Dr. Valentin Meilinger

PhD Candidate
Spatial Planning
v.u.meilinger@uu.nl

Valentin Meilinger holds an M.A. in Human Geography from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He studies cities as places where the built environment, technology, society, and culture overlap and create the spaces of daily urban life.

As a student research assistant, Valentin has worked on a case study on suburban governance in the Frankfurt/Rhine-Main Region which is part of the "Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st century" major collaborative research initiative at York University, Toronto.

Since April 2017, Valentin has been a PhD candidate in Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University under the supervision of Prof. Jochen Monstadt. His PhD research deals with socio-technical change of urban water infrastructures in Los Angeles, California. In Los Angeles, the city government’s ambitious agenda to source more water locally currently provokes far-reaching urban transformations. Valentin examines how infrastructural change comes along with traditional ways of building, governing and imagining Los Angeles becoming renegotiated. Empirically, his study focuses on three technologies: wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, and drought-resistant landscaping.