I am a Professor of Urban Geography and the Academic Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. 

As a Professor of Urban Geography, I study how we create urban environments and those environments shape us. I draw upon different perspectives, ranging from human ecology and historical sociology to various strands of critical theory. One of the hallmarks of my work has been to bring opposing epistemologies into conversation. My lines of research include:

1. Digital research and research of the digital. This line of research engages critically and constructively with computational and digital social science—two newly emerging fields at the intersection of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences where long-standing questions of the relation between critical and positivist approaches acquire new relevance. Examples of this work include On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (OUP 2024, with John D. Boy) and Seeing Like a Platform: An Enquiry into Digital Modernity (Routledge 2025, with Petter Törnberg)
2. Cities and social movements. How do social movements and urban environments shape one another? This line of research uses ethnography, archival research, and the computational analysis of social media data to examine the origins and development of social movements. See, for instance, Cities and Social Movements (Blackwell 2017, with Walter J. Nicholls)
3. Urban policy and spatial inequality. The question how governments are implicated in urban inequalities has been central to my work. I want to understand why governments pursue or abandon policies to restructure neighborhoods and to explore who benefits or loses out. One of the most recent examples is this article on neoliberalization and spatial inequality (with Cody Hochstenbach and Jolien Groot)

The conversation between disciplines and epistemologies is also central to my work as Academic Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. The AISSR brings together around 350 researchers from different social science disciplines, including anthropology, political science, sociology, geography, planning, and international development.

I’m currently the principal investigator for two research projects:

• Curating the Digital City. We see the city increasingly through the lens of digital platforms. The city appears as a collection of hip places filled with beautiful people on Instagram, while Google Maps provides ratings and reviews for even such mundane places as parking lots and sport clubs. This research project argues that digital platforms like Instagram and Google do not only represent the city in specific ways. They also shape it. Using digital data and ethnographic methods, the researchers show how places are being transformed for likes.
• Municipal Neighborhood Experiments (MUNEX). How to address growing inequality and work towards an inclusive sustainable transition? An ascendant municipalist movement argues that we should look for answers at the local level. Municipalism seeks to reinvent and reinvigorate local urban democracy by pushing back against overbearing bureaucracies and overpowering market forces. While the commitment to municipalism is strong and the momentum palpable, a key question is whether and how municipalist initiatives – from digital democracy platforms to public-communitarian partnerships – work in practice. To answer this question, the Municipalist Neighborhood Experiments (MUNEX) project examines municipalist policy experiments in neighborhoods in three cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Vienna. More information can be found on the MUNEX project page.

• Stadsgeografie (BA)
• Urban Debates (MA)
• Advanced Social Science Theory (PhD)