Fellows
UFS Fellows are established scholars and experts who have their main appointment at another institution or organisation, and work together with the Urban Futures Studio to push intellectual boundaries.
Lewis Akenji
Lewis Akenji is a political economist and Executive Director of Hot or Cool Institute. His work explores how social innovation and new institutional arrangements could deliver on future societies characterized by fairer allocation of resources and opportunities for collective wellbeing within ecological limits.
Roy Bendor
Roy Bendor is Associate Professor of Critical Design in the Department of Human-Centered Design at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, where he also directs the Design for Interaction (DfI) Master’s program. His research explores the capacity of design to disclose alternative social, political and environmental futures. Roy is also former editor of the sustainability forum in the ACM’s magazine Interactions, and author of Interactive Media for Sustainability (Palgrave, 2018).
Edwin Buitelaar
Edwin Buitelaar is a professor of land and real estate development at Utrecht University. His research focuses on issues related to land, real estate and urban development. His work is positioned at the policy-science interface.
Jonas Colen Ladeia Torrens
Jonas Colen Ladeia Torrens is a researcher and teacher at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. He is focusing on enabling transformations towards sustainability and is dedicated to understanding how we can navigate the current poly-crisis in just and timely ways.
Megan Davies
Dr Megan Davies is a Researcher at the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. At the CST she brings together her interest in transformative learning and transdisciplinary research to support sustainability transitions. She explores the governance, finance, and justice dimensions of infrastructure transitions in the global South, focussing on South Africa’s energy transition.
Dan Hassler-Forest
Dan Hassler-Forest is a media scholar who speaks, writes, and teaches about the interaction between popular culture and societal debates. He works as an Assistant Professor in the department of Media and Culture Studies, where he does research on the ways in which social power is represented through popular media – with a particular focus on major entertainment franchises. He coordinates and teaches courses on fan culture, media industries, transmedia storytelling, cultural analysis, and critical race theory.
Michiel van Iersel
Curator, urbanist, writer, teacher and co-founder of research platform Failed Architecture and Loom, an Amsterdam based cultural collective working at the intersection of the arts, heritage and the public domain.
Peter Pelzer
Peter Pelzer is Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of Delft University of Technology. Between 2015 and 2018 he played a central role in the take-off of the Urban Futures Studio, for instance through the Mixed Classroom and the Post-Fossil City Contest.
Suzanne Potjer
Suzanne Potjer is a policy advisor and an expert in the field of experimentation and learning in the public domain. She wrote the Urban Futures Studio book 'Experimental Governance. From the Possible, to the Doable, to the New Mainstream' (2019) and recently published, together with Maarten Hajer, the follow-up essay 'Experimental Governance. Booklet for policymakers on the move' (2021). She works as a consultant at TwynstraGudde, from where she helps governments, organisations and networks to work in new, more experimental ways.
John Robinson
John Robinson is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and the School of the Environment, at the University of Toronto, where is he also Presidential Advisor on the Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability.
Mark Swilling
South Africa Research Chair in Urban Innovations, Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST), Stellenbosch University
Vanessa Timmer
Executive Director of One Earth, an environmental 'think and do tank' creating and imagining sustainable ways of living in cities and around the world. Dr. Timmer is also a Senior Research Fellow at Utrecht University with Pathways to Sustainability and the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development.
Wytske Versteeg
Dr Wytske Versteeg is a writer, political scientist and researcher at Utrecht University. Her work has received several awards, including the VrouwDebuutPrijs, the Kellendonkprijs and the BNG Literatuurprijs. Recurring themes are philosophy, science, meaning, family, psychology, migration and climate change. In her latest book 'True. On the Art of (Not) Knowing', Wytske Versteeg conducts a personal investigation into the mercurial nature of truth.
Joost Vervoort
Joost Vervoort is Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination in the Environmental Governance Group at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Joost's research focuses on how different imaginations of the future connect to action in the present. He is an ecologist by training and holds a PhD from Wageningen University focused on supporting different societal perspectives in navigating complex societal challenges related to sustainability, framed by social-ecological systems thinking and transition/transformation research. He worked for seven years at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, before coming to UU. Joost has published widely on foresight, anticipatory governance, transformations, and simulation gaming.