Selected Projects
In my thesis at TU Delft, I focused on one of the most pressing and under-explored issues of our time: the rise in youth homelessness and its relationship with the built environment. Young people are often considered to be inherently resilient, which can result in them being excluded from conversations that shape our collective future. Yet many are marginalized by systemic injustice and live lives marked by instability and disconnection. Crucially, many do not recognize how precarious their situations are, nor do they feel entitled to seek support.
To raise awareness without reinforcing the stigma attached to the term homeless, I first needed to give this form of precarity a name. I introduced the term fluidly housed to describe those navigating unstable and often invisible conditions: constantly moving between couch-surfing, living in mobile homes or squats, and at times sleeping rough.
Patterns of Fluid Housing
Based on the understanding of care as ‘everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’, so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto, 2019), I explored how care is embedded in space and how we can learn from lived experience to shape a more just and equitable future.
Socio-Spatial Patterns of Care and Resistance
Bird-Eye View Schaerbeek West
Brussels is a very contradicting city, complex and fragmented. The term ‘Brussels paradox’ captures the widening gap between the city’s wealthy inhabitants and the rising levels of poverty and social inequality (Walker, 2024). Yet, full of grassroots activities and organizations, it feels like a city where everything can happen.
In cities like Brussels, care is unevenly distributed — often absent where it’s needed most. For fluidly housed youth, the urban fabric can feel more like a system of exclusion than support. This thesis asks a central question: What socio-spatial interventions can foster an infrastructure of care — one that enables these young people to engage with and activate the city through everyday acts of care, and in doing so, improve their livability?
‘Hacking’ Systemic Oppression with Careful Design
“[…] to hack something well, you have to understand a system well enough to get it to do something it wasn’t designed to do.”— Trabian Shorters
With a spatial perspective, I understand care not only as a service or sentiment, but as a political and spatial process — something that must be designed, practiced, and sustained. My research explores how urban environments can be reimagined as platforms for care, where fluidly housed youth are not just recipients, but active agents shaping space.
Building an ‘Infrastructure of Care’
This work is a call to shift focus: from rigid planning to flexible support, from institutional delay to everyday action, and from individual survival to collective liveability.
Co-Design Workshops with Students, using Personas and Pattern Language
The Five Booklets are published in the TU Delft Repository
Master's Thesis Urbanism TU Delft, 2024-25
Awarded with the exceptional grade 10/10
Cum Laude
Archiprix Nominee 2025
Presented at 'Designing the Otherwise' at the Graduation Show of Urbanism 2025
and 'Planning and Design for the Just City' Summer School 2025
DAAD Scholarship Holder
Fieldwork funded by Philip Spangenberg Travel Grant
Supervisors: Birgit Hausleitner, Dr. Caroline Newton