Friday 11 September — Opek, Leuven

Managing Director of Mobiel 21, the Leuven nonprofit (founded 1982) that has long championed sustainable mobility, citizen participation, and behaviour change for cities, schools, and governments.

Urban planner and co-founder of Humankind, the Rotterdam "agency for urban change" that uses co-creation and tactical urbanism to build people-oriented, car-light cities that, in his words, "make people smile."

Co-founder and designer at the Antwerp studio Omvorm, which treats design as systems-shaping rather than styling, with work spanning circular products and modular EV charging infrastructure.

Civil engineer-architect and co-founder of Miss Miyagi, the Leuven outfit behind bottom-up adaptive-reuse projects like De Hoorn and Hal5 (and the Stadsmakersfonds city-makers investment fund), developing real estate "for and by its users."

Karl Catteeuw is a researcher, lecturer, and coordinator of village policy for the Province of West Flanders, where he supports local governments through programs such as “DNA of the Village.” He is co-author of "Toolbox Dorpenbouw" (with Ward Verbakel and Edith Wouters), which argues that villages function differently from cities and require their own spatial language for streets, squares, slow roads, peripheries, and open spaces.

Tom Goosse is a researcher at Ghent University (UGent) and the University of Groningen (RUG). He explores the various intersections between citizen science and spatial policy. His work examines how citizen-led measurements can go beyond mere data collection and play a more substantial role in public discourse. He strives for action-oriented collaboration between citizens, researchers, and government agencies to drive spatial change.

Jiska Gysels is engineer-architect and environmental mediator at Endeavour, the Flemish cooperative socio-spatial research bureau, where she guides participatory planning processes and translates complex spatial questions into clear, audience-specific stories. She presents "Samen ruimte maken", a new book that distils a decade of people-centred spatial transformation into ten themes.

Eva Van Eenoo is a spatial planner and urbanist, and a postdoctoral researcher at the VUB (Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research). For five years, her doctoral research examined car-dependent society: how, where and by whom car use is produced and sustained, with Ghent as one of its case studies. Today she works on social housing, accessibility and the mobility patterns of social tenants, and weighs in with sharp, well-founded arguments in the debate about the place of the car in our society.