I am assistant professor of Urban Politics and Planning at the University of Amsterdam. Connecting my background in Anthropology and Political Science, I study the interactions between citizens and the state to rethink how cities could be more just and democratic.

After obtaining my PhD in Political Science in 2015 (cum laude), I moved to the Department of Geography and Planning to teach students how to better understand the conflicts that emerge when citizens shape cities from the bottom-up and local governments govern and plan top-down.

My work is built on two premises. First, I believe that learning about conflicts requires to be able to take perspectives that crosscut institutional and cultural contexts and contradicting belief systems.

Second, although conflicts may challenge human and democratic values, I study how they can turn into productive opportunities for equitable change. For that purpose, I am committed to making societally relevant contributions that lead to actionable practices for dealing with conflict. I have worked on these commitments in the following ways:

Learning about conflict across disciplinary, societal, and institutional contexts

My research takes place across the Global South and North, but also across local, regional, and national governments, as well as among citizens from diverse classes, ideologies, and knowledge backgrounds. In my research, I ethnographically immerse into these different worlds to understand how they overlap and contradict, leading to situations of conflict:

• My academic work has been published in various fields in the social sciences; Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Built Environment, Current Sociology, Political Geography, Urban Studies, Public Administration.
• Since 2022, I have been Chief Editor of Beleid en Maatschappy (Policy and Society), a Dutch peer-reviewed academic journal committed to crossing disciplinary boundaries and making societally relevant contributions.
• Between March and August 2023, I was Visiting Professor at CIDER, Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. I developed an annual summercourse on Planning for Inclusive Cities with colleagues of Los Andes, Toronto University and the UvA.
• My VENI grant (2020 – 2024), funded by the Dutch Research Council, allowed me to undertake comparative ethnographic fieldwork in Bogota, Colombia, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. There, I studied the contradicting experiences of planners, politicians, and diverse citizen groups during participatory planning conflicts. 
• In 2020, Luca Bertolini and I edited the volume Seeing the City. Interdisciplinary Perspectives the Study of the Urban (Amsterdam University Press).
• For my innovative ethnographic approach to public conflicts, I received the Van Poelje Prijs for best dissertation in Public Administration of 2015 in Belgium and The Netherlands. 

Commitment to societally relevant academic practice

Scientific research can greatly value society and government if scientists are willing to broaden their repertoires to engage with professionals, citizens, and politicians in long-term collaborations. I am committed to sharing my academic results through training professionals, politicians, and citizen groups, translating academic work into popular scientific and policy publications, and taking a role in the public debate:

• In 2024-2025, I lead the Impact Explorer Project for which I received funding from the Dutch Research Council and collaborate with the Municipality of Amsterdam as well as the Platform of Participation to translate my academic results in better policies and practice for contested processes of citizen participation. 
• I serve as a senior researcher and impact developer in the NWA-funded research project Crafting Resilience, where I work with researchers and professionals to translate findings into actionable practice.
• Since 2022, I serve as Dean of  ‘Metropool’, a post graduate program for senior civil servants working on metropolitan challenges at the Dutch School of Public Policy (NSOB) in The Hague.
• In 2024, I am a member of RLi advisory committee to the Dutch Government on System Failures in Dutch Public Policy.
• In 2022, I gave the annual Van Slingelandt Lecture for the Dutch Society of Public Administration 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
• Since 2016, I serve on the editorial board of the Dutch popular scientific Journal for Societal Issues (Sociale Vraagstukken)
• In 2020-2021, I was an Urban Citizen Fellow at NIAS/KNAW and the Municipality of Amsterdam, where I researched how Amsterdam could repoliticize citizen participation processes. I worked closely with civil servants and local politicians, and my advice was used to develop the municipality's current participation policy.

Societally relevant contributions

I have worked on making societally relevant contributions that lead to actionable practices for dealing with conflict in the following ways:

Learning about conflict across disciplinary, societal, and institutional contexts

My research takes place across the Global South and North, but also across local, regional, and national governments, as well as among citizens from diverse classes, ideologies, and knowledge backgrounds. In my research, I ethnographically immerse into these different worlds to understand how they overlap and contradict, leading to situations of conflict:

• My academic work has been published in various fields in the social sciences; Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Built Environment, Current Sociology, Political Geography, Urban Studies, Public Administration.
• Since 2022, I have been Chief Editor of Beleid en Maatschappy (Policy and Society), a Dutch peer-reviewed academic journal committed to crossing disciplinary boundaries and making societally relevant contributions.
• Between March and August 2023, I was Visiting Professor at CIDER, Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. I developed an annual summercourse on Planning for Inclusive Cities with colleagues of Los Andes, Toronto University and the UvA.
• My VENI grant (2020 – 2024), funded by the Dutch Research Council, allowed me to undertake comparative ethnographic fieldwork in Bogota, Colombia, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. There, I studied the contradicting experiences of planners, politicians, and diverse citizen groups during participatory planning conflicts. 
• In 2020, Luca Bertolini and I edited the volume Seeing the City. Interdisciplinary Perspectives the Study of the Urban (Amsterdam University Press).
• For my innovative ethnographic approach to public conflicts, I received the Van Poelje Prijs for best dissertation in Public Administration of 2015 in Belgium and The Netherlands. 

Commitment to societally relevant academic practice

Scientific research can greatly value society and government if scientists are willing to broaden their repertoires to engage with professionals, citizens, and politicians in long-term collaborations. I am committed to sharing my academic results through training professionals, politicians, and citizen groups, translating academic work into popular scientific and policy publications, and taking a role in the public debate:

• In 2024-2025, I lead the Impact Explorer Project for which I received funding from the Dutch Research Council and collaborate with the Municipality of Amsterdam as well as the Platform of Participation to translate my academic results in better policies and practice for contested processes of citizen participation. 
• I serve as a senior researcher and impact developer in the NWA-funded research project Crafting Resilience, where I work with researchers and professionals to translate findings into actionable practice.
• Since 2022, I serve as Dean of  ‘Metropool’, a post graduate program for senior civil servants working on metropolitan challenges at the Dutch School of Public Policy (NSOB) in The Hague.
• In 2024, I am a member of RLi advisory committee to the Dutch Government on System Failures in Dutch Public Policy.
• In 2022, I gave the annual Van Slingelandt Lecture for the Dutch Society of Public Administration 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
• Since 2016, I serve on the editorial board of the Dutch popular scientific Journal for Societal Issues (Sociale Vraagstukken)
• In 2020-2021, I was an Urban Citizen Fellow at NIAS/KNAW and the Municipality of Amsterdam, where I researched how Amsterdam could repoliticize citizen participation processes. I worked closely with civil servants and local politicians, and my advice was used to develop the municipality's current participation policy.

Research projects & grants

Making national participatory policies work locally. Improving the collaboration between citizens and municipal government. (2024-2025)

Two national laws to strengthen the voice of citizens in local decision-making will be implemented in 2024. Research shows that municipalities responsible for executing these laws struggle to include citizens, especially in spatial interventions. The new laws may deepen this struggle but also offer an opportunity to improve the collaboration between citizens and local governments. This project seeks to contribute to that opportunity by exploring how the findings of a VENI-project apply to the new policy context, translate these findings to different municipal contexts, and develop workshops for civil servants and local politicians responsible for executing the new participatory laws. This project is funded by an Impact Explorer Grant of the Dutch Research Council (NWO)

Strengthening democracy beyond ‘participation’: informal politics and inclusive urban development (2020 – 2024)

Citizens who experience social and geographic exclusion often have difficulty influencing local decision making on urban planning, and this experience can reinforce dissatisfaction with the democratic system and foster societal fragmentation. Although local governments around the world increasingly seek to involve citizens in decision making, studies show that formal participatory processes still fail to include all citizens. This project turns a lens onto the informal politics by which marginalized citizens already claim their ‘right to the city’, so that those practices can be better recognized by urban planners and their concerns can be heard. How do relatively marginalized citizens informally claim their right to the city in ways that are not recognized by formal participation efforts? How do these informal politics shape formal processes of participation? How can these informal ways be better included in participatory planning?

The project contributes to the scholarship of ‘participation’ by theorizing informal politics via contrasting ethnographic case studies of citizens’ politics in response to participatory urban development projects, in the distinct institutional contexts of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), where participation is highly regulated, and Bogotá (Colombia), where experimental efforts seek to creatively involve citizens. In-depth field research examines informal politics around the edges of formal meetings, in street-level encounters between citizens and public officials, and in other settings, and how these encounters shape formal participatory processes. The research design challenges two taken-for-granted ideas: that informality in politics is a Southern phenomenon and that citizen involvement is better organized in welfare states. Further, the comparison will illuminate how state institutional frameworks variously enable or constrain citizen participation. Using an innovative approach to the methodology of political ethnography, I involve local stakeholders in knowledge production and utilization, to ultimately generate multi-dimensional understandings of participation from below and above. This project is funded by an individual research grant (VENI) of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). 

Urban Citizen Fellow (September 2020 - February 2021)

As Urban Citizen Fellow at NIAS/KNAW I am researching how Amsterdam could re-politicize participation and how conflict and dissent play a role in local democracy. I am working on a study about a participation process in Amsterdam West that has turned into strong resistance from the neighbourhood. This project is funded by the Urban Citizen Fellowship of NIAS/KNAW and the Municipality of Amsterdam. 

Book project City Methods (2019 – 2020) 

In the volume 'Seeing the City. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Study of the Urban' Luca Bertolini and I bring together a wide variety of inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to study the city. The book is part of the IIS series 'Perspectives on interdisciplinarity' and Amsterdam University Press. This project is funded by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS).

Commoning Amsterdam’s Future (2019 – 2020) 

Together with Fenne Pinkster (UvA), Virginie Mamadouh (UvA), and documentary filmmaker Julia Strijland (Momo productions), we assess Amsterdam’s future through the eyes, experiences and stories of Amsterdam citizens from all walks of life. The city of Amsterdam is quickly expanding, posing new challenges to create plans for the future that foster the wide array of interests and dreams of the people of Amsterdam. Strategic plans like the Structuurvisie, Koers 2025and Omgevingsvisiesteer urban planning practices in the years to come. While such planning strategies have traditionally been top-down, the municipality now aims to include bottom-up experiences and interests of various stakeholders like residents, entrepreneurs, and professionals. While projects aim at engaging citizens, we believe that they are 1) limited to the more central neighborhood in the city, and 2) tend to cater to the more affluent citizens who raise issues by themselves and are comfortable speaking in formal public meetings. Our project aims to ‘common Amsterdam’s future’ from the bottom-up by including a group of citizens that has so far remained ‘outside’ of the planning process and wider discussions about the city’s plans for the future. Storytelling workshops result in a documentary that highlights the perspective of citizens in envisioning Amsterdam’s future. This project is funded by a Seed Grant XL of the Center for Urban Studies (CUS).

Master

2022, 2023: 'Research Methodologies I: Qualitative Data Analysis', Master Geography, Master Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. (coordinator/lecturer together with dr. W. Boterman)

2019 - 2022: 'Planning Research: empirical research methods and techniques', Master Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. (coordinator/lecturer together with dr. R. Arundel)

2016, 2017: 'Qualitative Research Methods', Master Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. (lecturer together with dr. F. Savini, dr. A. Zorlu, and R. Arundel)

2013, 2014, 2015: 'Analyzing Identity-Based Conflict', Master in Public Policy, International Relations, and Conflict Resolution and Governance, Graduate School for Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam (lecturer)

2013, 2014, 2015: 'Research Seminar', Master Conflict Resolution and Governance, Graduate School for Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam, (lecturer together with Dr. David Laws)

2013, 2014, 2015: 'Thesis supervision', Master Conflict Resolution and Governance, Graduate School for Social Sciences (GSSS), University of Amsterdam  (supervisor) 

2012: 'Practice Seminar', Master Conflict Resulution and Governance, Graduate School for Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam (lecturer together with Dr. David Laws)

2012: Series of lectures on 'Performance and narrative in conflict' , George Mason University, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR), Center for the Study of Narrative in Conflict, (visiting scholar)

2011: 'Short Intensive Course on neighborhood research', for PhD students, AISSR, University of Amsterdam (founder and organizer with dr. Emma Folmer)

Bachelor

Since 2023: 'Introduction to Spatial Planning', Bachelor Social Geography and Planning, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. (lecturer together with dr. Jannes Willems)

Since 2018: 'Methods and Techniques 2', Bachelor Social Geography and Planning, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. (coordinator/lecturer together with dr. A. Zorlu and dr. E. Veldhuizen)

2016-2019: 'Spatial Interventions', Bachelor Social Geography and Planning, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. (coordinator/lecturer together with dr. F. Savini)

2016/2017: 'The image of the modern city', Honours course, University of Amsterdam. (lecturer together with Dr. W. van Gent)

2016, 2017, 2018: 'Spatial Planning and Design', Bachelor Social Geography and Planning, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. (coordinator/lecturer) 

2016, 2017: 'Inequality: policy and conflict', Bachelor thesis project, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam (lecturer/supervisor together with C. Hochstenbach)

2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015: 'Introduction to Conflict Studies', Bachelor Political Science, department of political sciences, University of Amsterdam (coordinator and lecturer)