA) which identifies three types of governance tensions - i.e. organizational, resource and institutional - and ...
Reintegrating Urban Agroecology in the Western Cape - An Urban Design Investigation of Productive Landscape Strategies for a Resilient Cape KU Leuven
Looking at South African cities through the food lens, the high levels of inequality experienced by city dwellers are starkly reflected in the urban food systems and urban environments (SA Urban Food & Farming Trust, 2021). Since two-thirds of households that experience hunger lives in cities, food security is a critical and predominantly urban issue (Haysom et al, 2020). The urban food question requires a holistic perspective on the ...
Resilient Collective Spaces: Rethinking urban spaces defined by commercial programs: disentangling the formal and informal mechanisms of urban projects. KU Leuven
Today, the impact of a growing secularization, the substantial increase of leisure time and the economic transformation based on consumption in a western context redefine the main actors in the contemporary city and affect on how we experience and use collective spaces as part of our daily environment.
The morphological understanding of these collective spaces (Solà-Morales, 2008) as shared areas - that are no longer exclusively ...