(Photo by Merijn Soeters)

As Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam, I bring together my academic foundations in Anthropology and Public Administration to shape an interdisciplinary approach to Urban Planning and Governance. My research is driven by a clear ambition: to make our cities more equitable and democratic by learning from the interactions between citizens and the state—whether through protest, participatory planning, or everyday encounters.

I am deeply committed to bridging science and society through transdisciplinary research, engaged teaching, and intensive PhD supervision. I currently lead a major collaborative research initiative with the Municipality of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), where researchers, civil servants, and citizens collaborate in studying the effects of participatory policies on planning practice, and co-develop strategies for more inclusive urban governance.

My teaching philosophy is rooted in methodological pluralism and societal relevance. After more than a decade designing and teaching methodological and research design courses as well as core courses in Planning Theory and Spatial Interventions, I now serve as Director of the Master Urban and Regional Planning, the master in Human Geography, and the Research Master Urban Studies. In addition to teaching students, I educate government professionals. As Dean of Metropole at the Netherlands School of Public Administration (NSOB), I lead a program for mid-career urban professionals to strengthen their capacity to address complex urban challenges through reflective, transdisciplinary learning. I also mentor planning professionals pursuing doctoral research, strengthening the knowledge interface between academia and public service. Together with colleagues from Los Andes University and the University of Toronto, I developed an annual summer course on Planning for Inclusive Cities in which an international group of students learns from planning challenges and solutions in Bogotá, Colombia.

My academic work has been published across various fields in the social sciences: Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Urban Studies, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Built Environment, Current Sociology, Political Geography, Social Policy and Administration. In 2020, Luca Bertolini and I edited a volume that is widely used by students and scholars across disciplinary boundaries: Seeing the City. Interdisciplinary Perspectives the Study of the Urban (Amsterdam University Press).

My academic trajectory is marked by a consistent drive to innovate. After earning my PhD in Social Sciences cum laude in 2015, I joined the Department of Geography and Planning to engage students in studying the tensions between bottom-up civic initiatives and top-down planning logics. My dissertation, praised for its ethnographic depth and conceptual innovation, won the Van Poelje Prize for best thesis. I received the prestigious NWO VENI grant, which allowed me to do comparative ethnographic action research on participatory planning conflicts in Bogotá and Amsterdam. In 2023, I was Visiting Professor at CIDER, Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. In 2024, I was awarded the NWO Impact Explorer grant to actively translate research insights into practice—training professionals, publishing in accessible formats such as the widely used booklet ‘Struikelen over Participatie‘, and engaging municipal councils in reflections on their policies, and contributing to the public debate. The real-world value of my work was also recognized through an Urban Citizen Fellowship at NIAS/KNAW, where my research directly informed Amsterdam’s current participation policy. As part of the NWA-funded project Crafting Resilience, I currently lead the Community of Practice and supervise PhD candidates exploring how communities and state actors build resilience in the face of social and institutional challenges.

Beyond academia, I contribute to shaping national and planning practice discourse. Here, you can find an overview of Podcasts about my work (in Dutch). In 2022, I gave the annual Van Slingelandt Lecture for the Dutch Society of Public Governance entitled, ‘Through the eyes of the citizen: critical reflections on the relationship between citizens, the state and public administration.’ This lecture is published in Bestuurskunde (Public Administration), it can de listened to as Podcast, a shortened public version can be found on SocialeVraagstukken.nl. I am Chief Editor of Beleid en Maatschappy (Policy and Society) and was a member of the editorial board of Sociale Vraagstukken between 2016 – 2026. I also served on several advisory committees for the Dutch Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (RLi).

My mission is to build meaningful bridges between scholars, students, citizens, civil servants, planning professionals, and politicians—to deepen the democratic quality of our cities and expand the ways we learn, plan, and act together.